The Music of Chopin

Humanity is confronted with an alarming number of environmental problems that seem to grow worse by the day. We hear a steady stream of news reports about climate change, water shortages, and rampant deforestation. We learn of toxic chemicals in our food supply and garbage filling our oceans, and wonder: Why do these problems persist, and what can be done to set society on a more sustainable course?In Who Rules the Earth?, Paul F. Steinberg, one of America's leading scholars on the politics of environmentalism, explains that there is room for hope, and draws from the latest social science research to explain why. Green consumer choices and changes in personal lifestyles are important, but they are not nearly enough. Lasting social change requires modifying the very rules that guide human behavior and shape the ways we interact with the Earth. We know these rules by familiar names likecity ordinances, product design standards, purchasing agreements, public policies, cultural norms, or national constitutions. Though these rules are largely invisible to us, their impact across the world has been dramatic. By changing the rules, the Canadian province of Ontario cut the levels ofpesticides in its waterways in half. The city of Copenhagen has adopted new planning codes that will reduce its carbon footprint to zero by 2025. In the United States, a handful of industry mavericks designed new rules to promote greener buildings, and transformed the world's largest industry into a more sustainable enterprise.Steinberg takes the reader on a series of journeys, from a familiar walk on the beach to a remote village deep in the jungles of Peru, helping the reader to 'see' the social rules that pattern our physical reality and showing why these are the big levers that will ultimately determine the health of our planet. By unveiling the influence of social rules at all levels of society-from private property to government policy, and from the rules governing our oceans to the dynamics of innovation andchange within corporations and communities, Who Rules the Earth? will be essential reading for anyone interested in bringing about real environmental change.The lasting popularity of Chopin's music has reached `from salon to slum'. He captured and expressed the spirit of the age of Romanticism, its ardour and idealism, its longing and restlessness, its love of spontaneity, with an authority his contemporaries immediately recognized and which successive generations have admired and loved. Much of the Chopin literature in English is biographical, but this book is a critical study of the music itself and of the creativeprocess which is central to the life of any composer.Professor Jim Samson provides a detailed analysis of the style and structure of the music in the light of recent Chopin scholarship on the one hand and recent analytical methods on the other. The early chapters deal mainly with the sources and the characteristic profile of Chopin's musical style, relating his music to a wider context in social and stylistic history. Later chapters look rather at the structure of his music and how it functions, with many examples highlighting thediscussion.