text:
Talk:Strom Thurmond

Pi Kappa Alpha
Attended Clemson before Pi Kappa Alpha was established there. He was initiated by Xi Chapter at the University of South Carolina in 1959. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.94.240.137 (talk) 16:17, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

Section "Post-1970 views regarding race" does not actually really properly address what the section's title claims in does
The "Post-1970 views regarding race" starts out by mentioning the fact that post 1970, South Carolina African-African American voters could no longer be ignored as voting block by white senatorial candidates in the state which does little to inform us on Thurmond's personal views on the subject. It then it goes on talk how he hired a black women to his staff but does little to answer whether this was a result of his changing views on race or simply tokenism at play here. Finely, it ends with a statement about how he never repudiated his past views on racial segregation, implying his views on race never really change that much post-1970 and that he was simply being pragmatic as well disingenuous by hiring a token African-American on his staff to make it appear as if his views had changed without actually having done so. What the section really needs is any actually statements he made on the subject of race and whether many people truly believed at the time that him hiring the black staff member was a true sign of change vs simply tokenism. If he made no statements on race during this time and was simply silent on the matter we should be clear that it unclear just what views on the subject were post-1970's since hiring a single black staffer is clearly proof of any significant change in an of itself.--Notcharliechaplin (talk) 22:11, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Glad this section has been removed/revised, but I do feel like there could be a section which deals a little more in-depth with the issues of his racism. It seems like the best we can do is talk about how he is not NOT a racist? I just find it somewhat troubling and discouraging that in an approximately 20k word article about the life of an objectively racist octogenarian senator, the word "racist" appears a grand total of TWO times. Marcberm (talk) 13:44, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Statutory rape
Just because a man was a Senator does not mean his crimes get described with euphemisms. A 22-year-old man impregnating a 15- or 16-year old girl is statutory rape. It is not neutral to describe that crime as "Thurmond initiated a sexual relationship with her," nor "she became pregnant by Thurmond," as others have proposed. If a man kills a girl, Wikipedia does not describe it as "she became dead by him." Thurmond committed statutory rape in 1925 and nobody has ever suggested otherwise. Wikipedia should say so plainly. JamieMcCarthy (talk) 18:03, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
 * According to Wikipedia, the current age of consent in South Carolina is 16. I wasn't able to find a definitive source for the age of consent in the 1920s, but according to this article on children and youth in history, most of the Anglo-American world had the age of consent at 16 by 1920. Of course, this contemporary article points out that "Submitting to coercion, especially of an aggravated nature, is not consent." Based on the age range of Carrie Butler in the article, this is a borderline case.... I just noticed that the situation is discussed twice on this page, once in the final paragraph before the contents box (stating she was either 15 or 16), and once in the final paragraph of the "Early Life and Education" section (stating she was 16). Dorfird (talk) 13:08, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

I think we need to refer to a higher power - what's the convention here? Because if you label Strom Thurmond a statutory rapist, why would you not do the same thing for Benjamin Franklin? Or Mick Jagger? Considering he was neither accused nor convicted, I think it's an unfair term to introduce to the article. The relevant information is that in 1925 a rich 22 year old slept with his 15-16 year old servant. That information tells you all that you need to know, and it's clumsy to inject a legal term in there (eg 'murder) when no charge was rendered. 212.159.157.200 (talk) 10:40, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

There is no controversy when the page for William Walcher explains he was "murdered in 1080," though murder is the term for a specific crime, for which no one was in that case convicted. And because the basic facts are acknowledged by all parties including the Thurmond family attorney, there is no controversy in explaining that Thurmond almost certainly committed statutory rape. Upon further research, it turns out there was a short window of possibility for Carrie Butler's birth date and other circumstances which would technically result in no crime having been committed. (Her birthday, which is unknown, would have had to fall before roughly January 12th.) I have updated the page to acknowledge that fact and added documentation. Meachwhile, I direct attention again to WP:EUPHEMISM, which specifically directs us not to use terms like "make love." I am undoing the "slept with" change for that same reason, and I would ask editors to this page to please not continue to find euphemisms. JamieMcCarthy (talk) 14:10, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

I don't think William Walcher is a good example, as there's no wiggle room when it comes to defining how he was forced out of a burning church into the hands of a bunch of aggravated Northerners, but it could just as easily be worded as 'killed' and the article would retain the exact same meaning, and perhaps have more clarity. Presumably no charges were rendered as we have incomplete information, so we can't be 100% sure that ascribing a particular term is correct, so the broadest terminology or simply the basic details - "William was killed by a group of Northumbrians while escaping a church they'd set ablaze" are preferable, because they're a) factually correct, b) unambiguous, c) not looking to (anachronistically or not) apply social constructs to historical events. "Strom impregnated his 15/16 year old maid in 1925" is what happened. Misapplied charges of statutory rape can ruin lives, the term shouldn't be bandied about unless categorical fact. If there's a question over this, as you've uncovered, wouldn't it be better to cut it from the into and include a controversey section for this specific detail? 212.159.157.200 (talk) 13:34, 5 November 2018 (UTC)

 * The contributor above was concerned that misuse of the term "statutory rape" might ruin lives. It's a bit late for that now: the perpetrator has already gone to his eternal reward and is unlikely to be pulled from his 64 virgins on the basis of a Wikipedia entry.
 * We should consider the context in which the impregnation occurred. South Carolina had for the past two centuries had a majority of black residents but almost no black voters (due to the exercise of "states' rights") and so all the legislators, police, judges and jurors were white. A black man who raped a white woman could have committed a capital crime: but a white man who raped a black woman would not have been regarded as having committed any offence at all. Any complaint would have had serious repercussions for the victim, as still happens in Sharia Law jurisdictions like the Persian Gulf states. NRPanikker (talk) 11:07, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

The age of consent in South Carolina in 1920 was 16, according to the GMU article. Since the South Carolina age of consent was 16 in 1920 and is 16 now, it's a fairly safe guess that the age of consent was 16 in 1925. The only other somewhat plausible possibility would be that the 1925 SC age of consent was 18. And that would only be the case if the SC age of consent was raised to 18 at some point from 1921-1924, and then got reduced back to 16 later on. I am about 99.999% sure that  the South Carolina age of consent was not lower than 16 in 1925. (Since Georgia was the only state with an AOC lower than 16 in 1920.)

Carrie Butler was 16 when she gave birth, which indicates there's a 3 in 4 chance since actually got pregnant at 15. Pregnancies take 9 months. I've unfortunately been unable to find any info about exactly how many months she was past her 16th birthday when she gave birth. Less than 9 months past her birthday would mean she got pregnant at 15.

Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Saint Joseph, etc. actually lived before ages of consent were raised in the 1880-1920 period. Therefore, it's actually more fitting to call Strom a statutory rapist than the other guys.

Wikidude87654321 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikidude87654321 (talk • contribs) 03:59, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

proposed deletion
I believe this page should be taken down because it contains false information, I will request for it to be deleted. (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 19:11, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Not going to happen. It is clearly an article about a notable person. If there is incorrect information we'll fix it, not delete the article. What specifically do you think is incorrect? Meters (talk) 19:31, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I see the user has already asked for admin help on his talk page and been answered. The user has already been pointed to AFD, RS, COI and how to request edits. Asking a second time is not going to change the answer, Meters (talk) 19:38, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Switching parties
In the preface it's stated that in 1964 Thurmond switched parties for a second time. No where is mentioned when, why of form where he switched the first time. Also if I try to look it up, nothing comes up. I suggest to remove the part "for a second time". Or add the first time and what happened en when.

KeijersJ (talk) 13:58, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

 * Thurmond split from the Democratic party to run for president as a third-party Dixiecrat candidate in 1948. Afterward, he went back to the Democratic party. This is covered by the article in the 'Run for President' section, though not identified clearly as a party switch. The article's top-right infobox also identifies his 'political affiliation' with the Dixiecrat party. —ADavidB 19:02, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

Thurmond was a member of the Democratic Party until 1964 when, as a well-known proponent of Jim Crow laws, he joined the Republican Party for the remainder of his legislative career.

This insinuates the logical fallacy that because Thurmond supported Jim Crow laws, the Republican Party supported (or supports) Jim Crow laws. In fact, a considerably higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats opposed Jim Crow and voted for Civil Rights legislation, according to wiki's own article on that legislation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Vote_totals. The clause "as a well-known proponent of Jim Crow laws" should be removed or this should be otherwise re-worded to remove anti-conservative bias. Tpkatsa (talk) 14:07, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

 * Agreed, and done. —ADavidB 16:12, 9 November 2021 (UTC)

Length of article
The current length of this article is 114,764 characters. Just for comparison, the current length of the longest Featured Article (Hillary Clinton) is 110,304 characters. I agree that Thurmond's political career is much longer than that of Hillary Clinton, but I do want to reorganize this article to somewhat 80,000 to 85,000 characters. I read the article, and made some changes re-organizing it's sections, which, in my opinion was necessary. With that done, I wish to do the following: I'll be editing this article. Please let me know of any issues or concerns. Thanks! Kavyansh.Singh (talk) 12:27, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Reduction in length Per WP:TOOBIG Articles above length of 100,000 characters "Almost certainly should be divided". We can have a detailed article on United States Senate career of Strom Thurmond, but for now, various things in the prose needs to be removed. (final length should be somewhat 80,000 to 85,000 characters)
 * Shifting content to appropriate sections Currently, various incidents of his nth senatorial term are mentioned in the section on his mth senatorial term. There was a subsection named Carter nominees under Nixon administration. This is something, which could be fixed by a thorough read of the article.
 * Adding citations I don't see citation a major issue with this article, as we have various citations. But almost all citations needs to be re-formatted properly. Some expert studies and books also needs to be included.
 * Thorough copyedit Definitely required.

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title: Talk:Strom Thurmond


text:
Lazurite

Lazurite is a tectosilicate mineral with sulfate, sulfur and chloride with formula (Na,Ca)8[(S,Cl,SO4,OH)2. It is a feldspathoid and a member of the sodalite group. Lazurite crystallizes in the isometric system although well‐formed crystals are rare. It is usually massive and forms the bulk of the gemstone lapis lazuli.

Mineral
Lazurite is a deep‐blue to greenish‐blue. The colour is due to the presence of Trisulfur anions. It has a Mohs hardness of 5.0 to 5.5 and a specific gravity of 2.4. It is translucent with a refractive index of 1.50. It is fusible at 3.5 on Wolfgang Franz von Kobell's fusibility scale, and soluble in HCl. It commonly contains or is associated with grains of pyrite.

Lazurite is a product of contact metamorphism of limestone and is typically associated with calcite, pyrite, diopside, humite, forsterite, hauyne and muscovite.

Other blue minerals, such as the carbonate azurite and the phosphate lazulite, may be confused with lazurite, but are easily distinguished with careful examination. At one time, lazurite was a synonym for azurite.

Lazurite was first described in 1890 for an occurrence in the Sar-e-Sang District, Koksha Valley, Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan. It has been mined for more than 6,000 years in the lapis lazuli district of Badakhshan. It has been used as a pigment in painting and cloth dyeing since at least the 6th or 7th century. It is also mined at Lake Baikal in Siberia; Mount Vesuvius; Burma; Canada; and the United States. The name is from the Persian lajvard for blue.

Structure
Lazurite and hauyne seem to have the same structure and both are sulfate-dominant minerals. Lazurite is a pigment (opalescent) and has a bright blue streak (especially as a component of the semiprecious stone lapis lazuli). Many hauynes have a white or pale blue streak and are translucent. The difference might be a consequence of the redox state (sulfate to sulfide ratio).

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Lazurite


text:
Lapis lazuli

Lapis lazuli, or lapis for short, is a deep-blue metamorphic rock used as a semi-precious stone that has been prized since antiquity for its intense color. Originating from the Persian word for the gem, lāžward, lapis lazuli is a rock composed primarily of the minerals lazurite, pyrite and calcite. As early as the 7th millennium BC, lapis lazuli was mined in the Sar-i Sang mines, in Shortugai, and in other mines in Badakhshan province in modern northeast Afghanistan. Lapis lazuli artifacts, dated to 7570 BC, have been found at Bhirrana, which is the oldest site of Indus Valley civilisation. Lapis was highly valued by the Indus Valley Civilisation (3300–1900 BC). Lapis beads have been found at Neolithic burials in Mehrgarh, the Caucasus, and as far away as Mauritania. It was used in the funeral mask of Tutankhamun (1341–1323 BC).

By the end of the Middle Ages, lapis lazuli began to be exported to Europe, where it was ground into powder and made into the pigment, ultramarine. Ultramarine was used by some of the most important artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, including Masaccio, Perugino, Titian and Vermeer, and was often reserved for the clothing of the central figures of their paintings, especially the Virgin Mary. Ultramarine has also been found in dental tartar of medieval nuns and scribes, perhaps as a result of licking their painting brushes while producing medieval texts and manuscripts.

Major sources
Mines in northeast Afghanistan continue to be a major source of lapis lazuli. Important amounts are also produced from mines west of Lake Baikal in Russia, and in the Andes mountains in Chile which is the source that the Inca used to carve artifacts and jewelry. Smaller quantities are mined in Pakistan, Italy, Mongolia, the United States, and Canada.

Etymology
Lapis is the Latin word for "stone" and lazulī is the genitive form of the Medieval Latin lazulum, which is taken from the Arabic لازورد lāzaward, itself from the Persian لاژورد lāžavard/lāževard and/or لاجورد lājevard. It means "sky" or "heaven"; so this is a "stone (of/from) the sky" or "stone (of/from) heaven". For example, in the following Persian poem by Ferdowsi:

As the sun struck the dome of lazuli,

A golden curtain was drawn, most truly.

Historically, it was mined in the Badakhshan region of upper Afghanistan. Lazulum is etymologically related to the color blue, and used as a root for the word for blue in several languages, including Spanish and Portuguese azul as well as English azure.

Composition
The most important mineral component of lapis lazuli is lazurite (25% to 40%), a blue feldspathoid silicate mineral of the sodalite family, with the formula. Most lapis lazuli also contains calcite (white), and pyrite (metallic yellow). Some samples of lapis lazuli contain augite, diopside, enstatite, mica, hauynite, hornblende, nosean, and sulfur-rich löllingite geyerite.

Lapis lazuli usually occurs in crystalline marble as a result of contact metamorphism.

Color

The intense blue color is due to the presence of the trisulfur radical anion in the crystal. The presence of disulfur and tetrasulfur  radicals can shift the color towards yellow or red, respectively. These radical anions substitute for the chloride anions within the sodalite structure. The radical anion exhibits a visible absorption band in the range 595–620 nm with high molar absorptivity, leading to its bright blue color.

Uses and substitutes
Lapis takes an excellent polish and can be made into jewellery, carvings, boxes, mosaics, ornaments, small statues, and vases. Interior items and finishing buildings can be also made with lapis. During the Renaissance, lapis was ground and processed to make the pigment ultramarine for use in frescoes and oil painting. Its usage as a pigment in oil paint largely ended during the early 19th century, when a chemically identical synthetic variety became available.

Lapis lazuli is commercially synthesized or simulated by the Gillson process, which is used to make artificial ultramarine and hydrous zinc phosphates. Spinel or sodalite, or dyed jasper or howlite, can be substituted for lapis.

In the ancient world
Lapis lazuli has been mined in Afghanistan and exported to the Mediterranean world and South Asia since the Neolithic age, along the ancient trade route between Afghanistan and the Indus Valley dating to the 7th millennium BC. Quantities of these beads have also been found at 4th millennium BC settlements in Northern Mesopotamia, and at the Bronze Age site of Shahr-e Sukhteh in southeast Iran (3rd millennium BC). A dagger with a lapis handle, a bowl inlaid with lapis, amulets, beads, and inlays representing eyebrows and beards, were found in the Royal Tombs of the Sumerian city-state of Ur from the 3rd millennium BC.

Lapis was also used in ancient Persia, Mesopotamia by the Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians for seals and jewelry. It is mentioned several times in the Mesopotamian poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh (17th–18th century BC), one of the oldest known works of literature. The Statue of Ebih-Il, a 3rd millennium BC statue found in the ancient city-state of Mari in modern-day Syria, now in the Louvre, uses lapis lazuli inlays for the irises of the eyes.

In ancient Egypt, lapis lazuli was a favorite stone for amulets and ornaments such as scarabs. Lapis jewellery has been found at excavations of the Predynastic Egyptian site Naqada (3300–3100 BC). At Karnak, the relief carvings of Thutmose III (1479–1429 BC) show fragments and barrel-shaped pieces of lapis lazuli being delivered to him as tribute. Powdered lapis was used as eyeshadow by Cleopatra.

Jewelry made of lapis lazuli has also been found at Mycenae attesting to relations between the Myceneans and the developed civilizations of Egypt and the East.

Pliny the Elder wrote that lapis lazuli is "opaque and sprinkled with specks of gold". Because the stone combines the blue of the heavens and golden glitter of the sun, it was emblematic of success in the old Jewish tradition. In the early Christian tradition lapis lazuli was regarded as the stone of Virgin Mary.

In late classical times and as late as the Middle Ages, lapis lazuli was often called sapphire (sapphirus in Latin, sappir in Hebrew), though it had little to do with the stone today known as the blue corundum variety sapphire. In his book on stones, the Greek scientist Theophrastus described "the sapphirus, which is speckled with gold," a description which matches lapis lazuli.

There are many references to "sapphire" in the Old Testament, but most scholars agree that, since sapphire was not known before the Roman Empire, they most likely are references to lapis lazuli. For instance, Exodus 24:10: "And they saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone..." (KJV). The words used in the Latin Vulgate Bible in this citation are "quasi opus lapidis sapphirini", the terms for lapis lazuli. Modern translations of the Bible, such as the New Living Translation Second Edition, refer to lapis lazuli in most instances instead of sapphire.

Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer used lapis lazuli paint, in the Girl with a Pearl Earring painting.

Yeats
The poet, William Butler Yeats, describes a figurine of sculpted lapis lazuli in a poem entitled "Lapis Lazuli". The sculpture of three men from China, a bird, and a musical instrument serves in the poem as a reminder of "gaiety" in the face of tragedy.

title: Lapis lazuli


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Metis (moon)

Metis, also known as Jupiter XVI, is the innermost known moon of Jupiter. It was discovered in 1979 in images taken by Voyager 1, and was named in 1983 after the first wife of Zeus, Metis. Additional observations made between early 1996 and September 2003 by the Galileo spacecraft allowed its surface to be imaged.

Metis is tidally locked to Jupiter, and its shape is strongly asymmetrical, with the largest diameter being almost twice as large as the smallest one. It is also one of the two moons known to orbit Jupiter in less than the length of Jupiter's day, the other being Adrastea. It orbits within the main ring of Jupiter, and is thought to be a major contributor of ring material.

Discovery and observations

Metis was discovered in 1979 by Stephen P. Synnott in images taken by the Voyager 1 probe and was provisionally designated as S/1979 J 3. In 1983, it was officially named after the mythological Metis, a Titaness who was the first wife of Zeus (the Greek equivalent of Jupiter). The photographs taken by Voyager 1 showed Metis only as a dot, and hence knowledge about Metis was very limited until the arrival of the Galileo spacecraft. Galileo imaged almost all of the surface of Metis and put constraints on its composition by 1998.

Although the Juno orbiter, which arrived at Jupiter in 2016, has a camera called JunoCam, it is almost entirely focused on observations of Jupiter itself. During close observations of Jupiter, it may capture some distant images of the innermost moons Metis and Adrastea.

Physical characteristics

Metis has an irregular shape and measures $128,000 km$ across, which makes it the second smallest of the four inner satellites of Jupiter. Therefore, a very rough estimate of its surface area could be placed between 5,800 and 11,600 square kilometers (approx. 8,700). The bulk composition and mass of Metis are not known, but it is likely that its mean density is 1.5 g/cm3 or higher, and its mass can therefore be estimated as ~6.4×1016 kg or higher.

The surface of Metis is heavily cratered, dark, and appears to be reddish in color. There is a substantial asymmetry between the leading and trailing hemispheres: the leading hemisphere is 1.3 times brighter than the trailing one. The asymmetry is probably caused by the higher velocity and frequency of impacts on the leading hemisphere, which excavates a bright material (presumably ice) from its interior.

Orbit and rotation
Metis is the innermost of Jupiter's four small inner moons. It orbits Jupiter at a distance of ~128,000 km (1.79 Jupiter radii) within Jupiter's main ring. Metis's orbit has very small eccentricity (~0.0002) and inclination (~ 0.06°) relative to the equator of Jupiter.

Due to tidal locking, Metis rotates synchronously with its orbital period (about 7 hours), with its longest axis aligned towards Jupiter. Jupiter casts a shadow on all of Metis for 68 minutes each Metian day.

Metis lies inside Jupiter's synchronous orbit radius (as does Adrastea), and as a result, tidal forces slowly cause its orbit to decay. If its density is similar to Amalthea's, Metis's orbit lies within the fluid Roche limit; however, because it has not broken up, it must lie outside its rigid Roche limit.

Relationship with Jupiter's rings

Metis's orbit lies ~1,000 km within the main ring of Jupiter. It orbits within a ~500 km wide "gap" or "notch" in the ring. The gap is clearly somehow related to the moon but the origin of this connection has not been established. Metis supplies a significant part of the main ring's dust. This material appears to consist primarily of material that is ejected from the surfaces of Jupiter's four small inner satellites by meteorite impacts. It is easy for the impact ejecta to be lost from the satellites into space because the satellites' surfaces lie fairly close to the edge of their Roche spheres due to their low density.

title: Metis (moon)


text:
Talk:Infanticide

Aboriginal Australians
This page suggests that Aboriginal Australians commited high rates of infanticide, however this was mostly reported on as a reasoning for the stolen generation and was not anywhere near as common as many old sources suggest. Modern sources such as say that "What was, in all likelihood, an exceptional and incidental practice amongst Aboriginal people, rather than a matter of common custom, was raised up by the interaction of European and Aboriginal fears of the other into a morally and racially defining trope that marked whole communities as ‘infanticidal’, and as people whose common rights could be morally suspended." – Unsigned comment, made some time before 12:49, 15 May 2022

Reached its peak in Europe during WWII?
this seems sensational at best and not at all academic. Alexander R. Burton (talk) 08:51, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Disruptive editing regarding Romania
Hi IP editor, what's your issue with the text especially in regard to Romania which you continually try to delete? It's sourced and, as far as I can see, absolutely fine. But if you think there's something wrong with it, let's discuss it here. Gawaon (talk) 09:20, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

Bioethics views on Infanticide
Do you think recent views of bioethicists, including the argument for its morality in certain cases put forth by Alberto Giubilini and Francesco Minerva, or Peter Singer's views should be included in the article? 103.252.53.57 (talk) 08:04, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

 * Yes, they should. We just need sources that talk about their views, and then we can summarize those sources, per WP:V.  Should probably go in a new section, maybe "Ethics", or "Views of Bio-ethicists"? --- Avatar317 (talk) 23:11, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Infanticide


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Domenico Scarlatti

Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 – 23 July 1757) was an Italian composer. He is classified primarily as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style. Like his renowned father Alessandro Scarlatti, he composed in a variety of musical forms, although today he is known mainly for his 555 keyboard sonatas. He spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families.

Life and career
Scarlatti was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples, belonging to the Spanish Crown. He was born in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. He was the sixth of ten children of the composer and teacher Alessandro Scarlatti. His older brother Pietro Filippo was also a musician.

Scarlatti first studied music under his father. Other composers who may have been his early teachers include Gaetano Greco, Francesco Gasparini, and Bernardo Pasquini, all of whom may have influenced his musical style.

Scarlatti was appointed as a composer and organist at the Chapel Royal of Naples in 1701 and briefly worked under his father, who was then the chapel's maestro di cappella. In 1703 he revised Carlo Francesco Pollarolo's opera Irene for performance at Naples. Soon after, his father sent him to Venice. After this, nothing is known of his life until 1709, when he went to Rome and entered the service of the exiled Polish queen Marie Casimire. It was there he met Thomas Roseingrave. Scarlatti was already an accomplished harpsichordist; there is a story of a trial of skill with George Frideric Handel at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome, where Scarlatti was judged possibly superior to Handel on the harpsichord, although inferior on the organ. Later in life, he was known to cross himself in veneration when speaking of Handel's skill.

While in Rome, Scarlatti composed several operas for Queen Casimir's private theatre. He was Maestro di Cappella at St. Peter's from 1715 to 1719. In 1719 he travelled to London to direct his opera Narciso at the King's Theatre.

According to Vicente Bicchi, Papal Nuncio in Portugal at the time, Scarlatti arrived in Lisbon on 29 November 1719. There he taught music to the Portuguese princess Maria Magdalena Barbara. He left Lisbon on 28 January 1727 for Rome, where he married Maria Caterina Gentili on 6 May 1728. In 1729 he moved to Seville, staying for four years. In 1733, he went to Madrid as a music master to Princess Maria Barbara, who had married into the Spanish royal house. She later became Queen of Spain. Scarlatti remained in Spain for the remaining 25 years of his life and had five children there. After his wife died in 1739, he married a Spaniard, Anastasia Maxarti Ximenes. Among his compositions during his time in Madrid were most of the 555 keyboard sonatas for which he is best known.

Scarlatti befriended the castrato singer Farinelli, a fellow Neapolitan also enjoying royal patronage in Madrid. Musicologist and harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who published a biography of Scarlatti in 1953, commented that Farinelli's correspondence provides "most of the direct information about Scarlatti that has transmitted itself to our day".

Scarlatti died in Madrid at the age of 71. His residence at 35 Calle de Leganitos is designated with a historical plaque, and his descendants still live in Madrid. He was buried at a convent there, but his grave no longer exists.

Minor planet 6480 Scarlatti is named in his honour.

Music
Only a small number of Scarlatti's compositions were published during his lifetime. Scarlatti himself seems to have overseen the publication in 1738 of the most famous collection, his 30 Essercizi (Exercises). They were well received throughout Europe and were championed by the foremost English writer on music of the eighteenth century, Charles Burney. Burney wrote that the harpsichordist Joseph Kelway was "head of the Scarlatti sect", a group of English musicians that championed Scarlatti as early as 1739, also including Thomas Roseingrave.

The many sonatas unpublished during Scarlatti's lifetime have appeared in print irregularly in the past two and a half centuries. He has attracted notable admirers, including Béla Bartók, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Pieter-Jan Belder, Johann Sebastian Bach, Muzio Clementi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Carl Czerny, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy, Emil Gilels, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Enrique Granados, Marc-André Hamelin, Vladimir Horowitz, Ivo Pogorelić, Scott Ross (the first performer to record all 555 sonatas), Heinrich Schenker, András Schiff and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form, and some in early sonata form, and mostly written for harpsichord or the earliest pianofortes. (There are four for the organ and a few for small instrumental groups). Some display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and unconventional modulations to remote keys.

Though Scarlatti wrote over 500 sonatas, there is a wide variety in his works. Some are deeply serious, others are light and almost humorous. Some sound like courtly dances, others like street songs. This ability to cover a wide range of styles and moods is one of the hallmarks of Scarlatti's work. Another stylistic trait of this composer is the ability to mix “different forms or levels of discourse”.

Other distinctive attributes of his music are:
 * The influence of Iberian (Portuguese and Spanish) folk music. An example is his use of the Phrygian mode and other tonal inflections more or less alien to European art music. Many of his figurations and dissonances are suggestive of the guitar.
 * The influence of the Spanish guitar can be seen in notes being played repeatedly.

 * A formal device where each half of a sonata leads to a pivotal point, which Kirkpatrick termed "the crux", and which is sometimes underlined by a pause or fermata. Before the crux, Scarlatti sonatas often contain their main thematic variety, and after the crux, the music makes more use of repetitive figurations as it modulates away from the home key (in the first half) or back to the home key (in the second half).
 * Its tendency to be in the galant style.

Kirkpatrick produced an edition of the sonatas in 1953, and the numbering from this edition—the Kk. or K. number—is now nearly always used. Previously, the numbering commonly used was from the 1906 edition compiled by Neapolitan pianist Alessandro Longo (L. numbers). Kirkpatrick's numbering is chronological, while Longo's ordering is a result of his arbitrarily grouping the sonatas into "suites". In 1967 the Italian musicologist Giorgio Pestelli published a revised catalogue (using P. numbers), which corrected what he considered to be some anachronisms, and added some sonatas missing from Kirkpatrick's edition. Although the exact composition dates for these surviving sonatas are not known, Kirkpatrick concluded that they might all have been composed late in Scarlatti's career (after 1735), with most of them possibly written after the composer's 67th birthday.

Aside from his many sonatas, Scarlatti composed several operas, cantatas, and liturgical pieces. Well-known works include the Stabat Mater of 1715, and the Salve Regina of 1756, which is thought to be his last composition.

Complete works

 * L'Œuvre pour clavier, Scott Ross (1988, 34 CDs Erato/Radio France)
 * Domenico Scarlatti: The Complete Sonatas, Richard Lester, harpsichord & fortepiano (2001–2005, 39 CDs in 7 volumes Nimbus Records NI 1725/NI 1741).
 * Keyboard Sonatas, Emilia Fadini, Ottavio Dantone, Sergio Vartolo, Marco Farolfi, Enrico Baiano..., harpsichord, fortepiano, organ (1999–2012, 12 CDs Stradivarius) – in progress
 * Keyboard Sonatas, Pieter-Jan Belder, harpsichord & fortepiano (2012, 36 CDs Brilliant Classics)
 * Keyboard Sonatas, Carlo Grante, Bösendorfer Imperial piano (2009–2020, 35 CDs in 6 volumes Music & Arts)

Piano recitals

 * 2 Sonatas: Sonata K. 9 and Sonata K. 380 – Dinu Lipatti, piano (20 February and 27 September 1947, EMI / 12 CDs Hänssler PH17011)
 * 4 Sonatas : Sonata K. 1, Sonata K. 87, Sonata K. 193, and Sonata K. 386 – Clara Haskil, piano (? 1947, BBC / « Inédits Haskil » Tahra TAH 389 / TAH 4025)
 * 11 Sonatas: Sonata K. 1, Sonate K. 35, Sonata K. 87, Sonata K. 132, Sonata K. 193, Sonata K. 247, Sonata K. 322, Sonata K. 386, Sonata K. 437, Sonata K. 515, Sonata K. 519 – Clara Haskil, piano (October 1951, Westminster/DG 471 214-2)
 * 3 Sonatas: Sonata K. 87, Sonata K. 193, and Sonata K. 386 – Clara Haskil, piano (October 1951, Philips)
 * The Siena Pianoforte: 6 Scarlatti sonatas (and 3 sonatas of Mozart) – Charles Rosen, Siena piano (1955, Counterpoint/Esoteric / Everest Records CPT 53000)
 * 37 Piano Sonatas : Vladimir Horowitz (1946–1981, Complete Recordings RCA and CBS/Sony Classical)
 * 33 Sonatas : Christian Zacharias, piano (1979, 1981, 1984, EMI)
 * 18 sonatas : Maria Tipo, piano (27–28 November 1987, EMI CDC 7 49078 2)
 * 15 sonatas : Ivo Pogorelich, piano (September 1991, DG)
 * Scarlatti: Keyboard Sonatas : Mikhail Pletnev, piano (October 1994, Virgin Classics 5181862)
 * 16 Sonatas : Christian Zacharias, piano (1995, EMI)
 * 20 Sonatas : Valerie Tryon, piano (18 and 28 September 1999, Appian Publications & Recordings [APR])
 * 14 Sonatas: Christian Zacharias, piano (June 2002, MDG 34011622)
 * 18 Sonatas : Racha Arodaky, piano (17–21 July 2005, Zig-Zag Territoires)
 * Scarlatti: Piano Sonatas : Yevgeny Sudbin, piano (2005, BIS)
 * Alexandre Tharaud joue Scarlatti : 18 sonatas (30 August/3 September 2010, Virgin Classics)
 * Scarlatti: 18 Sonatas: Yevgeny Sudbin, piano (2016, BIS)
 * Scarlatti: 52 Sonatas: Lucas Debargue, piano (2019, Sony Music)
 * Scarlatti: 37 Sonatas: Alessandro Deljavan, piano (2023, OnClassical)

Fortepiano recitals

 * Sonate per cembalo, 1742, Francesco Cera, harpsichord & fortepiano (7–9 March 2000, March 2001, October 2002, 3 CD Tactus)
 * Sonates – Una nuova inventione per Maria Barbara, Aline Zylberajch, fortepiano after Cristofori (2005, Ambronay)

Harpsichord recitals

 * Sonatas for Harpsichord, Wanda Landowska (1934, 1939, 1940, EMI)
 * Keyboard Sonatas, Fernando Valenti (the 1950s, Westminster / 3 CDs Millenium MCA Universal, rereleased. 1998)
 * Keyboard Sonatas, Fernando Valenti (1951–1955, 11 CDs Pristine Audio, rereleased. 2006)
 * 60 Harpsichord Sonatas, Ralph Kirkpatrick (1954, CBS SL 221 / 2 CD Urania, rerelease of 54 sonatas in 2004)
 * Harpsichord Sonatas, Luciano Sgrizzi, harpsichord (1964, Accord)
 * 21 Harpsichord Sonatas, Ralph Kirkpatrick (1966, 1971, Archiv Produktion, rereleased 2004)
 * 10 Sonatas, Gustav Leonhardt (1970, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)
 * 16 Harpsichord Sonatas, Joseph Payne (1971, Turnabout)
 * Sonates pour clavecin, Blandine Verlet (1975, Philips)
 * Sonates pour clavecin, Blandine Verlet (1976, Philips)
 * 11 Sonatas, Valda Aveling (1976, EMI Classics For Pleasure)
 * 14 Harpsichord Sonatas, Gustav Leonhardt (1979, Seon/Sony)
 * Harpsichord Sonatas – Colin Tilney, Vincenzio harpsichord 1782 (August 1979, L'Oiseau-Lyre/Decca)
 * Harpsichord Sonatas, Trevor Pinnock (1981, CRD Records; rereleased in 1995)
 * Sonatas, Trevor Pinnock (1987, Archiv)
 * 12 Sonatas, Colin Tilney (1988, Dorian)
 * Les plus belles sonatas, Scott Ross (1988, Erato/Radio France)
 * Trente Sonates, Rafael Puyana (1988, 2CD Harmonia Mundi)
 * 16 Sonatas, Ton Koopman (1988, Capriccio)
 * Sonatas, Andreas Staier (December 1990, 26–28 October 1991, 2 CDs Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)
 * Sonatas, Bob van Asperen (May 1991, « Reflexe » EMI)
 * 22 sonates, Pierre Hantaï (June 1992, Astrée E 8502)
 * Cat Fugue and Sonatas for Harpsichord, Elaine Comparone (27–28 August 1992, Lyrichord)
 * Sonatas, Andreas Staier (December 1995, Teldec)
 * Sonates inédites, Fandango, Mayako Soné (1994, Erato/Warner Classics)
 * Scarlatti High and Low – 16 dernières sonates pour clavecin, Colin Tilney (1995, Music & Arts)
 * 18 Sonatas, Eiji Hashimoto, harpsichord (1996, Klavier)
 * 21 sonates de la maturité, Frédérick Haas (2002, Calliope)
 * Sonates, Pierre Hantaï (2002, 2004, 2005, 2016, 2017, 2019 6 CDs/SACD Mirare)
 * Sonatas, Elaine Thornburgh (2005, 2 CDs Lyrichord)
 * Duende (17 sonatas), Skip Sempé (with Olivier Fortin, second harpsichord) (2006, Paradizo)
 * 35 Sonates, Frédérick Haas (October 2016, Hitasura Productions)
 * 16 Sonates – Jean Rondeau (2018, SACD Erato)
 * Zones, Lillian Gordis (June 2019, Paraty PTY 919180)
 * 13 Sonates Du Libro 3 De 1753, Frédérick Haas (September 2022, Histasura Productions)

Vocal music

 * Scarlatti: Stabat Mater – Campra: Requiem. Monteverdi Choir; John Eliot Gardiner, conductor (2020, Erato)

title: Domenico Scarlatti


text:
Metis (mythology)

Metis (Μῆτις; Modern Greek: Μέτης), in ancient Greek religion and mythology, was one of the Oceanids. She is notable for being the first wife and advisor of Zeus, the King of the Gods. She helped him to free his siblings from their father Cronus' stomach by giving him an emetic and, when she was swallowed by Zeus after it was foretold that she would bear a son mightier than his father, helped their daughter Athena to escape from his forehead.

Function
By the era of Greek philosophy in the 5th century BC, Metis had become the first deity of wisdom and deep thought, but her name originally connoted "magical cunning" and was as easily equated with the trickster powers of Prometheus as with the "royal metis" of Zeus. The Stoic commentators allegorised Metis as the embodiment of "prudence", "wisdom" or "wise counsel", in which form she was inherited by the Renaissance.

The Greek word metis meant a quality that combined wisdom and cunning. This quality was considered to be highly admirable, the hero Odysseus being the embodiment of it, for example using such a strategy against Polyphemus, son of Poseidon. In the Classical era, metis was regarded by Athenians as one of the notable characteristics of the Athenian character.

Hesiod's account
Metis was an Oceanid nymph, one of the 3000 daughters of the Titans Oceanus and his sister-wife Tethys, and a sister of the Potamoi (river-gods), which also numbered 3000. Metis gave her cousin Zeus a potion to cause his father Cronus, the supreme ruler of the cosmos, to vomit out his siblings their father had swallowed out of fear of being overthrown. After the Titanomachy, the 10-year war among the immortals, she was pursued by Zeus and they got married. Zeus himself is titled Metieta (Μητίετα), in the Homeric poems.

Metis was both a threat to Zeus and an indispensable aid. He lay with her, but immediately feared the consequences. It had been prophesied that she would bear a daughter who would be wiser than her mother, and then a son more powerful than his father, who would eventually overthrow Zeus and become king of the cosmos in his place. In order to forestall these consequences, Zeus tricked Metis into turning herself into a fly and promptly swallowed her. However, she was already pregnant with their first and only child, Athena. Metis crafted armor, a spear, and a shield for her daughter, whom she raised in Zeus' mind. Athena eventually used her spear and shield, banging them together to give her father a headache. Soon, he could not take his headache anymore and had the smith god Hephaestus, one of his sister-wife Hera's sons, cut his head open to let out whatever was in there on the river Trito's banks. Athena emerged from Zeus's mind full grown, wearing the armor her mother made her. She was made the goddess of wisdom, warfare, and crafts. "But Zeus lay with the fair-cheeked daughter of Ocean and Tethys apart from Hera ... deceiving Metis although she was full wise. But he seized her with his hands and put her in his belly, for fear that she might bring forth something stronger than his thunderbolt: therefore did Zeus, who sits on high and dwells in the aether, swallow her down suddenly. But she straightway conceived Pallas Athena: and the father of men and gods gave her birth by way of his head on the banks of the river Trito. And she remained hidden beneath the inward parts of Zeus, even Metis, Athena's mother, worker of righteousness, who was wiser than gods and mortal men."

Other versions
According to a scholiast on the Theogony, Metis had the ability of changing her shape at will. Zeus tricked her and swallowed his pregnant wife when she transformed into a πικρὰν (pikràn). As Keightley notes, πικρὰ ("bitter") makes little or no sense in that context, and it has been variously corrected to μυῖαν (muîan, meaning "fly") or μικρὰν (mikràn, meaning "small thing") instead.

According to Apollodorus, Metis was raped by Zeus, and changed many forms in order to escape him, after he pursued her.

An alternative version of the same myth makes the Cyclops Brontes rather than Zeus the father of Athena before Metis is swallowed.

Hesiod's account is followed by Acusilaus and the Orphic tradition, which enthroned Metis side by side with Eros as primal cosmogenic forces. Plato makes Poros, or "creative ingenuity", a son of Metis.

Ancient legacy
The similarities between Zeus swallowing Metis and Cronus swallowing his children have been noted by several scholars. This also caused some controversy in regard to reproduction myths.

Modern legacy

 * Metis Island in Antarctica is named after Metis.
 * 9 Metis, one of the larger main-belt asteroids, is named after this goddess.
 * Metis, a moon of Jupiter, is named after the goddess.

title: Metis (mythology)


text:
Sea serpent

A sea serpent is a type of sea monster described in various mythologies, most notably in Mesopotamian cosmology (Tiamat), Ugaritic cosmology (Yam, Tannin) biblical cosmology (Leviathan, Rahab), Greek cosmology (Cetus, Echidna, Hydra, Scylla), and Norse cosmology (Jörmungandr).

Mediterranean and Western Asia
The Drachenkampf mytheme, the chief god in the role of the hero slaying a sea serpent, is widespread both in the ancient Near East and in Indo-European mythology, e.g. Lotan and Hadad, Leviathan and Yahweh, Tiamat and Marduk (see also Labbu, Bašmu, Mušḫuššu), Illuyanka and Tarhunt, Yammu and Baal in the Baal Cycle etc. The Hebrew Bible also has mythological descriptions of large sea creatures as part of creation under Yahweh's command, such as the Tanninim mentioned in Book of Genesis 1:21 and the "great serpent" of Amos 9:3. In the Aeneid, a pair of sea serpents killed Laocoön and his sons when Laocoön argued against bringing the Trojan Horse into Troy. Claudius Aelianus in his work On the Nature of Animals mentions a giant sea centipede, which has a tail that is similar to a crayfish and which moves using numerous feet on each side of its body. Guillaume Rondelet mentions a similar imaginary creature called centipede cetacean in his work L'histoire entière des poissons.

Germanic Scandinavia
In Nordic mythology, Jörmungandr (or Midgarðsormr) was a sea serpent or worm so long that it encircled the entire world, Midgard. Sea serpents also appear frequently in later Scandinavian folklore, particularly in that of Norway, such as an account that in 1028 AD, Saint Olaf killed a sea serpent in Valldal in Norway, throwing its body onto the mountain Syltefjellet. Marks on the mountain are associated with the legend.

Natural history
An apparent eye-witness account is given by Aristotle in his work Historia Animalium on natural history. Strabo makes reference to an eyewitness account of a dead sea creature sighted by Poseidonius on the coast of the northern Levant. He reports the following: "As for the plains, the first, beginning at the sea, is called Macras, or Macra-Plain. Here, as reported by Poseidonius, was seen the fallen dragon, the corpse of which was about a plethrum [100 ft] in length, and so bulky that horsemen standing by it on either side could not see one another, and its jaws were large enough to admit a man on horseback, and each flake of its horny scales exceeded an oblong shield in length." The creature was seen sometime between 130 and 51 BC.

Norway, 16th century
Swedish ecclesiastic and writer Olaus Magnus included illustrations of sea serpents and other various marine monsters on his illustrated map, the Carta marina. In his 1555 work History of the Northern Peoples, Olaus gives the following description of a Norwegian sea serpent:

Those who sail up along the coast of Norway to trade or to fish, all tell the remarkable story of how a serpent of fearsome size, from 200 ft to 400 ft long, and 20 ft wide, resides in rifts and caves outside Bergen. On bright summer nights this serpent leaves the caves to eat calves, lambs and pigs, or it fares out to the sea and feeds on sea nettles, crabs and similar marine animals. It has ell-long hair hanging from its neck, sharp black scales and flaming red eyes. It attacks vessels, grabs and swallows people, as it lifts itself up like a column from the water.

Norwegian Bishop Erik Pontoppidan (1698–1764) did not disbelieve the existence of sea serpents themselves, but doubted they would prey on ships and feed on humans, being more cautious-minded in that respect than Archbishop Olaus (of Upsala). Nevertheless, a number of reports were made by sailors at the time that sea serpents would destroy ships by wrapping the ship in coils of their body and pulling it underwater. Sailors threatened by a sea serpent were said to have thrown large objects such as paddles or shovels overboard in the path of the serpent, hoping that the serpent would take the object and leave without destroying the ship.

Greenland in 1734
Rev. Hans Egede, a Dano-Norwegian clergyman who was an early explorer and surveyor of Greenland, gave an 18th-century description of a sea serpent witnessed by his party. In his journal he wrote:

"On the 6th of July, 1734, there appeared a very large and frightful sea monster, which raised itself so high out of the water that its head reached above our main-top (top of the mainmast). It had a long, sharp snout, and spouted water like a whale; and very broad flappers. The body seemed to be covered with scales, and the skin was uneven and wrinkled, and the lower part was formed like a snake. After some time the creature plunged backwards into the water, and then turned its tail up above the surface, a whole ship-length from the head. The following evening we had very bad weather' ―translated in Henry Lee (1883)." Egede also wrote on the same sea-monster sighting in his book, noting that the beast was spotted at the 64th degree of latitude, and was as thick or "bulky as the Ship, and three or four times as long". Egede himself did not supply a sketch in this otherwise well-illustrated book, but the missionary named Bing who was his comrade drew a sketch, which is reproduced in Henry Lee's work.

Bing further described this creature as having reddish eyes, almost burning with fire. This convinced Bishop Pontoppidan that this was different from the type of sea serpent seen by others. From Bing's drawing, Pontoppidan estimated the creature to be considerably shorter than the length of a cable rope, or 100 fathoms (200 m) attested by multiple witnesses, and the pair of fins which were attached "below the waist (liv)" in Pontoppidan's view, was another unusual feature.

Lee proposed a rational explanation that this sea-serpent was a misapprehended sighting of what was actually the exposed head and one tentacle of a giant squid (Cf. figure above left).

New York exhibition in 1845
In 1845, a 35 m long skeleton claimed as belonging to an extinct sea serpent was put on a show in the New York City by Albert C. Koch. The claim was debunked by Prof. Jeffries Wyman, an anatomist who went to see the skeleton for himself. Wyman declared that the skull of the animal had to be mammalian in origin, and that the skeleton was composed of bones of several different animals, including an extinct species of whale.

Portuguese waters, 1848
On 6 August 1848 Captain McQuhae of HMS Daedalus (1826) and several of his officers and crew (en route to St Helena) saw a sea serpent which was subsequently reported (and debated) in The Times. The vessel sighted what they named as an enormous serpent between the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena. The serpent was witnessed to have been swimming with 4 ft of its head above the water and they believed that there was another 60 ft of the creature in the sea. Captain McQuahoe also said that "[The creature] passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter, that had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily have recognized his features with the naked eye." According to seven members of the crew, it remained in view for around twenty minutes. Another officer wrote that the creature was more of a lizard than a serpent. Evolutionary biologist Gary J. Galbreath contends that what the crew of Daedalus saw was a sei whale.

A report was published in the Illustrated London News on 14 April 1849 of a sighting of a sea serpent off the Portuguese coast by HMS Plumper (1848).

"On the morning of the 31st December, 1848, in lat. 41° 13'N., and long. 12° 31'W., being nearly due west of Oporto, I saw a long black creature with a sharp head, moving slowly, I should think about 2 kn ... its back was about 20 ft if not more above water; and its head, as near as I could judge, from 6 to 8 ft m] ...There was something on its back that appeared like a mane, and, as it moved through the water, kept washing about; but before I could examine it more closely, it was too far astern"

 * "A giant snake appeared at once from the water - and the largest cetacean a boa constrictor way wrapped twice. (I note such a physeter It can grow to 20-30 meters long!) It lasted for about 15 minutes the deadly struggle, the sea was just foaming and crashing waves around us, finally the back of the whale stood out Out of the water, he sank head first into the deep where the snake must have killed him. A cold shiver ran through us a cet at the sight of his final struggle; so writhing poor in the monster's double ring, like a little bird between the claws of a falcon. View of the two rings, the snake. It could have been 160-170 feet long and 7-8 feet thick."

In media

 * C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia features a sea serpent as one of many obstacles in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, along with the 1989 TV serial and the 2010 film based on it.
 * Beany and Cecil, featuring a sea sick sea serpent. Revived as The New Beany and Cecil Show by prouducer DIC Entertainment.

title: Sea serpent


text:
Arcangelo Corelli

Arcangelo Corelli (, also, , ; 17 February 1653 – 8 January 1713) was an Italian composer and violinist of the Baroque era. His music was key in the development of the modern genres of sonata and concerto, in establishing the preeminence of the violin, and as the first coalescing of modern tonality and functional harmony.

He was trained in Bologna and Rome and spent most of his career there with the protection of wealthy patrons. Though his entire production is limited to just six published collections – five of which are trio sonatas or solo and one of concerti grossi — he achieved great fame and success throughout Europe, in the process crystallizing widely influential musical models.

His writing was admired for its balance, refinement, sumptuous and original harmonies, for the richness of the textures, for the majestic effect of the theatricality and for its clear, expressive and melodious polyphony, a perfect quality of classical ideals, although belonging to the baroque epoch and often employing resources typical of this school, such as the exploration of dynamic and expressive contrasts, but always tempered by a great sense of moderation. He was the first to fully apply, with an expressive and structuring purpose, the new tonal system, consolidated after at least two hundred years of experimentation. As a virtuoso violinist he was considered one of the greatest of his generation and contributed, thanks to the development of modern playing techniques and to his many disciples scattered throughout Europe, to place the violin among the most prestigious solo instruments and was also a significant figure in the evolution of the traditional orchestra.

A dominant figure in Roman musical life and internationally highly regarded, he was desired by many courts and was included in the most prestigious artistic and intellectual society of his time, the Pontifical Academy of Arcadia. He was known in his time as "the new Orpheus", "the prince of musicians" and other similar adjectives, great folklore was generated around his figure and his fame did not diminish after his death. Even today his work is the subject of a voluminous critical bibliography and his sonatas are still widely used in musical academies as didactic material as well as pieces capable of affirming themselves in today's concert repertoire. His position in the history of Western music is considered crucial, being recognized as one of the greatest masters at the turn of the 17th and 18th century, as well as one of the earliest and greatest classicists.

Childhood
Baptismal records indicate that Corelli was born on 17 February 1653 in the small Romagna town of Fusignano, then in the diocese of Ferrara, in the Papal States. His ancestors had been in Fusignano and land-owners there since 1506, when a Corelli moved to the area from Rome. Although apparently prosperous, they were almost certainly not of the nobility, as several fanciful accounts of the composer's genealogy subsequently claimed. Corelli's father, from whom he took the name Arcangelo, died five weeks before the composer's birth. Consequently, he was raised by his mother, Santa (née Ruffini, or Raffini), alongside four elder siblings.

The wealth of anecdotes and legends attached to Corelli contrast sharply with the paucity of reliable contemporary evidence documenting events in his life. This gap is especially pronounced for his formative years, including his musical education; traditional accounts of a highly idealized childhood have long been debunked.

Musical education
According to the poet Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, who presumably knew the composer well, Corelli initially studied music under a priest in the nearby town of Faenza, and then in Lugo, before moving in 1666 to Bologna. A major centre of musical culture of the time, Bologna had a flourishing school of violinists associated with Ercole Gaibara and his pupils, Giovanni Benvenuti (violinist) and Leonardo Brugnoli. Reports by later sources link Corelli's musical studies with several master violinists, including Benvenuti, Brugnoli, Bartolomeo Laurenti and Giovanni Battista Bassani. Although historically plausible, these accounts remain largely unconfirmed, as does the claim that the papal contralto Matteo Simonelli first taught him to write in the "Palestrina style". A remark Corelli later made to a patron suggests that his musical education focused mainly on the violin.

Chronicles of the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna indicate that Corelli was accepted as a member by 1670, at the exceptionally young age of seventeen. The credibility of this attribution has been disputed. Although the nickname Il Bolognese appears on the title-pages of Corelli's first three published sets of works (Opus 1 to 3), the duration of his stay in Bologna remains unclear.

Early career
Anecdotes of travels outside Italy to France, Germany, and Spain lack any contemporary evidence. For example, the anecdote that Corelli's continental fame stemmed from a trip to Paris at the age of nineteen, where he was chased away by an envious Jean-Baptiste Lully, seems to have originated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was also claimed that Corelli spent time in Germany in the service of Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria (supposedly in 1681), as well as in the house of his friend and fellow violinist-composer Cristiano Farinelli (between 1680 and 1685).

Although it is unclear quite when Corelli arrived in Rome, he was certainly active there by 1675, when "Arcangelo Bolognese" (as he was referred to) was engaged to play as one of the supporting violinists in Lenten oratorios at the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, as well as in the French national celebrations held each year on 25 August at San Luigi dei Francesi and during the ordination of a member of the powerful Chigi family at Santi Domenico e Sisto. In August 1676, he was already playing second violin to the renowned Carlo Mannelli at San Luigi dei Francesi. Although Rome did not have any permanent orchestra providing stable employment for instrumentalists, Corelli rapidly made a name for himself, playing in a variety of ensembles sponsored by wealthy patrons, such as Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, for whom he played in Lenten oratorios at San Marcello from 1676 to 1679.

Professional success
In 1687 Corelli led the festival performances of music for Queen Christina of Sweden. He was also a favorite of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, grandnephew of another Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, who in 1689 became Pope Alexander VIII. From 1689 to 1690 he was in Modena. The Duke of Modena was generous to him. In 1706 Corelli was elected a member of the Pontificia Accademia degli Arcadi (the Arcadian Academy of Rome). He received the Arcadian name of Arcomelo Erimanteo.

In 1708 he returned to Rome, living in the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni. His visit to Naples, at the invitation of King Philip V, took place in the same year. The style of execution introduced by Corelli and preserved by his pupils, such as Francesco Geminiani, Pietro Locatelli, Pietro Castrucci, Francesco Antonio Bonporti, Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli, Francesco Gasparini, and others, was of vital importance for the development of violin playing. It has been said that the paths of all of the famous violinist-composers of 18th-century Italy led to Arcangelo Corelli, who was their "iconic point of reference".

However, Corelli used only a limited portion of his instrument's capabilities. This may be seen from his writings. The parts for violin very rarely proceed above D on the highest string, sometimes reaching the E in fourth position on the highest string. The story has been told and retold that Corelli refused to play a passage that extended to A in altissimo in the overture to Handel's oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth (premiered in Rome, 1708).

Nevertheless, his compositions for the instrument mark an epoch in the history of chamber music. His influence was not confined to his own country: his works were key in the development of the music of an entire generation of composers, including Antonio Vivaldi, Georg Friedrich Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach and François Couperin, as well as many others. Bach studied the works of Corelli and based an organ fugue (BWV 579) on Corelli's Opus 3 of 1689. Handel's Opus 6 Concerti Grossi take Corelli's own older Opus 6 Concerti as models, rather than the later three-movement Venetian concerto of Antonio Vivaldi favoured by Bach.

Musical society in Rome also owed much to Corelli. He was received in the highest circles of the aristocracy, and for a long time presided at the celebrated Monday concerts in the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni.

Death
Corelli died in Rome in possession of a fortune of 120,000 marks and a valuable collection of works of art and fine violins, the only luxury in which he had indulged. He left both to his benefactor and friend, who generously made over the money to Corelli's relatives. Corelli is buried in the Pantheon at Rome.

Context
Corelli's artistic figure flourished at the height of the Baroque, a cultural current characterized by an ornate and luxuriant artistic expressiveness, rich of strong contrasts. His music developed from the Renaissance polyphony, but was characterized by a transition towards greater independence between the voices. New socio-cultural and religious factors, as well as a strong influence of theater and rhetoric, led to the development of a renewed musical language that could better express the spirit of the time, thus developing a wide range of new harmonical, vocal and instrumental techniques. It is the period in which the tonal system is definitively consolidated, abandoning the old modal system, and which has its most typical expression in the writing style called continuo or ciphered bass, in which the bass line and the top line are written in full, leaving the execution of the harmonic filling attributed to the other parts to the discretion of the performer, indicated synthetically by the author by numbers. The great importance attributed to the superior voice, which relegated the other parts to a subordinate role, brought out the figure of the virtuoso soloist. The tempered tunings were also introduced, the melody often had popular inspiration and the dissonances began to be used as an expressive resource. Polyphony remained omnipresent especially in sacred music, generally more conservative, but the complexity that characterized it in previous centuries, which often made the sung texts incomprehensible, was abandoned in favor of a much clearer and simplified counterpoint, in which primacy was often given to the loudest voice. Furthermore, in the field of symbolism and language, the development of the theory of affects was of great importance, in which figures, melodies, tones and specific standardized technical resources became a musical lexicon at the service of expression. Such resources were very common in opera, the most popular and influential genre of the time, also exerting a decisive influence on the direction of instrumental music, a language that Corelli contributed significantly to articulate and affirm. At a formal level, the Baroque consolidated the forms of the suite and the sonata into multiple movements, which gave rise to the sonata da chiesa, the sonata da camera, to the sonata, to the concerto grosso, to the solo concerto and, later, to the symphony. In general, the changes introduced by the Baroque constituted a revolution in the history of music, perhaps as important as those promoted by the emergence of ars nova in the 14th century and avant-garde music in the 20th century.

Bologna, where Corelli originally studied, with its 60,000 inhabitants, was the second most important city in the Papal State, seat of the oldest university in the world and center of an intense cultural and artistic life. There were several large churches that maintained permanent orchestras, choirs and schools, three large theaters hosted dramatic and operatic performances, several publishing houses published sheet music, and there were at least half a dozen academies maintained by the nobility and higher clergy in their buildings. All of this defined trends and aesthetic canons, some dedicated exclusively to music, among which the most famous was the Accademia Filarmonica, founded in 1666 by Count Vincenzo Maria Carrati. An illustrious violin school was formed in this city, founded by Ercole Gaibara, whose principles were assimilated by Corelli.

Rome, on the other hand, had much greater traditions, wealth, and importance on several levels, starting with being the seat of Catholicism. Furthermore, it was a cosmopolitan capital that welcomed artists from all over Europe, eager to establish themselves in such rich, varied and influential settings, where the great patrons of the Church and the aristocracy challenged each other by organizing sumptuous presentations and promoting numerous artists. However, few churches and brotherhoods had stable musical bodies and there was a great exchange of professionals between one celebration and another. Unlike Bologna, in Rome the Church had a decisive influence on cultural life, and the guidelines in this regard varied according to the preferences of each pontiff. Pope Clement IX, for example, was himself a librettist of operas and oratorios and promoted secular music, and Corelli apparently found himself in this environment without any difficulty, although it is not known who introduced him to it. In any case, he soon gained the favor of patrons who were among the city's most prominent.

The violinist
As already mentioned, Corelli learned the fundamentals of violin technique in Bologna, and as a disciple of the virtuosos Giovanni Benvenuti and Leonardo Brugnoli, he followed the lines set by Ercole Gaibara, considered the progenitor of the Bolognese school. He later taught many students and spawned his own school, but despite his fame in this field, surprisingly few inaccurate descriptions of his technique survive, generating considerable controversy among critics, a shortcoming that is compounded by the fact that he did not write any manual or treatise about the topic. At the time there were several violin schools in Italy, which proposed different playing methods and even ways in which the player should hold the violin. There is considerable iconography describing these differences, where violinists rest the instrument under the chin, on the shoulder or against the chest, at different angles. Naturally, these differences involved different left hand and bow techniques and, to some extent, defined the style and complexity of the music they could perform.

During the 18th century he was considered a great virtuoso, but critics of the 20th century have sometimes doubted the ancient testimonies. Boyden, for example, stated that "Corelli cannot claim a prominent place in the history of violin technique"; Pincherle considered him "inferior to his German and even Italian contemporaries in terms of pure technique", and McVeigh said that he was "certainly not one of the great virtuosos of his time". However, according to Riedo, such opinions are based on what can be deduced from the technical requirements contained in his compositions, but this method is not entirely faithful to reality, since the score only offers a vague idea of what could be a live performance, also observing that the style developed by Corelli was characterized more by sobriety and singability than by extravagance. Furthermore, his compositions, in their published version, are addressed above all to a heterogeneous audience and not only to specialists and virtuosos. At the same time, his works cannot be exemplary of his ability to interpret works by other authors, where he may have taken a different approach. The failures of the Naples recital and the confrontation with Handel in Rome, where he supposedly claimed to have no experience in French technique, are often cited as evidence supporting his limited violin technique, although they are not firmly demonstrated. According to Riedo's research, which summarizes studies on this aspect, Corelli probably held the violin against his chest and projected it forward; this possibility is supported by engravings and drawings, as well as written sources, including descriptions of the performances of other violinists who had been his students or were influenced by him. This position was very common before his time, was dominant in the Rome of his time and remained common until the 19th century. Francesco Geminiani, who was probably his student, in his The Art of Playing the Violin (1751) wrote that "the violin should be held just below the clavicle, inclining the right side slightly downward, so so it is not necessary to bend too much when playing the fourth string." Walls claimed that almost no virtuoso of the first half of the 18th century took a different stance. It provided the performer with an elegant attitude, in Corelli's case also important for being a patrician, but it slightly impaired the execution of the highest notes of the fourth string. Corelli's music rarely requires positions higher than the third.

Geminiani, who was also a virtuoso, gave voice to a very current vision of what is expected from a good violinist: "The intention of music is not only to please the ear, but to express feelings, touch the imagination, influence the mind, and dominate the passions. The art of playing the violin consists in giving the instrument a sound that rivals the most perfect human voice, and in executing each piece with accuracy, decorum, delicacy and expression according to the true intention of the music." In Riedo's words, "Geminiani's ideological and aesthetic views seem to correspond exactly to Corelli's compositions: he enhanced the textures, without acrobatic passages with extreme changes of position and without virtuoso effects. The positions of Boyden, Pincherle and McVeigh must be reconsidered, since this type of acrobatic virtuosity does not seem to have been Corelli's goal." Contemporary descriptions report that his performances were "erudite, elegant and pathetic, and his sound firm and uniform." Bremner wrote in 1777: "I was informed that Corelli would not accept into his orchestra any violinist who could not, with a bow, create a uniform and powerful sound, like that of an organ, by playing two strings at the same time, and maintain it for at least minus ten seconds." This suggests that his main concern was the mastery of bow technique, responsible for the overall sound produced and for the nuances and subtleties of dynamics and phrasing, which also coincides with claims of the time about Corelli's ability to express in the violin the most diverse emotions in their fullness, making his instrument "speak" as if it were a human voice.

Among the advances that he promoted in the technique are the more intense exploration of double strings (including figurations in a pedal note), the G string (little used until then), harmonics, arpeggios, and tremolo, of rubato, of staccato, of scordatura, of fast figurations in thirds, of chords of more than two notes and was the main proponent of the bariolage technique. Although Corelli did not write anything about it, the treatises published by Geminiani, Francesco Galeazzi and others influenced by him probably faithfully reflect the master's principles. His performances in various fields related to the violin – virtuoso, teacher and composer – have left an indelible mark on the history of this instrument and have laid the foundations of its modern technique.

It is known that he had many students, among them: Matteo Fornari, Giovanni Battista Somis, Pietro Castrucci, Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli, Francesco Gasparini, Jean-Baptiste Anet, Georg Muffat and Francesco Geminiani.

The conductor
Little is known about his performances as a conductor, except that he successfully played this role for many years at the head of the orchestras of the church of San Luis and the Academy of Drawing Arts and of countless groups formed for specific occasions, such as recitals in the private academies of the aristocracy, civic festivals and diplomatic receptions. The recognition he received was always very generous, and he was praised above all for the great discipline of the musicians he directed, always obtaining vigorous performances, with great precision in the attack of the notes and a powerful overall effect. Geminiani reported that "Corelli felt it was essential that the entire orchestra move the bows at exactly the same time: all up, all down, so that in rehearsals prior to performances, he could stop the music if he saw an out-of-range bow position".

Corelli was of vital importance in the process of transformation of the traditional orchestra. In the previous generation, ensembles were quite small even for opera performances and only on very exceptional occasions were large groups recruited, especially for open-air festivals. The orchestra of San Luigi, for example, did not exceed twenty members, even on prestigious occasions, and most of the time it consisted of about ten or fifteen members.

Thanks to the legacy of ancient polyphonic practices, ensembles made use of various instruments of balanced proportions, grouped in "choirs", each composed of several types of instruments. Corelli's generation began to change this balance of forces towards an increasing predominance of the string section, with an emphasis on the violins, significantly expanding the number of musicians, grouping the instruments into homogeneous sections and separating the singers from the orchestra. . Its spatial arrangement also changed, adopting a distribution that favored the typical language of the Grosso concert, with a small solo ensemble, the concertino, separated from the large ripieno group.

In addition to conducting and being a concertmaster at the same time, Corelli was responsible for recruiting musicians to form occasional orchestras, paid salaries, and performed all the functions of a modern event manager. On some occasions he employed an immense number of musicians, up to 150, far above all the standards of his time. According to Crescimbeni's testimony, "he was the first to introduce ensembles in Rome with such a number of instruments and such diversity that it was almost impossible to believe that he could make them play all together without fear of confusion, especially since he combined wind instruments with strings, and the total very often exceeded one hundred elements." Although the number of musicians varied greatly in each performance, the balance of Corelli's orchestras was constant, with at least half of the musicians playing violins and a quarter occupied with cellos, violons and double basses. The remaining fraction was filled with a varied instrumentation of violas, wind instruments, lutes, theorbos, organs, harpsichords and others, and depended largely on the character of the music of the occasion. His intense activity at different levels in the field of orchestral music dominated the Roman scene and his role as organizer, dynamizer and standard bearer can be compared to that of Jean-Baptiste Lully at the court of Louis XIV. By extension, one could say that all the Roman orchestras between 1660 and 1713 were “Corelli's orchestra."

The composer
Despite the typically Baroque love for the extravagant, the bizarre, the asymmetrical and the dramatic, Corelli's production deviates from this scheme, favoring the classical principles of sobriety, symmetry, rationality, balanced and expressive moderation, as well as formal perfection, appreciated several times by coeval and contemporary critics, formulating an aesthetic that is among the beginners of the neoclassical school of music with considerable economy of means. In the description of the Larousse Encyclopedia of Music, "no doubt others before him showed more originality, but none in his day showed a more noble interest in balance and order, or in formal perfection and meaning. Despite his Bolognese training, he embodies the classical era of Italian music, thanks above all to the Roman tradition. [...] Although he did not invent the forms he used, Corelli gave them a nobility and perfection that make him one of the greatest classicists".

Corelli's works were the result of long and thoughtful planning, and were published only after careful and multiple revisions. His latest collection seems to have taken more than thirty years to complete, and a statement he left in a letter of 1708 attests his insecurity: "After so many and extensive revisions I have rarely felt the confidence to deliver to the public the few compositions that I sent it to the press". Such a rigorous, rationally and organized method, and such a strong yearning for ideal perfection, are other characteristics that make him a classic in opposition to the wild, asymmetrical, irregular and improvisational spirit of the most typical Baroque. For Franco Piperno, "his printed work has an exceptionally well-kept and cohesive structure, deliberately designed to be didactic, modeling and monumental. It is no coincidence that one of the figures on the title page of his Opera Terza is written "to posterity", that is, as posterity would see him: as an authority on composition, execution and pedagogy, a source of full of potential ideas". He was rigid also in the choice of genres to deal with: the trio sonata, the sonata for solo instrument and the concerto grosso. All his production is for strings, with continuo accompaniment, which could be performed by a variable combination of organ, harpsichord, lutes or theorbos. He left no works for voice, but his compositions reveal a strong influence of vocal music in their expressiveness, as well as in the treatment of polyphony.

In his time, the circle of fifths established itself as the main driver of chord progressions and, according to Richard Taruskin, Corelli practiced, more than anyone of his generation, new concepts with expressive, dynamic and structural purposes, which was fundamental for the sedimentation of the tonal system. Manfred Bukofzer, likewise, states that "Arcangelo Corelli deserves credit for the full realization of tonality in the field of instrumental music. His works happily usher in the late Baroque period. [...] Although closely linked to counterpoint tradition of the ancient Bolognese school, Corelli handled the new language with impressive confidence. On the other hand, chromatisms are rare in his music, but dissonances are relatively common and used as an expressive element, although they are always well prepared and well resolved. Critics have also highlighted the harmonious and balanced integration between polyphonic and homophonic elements, with polyphony which unfolds freely within a tonal structure. In his work there is an abundance of polyphonic expressive forms, the fugati, simple counterpoints and imitative writings, with themes that are repeated in succession by the various voices alternately, usually also called fugues, but in his style authentic fugues are rare, as his development differs from conventional models because of form, exhibiting a wide variety of solutions. According to Pincherle, one of the most significant aspects of Corelli's genius lies in the coordinated movement of these voices that intertwine, avoid each other and find themselves in such a way as to develop ever-changing motifs, establishing a unity through the motivic kinship of the different movements, a method which Fausto Torrefranca compared to the creation of "a frieze that runs along the walls and facades of a temple".

Among his influences are mainly the masters of the Bolognese school, such as Giovanni Benvenuti (violinist), Leonardo Brugnoli and Giovanni Battista Bassani. Also evident is the influence of Jean-Baptiste Lully, attested by Francesco Geminiani, as well as by the Venetian school, in particular Francesco Cavalli, Antonio Cesti and Giovanni Legrenzi. George J. Buelow, further, attests that the influence of Palestrina on the development of the polyphonic style of his music has been largely ignored, an influence received mainly through his teacher Simonelli, who was a singer of the Sistine Chapel, where Palestrina's work was one of the highlights of the repertoire.

Corelli's style has long been praised as paradigmatic for its clarity and its sober and expressive melodism, the quintessence of Arcadian good taste. Georg Friedrich Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, François Couperin, Giuseppe Torelli, Georg Muffat, Georg Philipp Telemann, Giuseppe Valentini, Benedetto Marcello, Pietro Locatelli, Giuseppe Sammartini, Francesco Geminiani and countless other musicians were inspired by the Corellian model in producing their orchestral music. In Rome its influence was so overwhelming that no composer of the next generation could completely avoid it. Along with Torelli and Vivaldi, Corelli was one of the key figures in establishing the concerto as a genre whose popularity still persists today. One American admirer was President Thomas Jefferson who regularly played the violin, and cataloged four of Corelli's sonatas in the library at Monticello.

An 1827 music dictionary still echoed what Burney had said more than thirty years earlier: "Corelli's concerts have withstood all the onslaught of time and fashion, more firmly than his other works. Harmony is so pure, the parts so clearly, judiciously and ingeniously arranged, and the overall effect, played by a large orchestra, is so majestic, solemn and sublime, that they disarm any criticism and make one forget everything that has ever been composed in the same genre". In the opinion of Michael Talbot, writing for The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto, it is difficult to explain the enduring popularity of this collection, considering the semplicity not the cause of its popularity, but only a precondition. He continues stating:

"Corelli's genius lies rather in his ability to create satisfying forms without resorting to fixed formulas, in his ability to combine contrasting ideas [...], in his original inventiveness for atmospheres, and in his moments – more numerous than expected – of harmonic audacity. Among the unforgettable passages of the Concerti grossi are the poignant suspensions and enchanting octave doublings in the second adagio of the fourth concert and the magical change of key from minor to major at the beginning of the Pastorale that concludes the eighth concerto, an optional movement that was composed to be performed on Christmas Eve."

Corelli composed 48 trio sonatas, 12 violin and continuo sonatas, and 12 concerti grossi.

Six sets of twelve compositions, published between 1888 and 1891 by Chrysander, are authentically ascribed to Corelli, together with a few other works.
 * Opus 1: 12 sonate da chiesa (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1681)
 * Opus 2: 12 sonate da camera (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1685)
 * Opus 3: 12 sonate da chiesa (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1689)
 * Opus 4: 12 sonate da camera (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1694)
 * Opus 5: 12 Suonati a violino e violone o cimbalo (6 sonate da chiesa and 6 sonate da camera for violin and continuo) (Rome 1700) The last sonata is a set of variations on La Folia.
 * Opus 6: 12 concerti grossi (8 concerti da chiesa and 4 concerti da camera for concertino of 2 violins and cello, string ripieno, and continuo) (written in the 1680s, publ. Amsterdam 1714)
 * op. post.: Sinfonia in D minor, WoO 1 (for Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier's Oratorium Santa Beatrice d’Este 1689)
 * op. post.: Sonata a Quattro, WoO 2 (Rogers, Amsterdam, 1699)
 * op. post.: Sonata a Quattro, WoO 3 (Rogers, Amsterdam, 1699 – incomplete/dubious)
 * op. post.: Sonata a Quattro for Trumpet, 2 Violins & B.C, WoO 4
 * op. post.: 6 Sonate a tre, WoO 5–10 (Amsterdam 1714)

Legacy
His concerti grossi have often been popular in Western culture. For example, a portion of the Christmas Concerto, Op. 6 No. 8, is in the soundtrack of the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and Corelli's Op. 6 No. 2 also provided the theme for Sir Michael Tippett's Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli. British composer E. Florence Whitlock composed Variations on a Theme by Corelli for violin in 1968.

title: Arcangelo Corelli


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East Slavs

The East Slavs are the most populous subgroup of the Slavs. They speak the East Slavic languages, and formed the majority of the population of the medieval state Kievan Rus', which they claim as their cultural ancestor. Today Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians are the existent East Slavic nations. Rusyns can also be considered as a separate nation, although they are often considered a subgroup of the Ukrainian people.

Migration
There is no consensus among scholars as to the urheimat of the Slavs. In the first millennium AD, Slavic settlers are likely to have been in contact with other ethnic groups who moved across the Eastern European Plain during the Migration Period. Between the first and ninth centuries, the Sarmatians, Huns, Alans, Avars, Bulgars, and Magyars passed through the Pontic steppe in their westward migrations. Although some of them could have subjugated the region's Slavs, these foreign tribes left little trace in the Slavic lands. The Early Middle Ages also saw Slavic expansion as an agriculturist and beekeeper, hunter, fisher, herder, and trapper people. By the 8th century, the Slavs were the dominant ethnic group on the East European Plain.

By 600 AD, the Slavs had split linguistically into southern, western, and eastern branches. The East Slavs practiced "slash-and-burn" agricultural methods which took advantage of the extensive forests in which they settled. This method of agriculture involved clearing tracts of forest with fire, cultivating it and then moving on after a few years. Slash and burn agriculture requires frequent movement because soil cultivated in this manner only yields good harvests for a few years before exhausting itself, and the reliance on slash and burn agriculture by the East Slavs explains their rapid spread through eastern Europe. The East Slavs flooded Eastern Europe in two streams. One group of tribes settled along the Dnieper river in what is now Ukraine and Belarus to the North; they then spread northward to the northern Volga valley, east of modern-day Moscow and westward to the basins of the northern Dniester and the Southern Buh rivers in present-day Ukraine and southern Ukraine.

Another group of East Slavs moved to the northeast, where they encountered the Varangians of the Rus' Khaganate and established an important regional centre of Novgorod for protection. The same Slavic population also settled the present-day Tver Oblast and the region of Beloozero. Having reached the lands of the Merya near Rostov, they linked up with the Dnieper group of Slavic migrants.

Pre-Kievan period
According to archeology, the Prague, Korchak, Penkova, Kolochin, and Kyiv cultures are classified as early Slavic. The earliest of which, Kyiv, from the 2nd–3rd centuries AD. e. was the northern neighbor of the more developed and multi-ethnic Chernyakhov culture, associated with West Slavs (Great Moravia). Rare, few and short-lived settlements of the Slavs were located "in unusual topographic conditions: in low places, often now flooded during floods".

Eastern Slavs, who found themselves as a result of migrations of the 4th–5th centuries. in the basins of lakes Chudskoye and Ilmen, formed the culture of Pskov long barrows. This culture was strongly influenced by the autochthonous Finno-Ugric and Baltic peoples, from whom it adopted a specific burial rite and some features of ceramics, but in general, the way of life of the Eastern Slavs changed little. By the 5th century on the site of the Kyiv culture and in other regions to the north, east, west and south of it, a number of related cultures arise, such as Korchak, Kolochin, etc.

Among the East Slavs, fortified cities, apparently, first appeared among the Ilmen Slovenes in the 5th century (based on archaeological data in the town on Mayat river). The first settlements near the Polans and Severians arose in the region of Kyiv and Chernigov already by the 7th–8th centuries, which indicates at least a partial rejection of the previous strategy of scattered and secretive living among the forests. This is also evidenced by the fact that in the VIII-IX centuries. in all other East Slavic lands there were no more than two dozen cities, while only on the Left Bank of the Dnieper there were about a hundred of them. The foundation of the main Slavic city of this region, Novgorod, is attributed by the letopis to 862. In the same era, settlements appeared on the territories of other East Slavic tribes (see Old Russian cities). So, the northerners who lived on the territory of modern Voronezh, Belgorod and Kursk regions, along with settlements in the 9th–10th centuries. built fortified settlements, mainly at the confluence of large rivers (see Romensko-Borshchiv culture). In the 10th century, a fortress appeared not far from the city of Smolensk that arose later (the Gnezdovsky archaeological complex).

Somewhat apart are the early East Slavic settlements, the creation of which is attributed to the tribal unions of Dulebs and Antes. Archaeologically, they are represented by the Prague-Korchak and Penkov cultures, respectively. A number of such settlements of the Prague-Korchak (Zimino, Lezhnitsa, Khotomel, Babka, Khilchitsy, Tusheml) and Penkovo (Selishte, Pastyrskoe) cultures existed in the 6th–7th centuries. on a vast territory from the borders of modern Poland and Romania to the Dnieper. The Prague-Korchak settlements were a site surrounded by a wooden wall with one building, which was part of the common wall of the settlement. They did not have agricultural tools, and the settlements, apparently, were built to collect and accommodate a military detachment. Penkovsky settlements could have up to two dozen buildings inside the walls and were large trade, craft and administrative centers for their time. The center of the territory controlled by the dulebs (Zimino, Lezhnitsa) was in the basin of the Western Bug; the geographical center of the Penkovo culture falls on the Dnieper region, but the main fortress of the Antes (Selishte) was located in the western part of this area, near the borders of Byzantine Empire (in modern Moldova), on which they made military campaigns. The early Slavic settlements were destroyed by the Avars in the 7th century, after which they were not built until the 10th century.

Post-Kievan period
The disintegration, or parcelling of the polity of Kievan Rus' in the 11th century resulted in considerable population shifts and a political, social, and economic regrouping. The resultant effect of these forces coalescing was the marked emergence of new peoples. While these processes began long before the fall of Kiev, its fall expedited these gradual developments into a significant linguistic and ethnic differentiation among the Rus' people into Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians. All of this was emphasized by the subsequent polities these groups migrated into: southwestern and western Rus', where the Ruthenian and later Ukrainian and Belarusian identities developed, was subject to Lithuanian and later Polish influence; whereas the Russian ethnic identity developed in the Muscovite northeast and the Novgorodian north.

Modern East Slavs
Modern East Slavic peoples and ethnic/subethnic groups include:
 * Belarusians
 * Litvins
 * Cossacks
 * Zaporozhian Cossacks
 * Tavria Zaporozhians
 * Black Sea Zaporozhians
 * Podlashuks
 * Poleshuks
 * Russians
 * Albazinians
 * Doukhobors
 * Goryuns
 * Kamchadals
 * Kamenschiks
 * Lipovans
 * Polekhs
 * Pomors
 * Semeiskie
 * Siberians
 * Starozhily
 * Rusyns
 * Boyko
 * Hutsuls
 * Lemkos
 * Pannonian Rusyns
 * Ukrainians
 * Cossacks
 * Galicians
 * Podolyans
 * Slobozhanians
 * Zaporozhian Cossacks

Genetics
According to Y chromosome, mDNA and autosomal marker CCR5de132, East Slavs and West Slavs are genetically very similar, which is consistent with the proximity of their languages, demonstrating significant differences from the neighboring Finno-Ugric, Turkic and North Caucasian peoples all the way from west to east; such genetic homogeneity is somewhat unusual for genetics given such a wide dispersal of Slavic populations, especially Russians. Together they form the basis of the "East European" gene cluster, which also includes Balts, some Balkan peoples. Genetic research has shown that the genomes of East Slavs are homogenous and contrary to popular belief, unaffected by Turkic or Mongol influences.

Only the Northern Russians among the East and West Slavs belong to a different, "Northern European" genetic cluster, along with the Balts, Germanic and Baltic Finnic peoples (Northern Russian populations are very similar to the Balts).

title: East Slavs