New Titles at the UConn Library Avery Point

Bands in American Musical History: Inflection Points and Reappraisals

Essays on the history of bands in America from ca. 1820 to 1930, offering new insights on a major sphere of music making that brought diverse repertories to wide audiences.

The essays in this volume, written by leading scholars in the field of American band history, examine a broad spectrum of issues, including biography, performance, repertoire, and marketing. Detailed studies of key turning points in the evolution of bands examine P. S. Gilmore's 1864 New Orleans concerts, the Kaiser-Cornet-Quartett's 1872 tour, the 1892 transition from Gilmore's Band to Sousa's Band, C. G. Conn's lavish artist-endorsement posters, and the demise of the Sousa Band in the late 1920s.

Additional essays seek to rectify oversights and add insights to the lives of key figures in band history. African American keyed bugler Frank Johnson's earliest works receive close scrutiny, as does the life of neglected cornet superstar Alice Raymond.

A complete reevaluation of Francesco Fanciulli, the US Marine Band leader whose reputation suffered greatly from an 1897 scandal, shows his importance in the realm of conducting and composition. An essay on the repertoire of a town band in antebellum New Hampshire and a documentary study of Civil War bandsmen seek to better understand social aspects of bands in the 1850s and 1860s.

Decision-Making Models: A Perspective of Fuzzy Logic and Machine Learning

Decision Making Models: A Perspective of Fuzzy Logic and Machine Learning presents the latest developments in the field of uncertain mathematics and decision science. The book aims to deliver a systematic exposure to soft computing techniques in fuzzy mathematics as well as artificial intelligence in the context of real-life problems and is designed to address recent techniques to solving uncertain problems encountered specifically in decision sciences. Researchers, professors, software engineers, and graduate students working in the fields of applied mathematics, software engineering, and artificial intelligence will find this book useful to acquire a solid foundation in fuzzy logic and fuzzy systems, optimization problems and artificial intelligence practices, as well as how to analyze IoT solutions with applications and develop decision making mechanisms realized under uncertainty.

• Introduces mathematics of intelligent systems which provides the usage of mathematical rigor such as precise definitions, theorems, results, and proofs
• Provides extended and new comprehensive methods which can be used efficiently in a fuzzy environment as well as optimization problems and related fields
• Covers applications and elaborates on the usage of the developed methodology in various fields of industry such as software technologies, biomedicine, image processing, and communications

Why Change is Hard: The Power of Master Narratives Over Self and Society

The possibilities of personal growth and change are embedded in American cultural values that center individual autonomy and personal responsibility for charting one's life course. These values infuse the scientific study of identity development, where scholarship has contributed to the idea that we are the sole authors of our own stories. However, the data to support such claims are sparse.

In Why Change is Hard, Kate C. McLean argues that the promise of the possibility for growth and change, and the personal capacity to do so, are represented in problematic master narratives--present in broader society, as well as in the scientific community. Such narratives about personal growth and responsibility serve to limit attention to the systems and structures of society that restrict and deny the expression of individual identities, resulting in the maintenance of an inequitable status quo. The argument is made through the prism of the science on personality development, and narrative identity development in particular. This book calls into question the degree to which the theories and methods employed, as well as the data, support the elevation of such master narratives about the possibility for growth, challenging scholars to develop an awareness of their complicity in the maintenance of harmful ideologies.