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Cobb’s New Creating Community Awards – Recipients Named

Marietta, Georgia – January 26, 2011 – The Cobb Community Relations Council is pleased to announce the first ever Creating Community Awards.  The award program is promotes positive relations and inclusion for all Cobb County.  The criteria for the awards include:  the nominee has fostered community cooperation and has demonstrated vision and innovative solutions in connecting diverse communities.

Each Commissioner received nominations from his or her district and one recipient from that district was chosen.  They are:  District One – Intellectual Diversity Club (Marietta Middle School), District Two – Georgia Ballet, District Three – Temple Kol Emeth, District Four – Zion Baptist/Cobb Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Dr. Oral Moses.

The four recipients will receive their awards from the Commissioners at the Creating Community Awards Dinner March 18 at The Ford Center in Powder Springs.  Rob Garcia, Bank of North Georgia, will emcee and Bill Bolling, Founder of Atlanta Community Food Bank, is the guest speaker.

For ticket information, contact Ellen Spiceland, 770-618-5125 or for more information go to ccrc.cobbcountyga.gov.

Contact:

Patty Smitherman
psmitherman@mindspring.com
989 Forest Pond Court
Marietta, GA 30068
678-640-679

Atlanta Journal Constitution Again Takes Notice of CSO

By Pierre Ruhe, For the AJC

A lot of classical concerts fall prey to the masterpiece syndrome: line up two or three great pieces, play them one after the other, and you’ve got an easy — some might suggest foolproof — hit parade.

Yet this season, the Cobb Symphony Orchestra is asking its audience to consider the broader implications of everything it hears, with the hope that a few provocative ideas are thrown into the mix. CSO music director Michael Alexander described the thematic programming as simplicity itself: “We take diverse things and put them together.” If it works as hoped, these will lead to unexpected consequences.

Perhaps the strangest bedfellows will be heard March 5 at the First United Methodist Church of Marietta for a work called “The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass.” The composer is Carol Barnett, with a small but serious reputation in the choral community, especially in Minnesota, where she’s a small-college professor.

It’s a hybrid Mass, sung in English, which premiered in 2006 and is scored for chorus and a kind of five-piece Hillbilly Philharmonic consisting of fiddle, guitar, upright bass, mandolin and banjo. After the premiere, some of the performers commented that the classically straightlaced choir was pushed into a folk idiom while the veteran bluegrass band Monroe Crossing was asked to sit up straight and play the correct notes on the charts.

The theology might raise conservative eyebrows. Marisha Chamberlain’s libretto, incorporating elements of the Latin Mass with Appalachian tunes and ballads, has an inventive “Gloria” section praising God “for feather, fur, for scale and fin.” The work begins with a male God and, across the Mass’ 45 minutes, ends with “They say God loved the world so dear, She set aside Her crown.”

Yet by all accounts, the cultural and musical mash-up was a sterling success.

Bryan Black, the Cobb Symphony’s choral director, had heard of “The World Beloved” and its budding popularity. He brought it to music director Alexander’s attention when the season was being planned. “Our chorus is loving it,” Alexander said.

Although the Mass is getting some play around the country, most groups hire just a pianist to accompany the choir. “We’ve got a proper bluegrass band,” the conductor said, “but that’s been the trickiest part, to find top-notch bluegrass musicians who can also read music!” (For the premiere, the members of Monroe Crossing, who don’t read music, learned the part by rote from MIDI computer sound files.)

Thus a CSO section violinist, Heather Hart, will take the fiddle role and CSO principal bassist Bob Goin will thump the bass line. The virtuosic banjo part, the glue that binds the Mass together, has been the trickiest part to cast, and the slot still had not been filled.

The full 70-member CSO will perform a more traditional pairing — major symphonies by two Russian titans –  one week later, March 12 and 13, at Kennesaw State University’s acoustically splendid Bailey Center.

Yet the two works on the program still meet the diversity criteria for the season: Dmitri Shostakovich’s brash and electrified Symphony No. 1 and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s lush, panoramic Symphony No. 2.

“The Shostakovich is the hardest thing we’ll play all year, flat out,” Alexander said. “As the textures get thinner, you can hear the individual strengths within our orchestra. It will help us grow.”

Shostakovich’s First Symphony, his graduation exam from the Leningrad Conservatory in 1925, is jittery, sharp-edged, urban, “new” and impetuous — in a way that reveals a 19-year-old genius at the start of a towering career. It contains none of the emotional anxiety and encrypted layers of meaning that scar the composer’s style after his encounters with Soviet dictator Stalin, who controlled the arts with the same iron grip he used in politics and the military.

Compared to the jazz-age freshness of Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff sounds like the dying last vestige of the old 19th century aesthetic. But what a 1907 sound: those endless melodies that are among the most gorgeous in the repertoire, those expansive vistas that are breathtaking, the Adagio so hummable it could be a hit on the pop charts.

Pairing these Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff symphonies, Alexander said, “is a look into how music split apart in the early 20th century, going into modernism versus trying to hang onto what was really beautiful just a little while longer.”

Pierre Ruhe is classical music critic of www.ArtsCriticATL.com

Concert Previews:

The Cobb Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Chorus

Carol Barnett’s “The World Beloved: a Bluegrass Mass.” 8 p.m. March 5, $8-$10. 56 Whitlock Ave., Marietta.

“Russian Giants.” 8 p.m. March 12 and 3 p.m. March 13. $10-$15. Bailey Center, 1000 Chastain Road on the Kennesaw State University campus. www.cobbsymphony.org

An Open Letter  To The CSO Community

Dear Cobb Symphony Family,

For six years I have prided myself on sharing good news about what is happening with the Cobb Symphony to anyone who would listen. To name a few things that this organization has accomplished in such a short time is hard to do. The list goes on and on; the largest youth orchestra program in the southeast from scratch, fully functioning chorus and jazz programs from scratch, and an orchestra that pushes the limits of what is possible, sets a high bar for collaboration, and produces an artistic product that the community can point to with pride. Not to mention erasing an enormous debt, creating an endowment fund, astronomical growth in ticket sales, a private lesson program, never turning a student away from any program for financial reasons, outreach to underserved communities, and countless connections to school music programs. Like all other arts groups in these difficult economic times, we have tightened our belts and become one of the most efficient non-profits in existence with close to 90% of our income being earned. Our staff and board have committed beyond any reasonable measure to keep a vital, professional, musical presence in our community that educates, builds community relations, and presents great art that sparks dialogue and thought and explains that which is not possible to put into words.

Where have we failed? Frankly, we have been far too humble. So humble, that we have done a very poor job of showing the community at large what has been built. This is not a small fault and one that I must take a large part of the blame for. I insist constantly that we do what we do for the love of our art and for what it does to make the community a better place. We have been so focused on this that we do not take enough time to “toot our own horn” and ask the community to buy in to this tremendous resource that has been placed at its doorstep. According to the League of American Orchestras we have programs equivalent to orchestras with a budget about six times our size. This is something the community should know about and support financially. We have built this without asking for any community resources, we have only provided resources for the community.

Why do I tell you this now? Because, we are at a critical juncture as an organization. We need your help now to sustain what has been built. At the very least, we need you to take part in the Noteworthy 5k on February 26. Come show the community how many people are positively affected by our programs. Bring neighbors and friends. I cannot think of a better way for us to become less humble, than by creating an event that is purely an outward expression of joy about the positive things the arts produce in a community. Join us and make the CSO part of your experience.

Michael Alexander
Music Director
Cobb Symphony Orchestra

I’m cheating today, and posting a link to an amazing article I found over on Poynter.org, a Journalism website.

Chris Lavin expertly articulates some of the problems with music journalism.  We need to expand the way we present music, and he hits the proverbial nail on the head.

Why Arts Coverage Should Be More Like Sports (don’t be turned off by the title!)

The reputation of the Cobb Symphony Orchestra continues to grow.  Thank you, Pierre Rhue, for keeping an eye on us and providing this objective assessment.  More to come!

The following was originally posted at ArtsCriticATL.com.

Classical Music

Review: Cobb Symphony delivers sparkling Ravel and an engaging world premiere

The Cobb Symphony had been in the business of playing the old-time classics for 60 years. But orchestras that perpetually take from the repertoire and never give anything back are no longer living in today’s arts community. They have stagnated into something akin to “heritage tourism,” closer in spirit to a Civil War reenactment or a Renaissance fair than to a vibrant arts scene. Indeed, a lack of new repertoire — one that energizes and connects with a broader audience — is what had been steering the whole classical-music industry off a cliff.

Cobb Symphony music director Michael Alexander and his organization, like many groups across the country, have realized this in the nick of time. One year ago, the CSO commissioned a local composer to write a piece of music, the orchestra’s first-ever commission. The concert was sold out, and they earned as much applause for a fine performance as congratulations for doing what is essential for the health of their art.

Eric Alexander at work composing, with trombone at the ready.

It wasn’t a fluke. Saturday night at the Murray Arts Center in Kennesaw, an exurb north of Atlanta, the CSO gave the world premiere of “Autumn Moonlight,” music they commissioned from Eric Alexander, 51, a composer and trombonist in the orchestra. No relation to the conductor, Eric Alexander was a funny guy with a microphone, introducing his work with a few jokes: “Hearing a composer talk about his composition is as boring as hearing a plumber talk about plumbing.” He placed himself in the “pop-jazz world,” and his program bio lists theater and musicals to his credit, along with backing gigs for Tony Bennett, Dr. John, Al Jarreau and Barry Manilow. For his five-song cycle, for soprano and orchestra, Alexander found inspiration, and poetry, from a collection of children’s verse.

The moon shone prominently in every poem. The first “song” was a setting of five short poems strung together like beads, including haiku from Japanese master Matsuo Basho and a once-controversial poem attributed to Hilda Conkling. The composer started with a bright, exotic, inventive soundscape: a combination of harp and flute and the highest registers of the piano evoking Japanese music, anchored by harmonies familiar from Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.”

Elsewhere Alexander tapped more conventional sounds, at once optimistic (in a New Deal or 1950s way) and familiar, which bathed the whole cycle in a retro-Americana nostalgia. That imaginary era is called “the good old days.” It’s the same basic soundworld appropriated by the Atlanta Symphony’s “Atlanta School” of composers, which has achieved remarkable success winning over local audiences and thus connecting with a living art.

To the listener — whether the composers intend it or not — this style of composition carries social and political baggage. For segments of our society that feel culturally embattled today, this style offers a return to the “comforting” era right before musical composition, or our nation, slipped off the rails and into social and political upheavals of the 1960s. (Is retro-Copland thus “red state” music? Is that too literal a reading?)

Throughout, Alexander’s text setting was clear and mostly one syllable to a note, which made the occasional melisma seem startling. Bits of scene painting carried us along, with a trombone “moo” at the mention of cows in the setting of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon,” or a gentle waltz when asked “Do you dance, Minnaloushe?” in W. B. Yeats’ “The Cat and the Moon.”

The cycle was written for Nila Alexander, the composer’s wife, a former early-music opera singer and now a choir director in Kennesaw. The vocal writing in “Autumn Moonlight” was not for an operatic voice, but for a trained soprano. In all, the song cycle reminded me in parts of Barber’s beloved “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” with its relaxed, singing-on-the-porch-after-supper delivery. Elsewhere, bits that would fit in James Horner’s “Titanic” soundtrack puffed up an otherwise down-to-earth and affectionate song cycle. The performance, not ideal, conveyed the music’s essence.

For this concert, the CSO was scaled down to its 21 core members. Conductor Michael Alexander sported a black silk Chinese formal jacket — a memento from his recent travels — and began with Richard Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll,” a birthday present to his wife, Cosima. (Imagine being married that monster? Now you can read about it every day: Cosima’s diary is on Twitter, with entries corresponding to the correct date.) The wind playing was scrappy and the intonation from the violins and violas poor, making the mostly-professional CSO sounds like an enthusiastic community orchestra. Alexander conducted this poignantly beautiful music at the surface, moment by moment, without lyricism and without shape or depth.

Harpist Julie Albertson

Associate conductor Grant Harville took charge for Ravel’s “Introduction and Allegro,” for harp, flute, clarinet and string quartet. With harpist Julie Albertson leading the way, the small group had no technical problems, and the music shimmered exquisitely, thoroughly bewitching.

I had met the café owner the day prior in a dingy little bar, on the first day of our vacation.  The proverbial hole-in-the-wall, I had deigned to spend a little time there upon being confronted with the most confounding of temporal conundrums: too much time to do nothing before dinner, not enough time to do something before dinner.

Overhearing my family’s mentions of Wisconsin, the café owner introduced himself.  A native Wisconsinite, it seemed.

What are the odds of meeting someone from Wisconsin in a bar?

In the spirit of affability, the conversation continued, taking shape and converging on various other subjects before settling on my band.

Curiously yet kindly, the café owner asked to purchase a copy of my CD.  I thankfully obliged, and therefore felt inclined to partake in his invitation for breakfast the next morning at his small establishment.

Such were the circumstances that led me to the tiny hillside joint, a small shack that served up a considerably above-average breakfast.  Spying us, the owner came by and inquired as to our satisfaction with the meal.

We rightly praised the food.  “And what did you think of the album?” we responded in turn.  “Did you have a chance to listen to it yet?”

“Yes,” the café owner said, smiling.  “I really enjoyed it.”

We all smiled.

“It reminded me,” he continued, “It reminded me a bit of Spyro Gyra.  Yeah, there was a bit of Spyro Gyra in there, it seemed to me.”

I stumbled out some answer, a friendly inanity along the lines of “Well, people hear different things when they listen to music, I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

I wasn’t hurt.  I wasn’t even offended – Spyro Gyra has made a lot more money than I ever will, and some of their stuff is decent.  I was just…

Confused.  My band is a New Orleans style brass band.  It sounds like… a New Orleans style brass band.  That’s the first connection that should be made.  Are there influences from other genres?  Yes.  But it’s a brass band first.

The remainder of the vacation had me thinking about how little we really know about music, collectively.  I wrote HERE about how people grasp at straws when trying to describe music.  It’s hard to talk about something you can’t see.

But why not use the tools of description that are at your disposal?  Why not be familiar enough with free jazz to recognize it?  With New Orleans brass band music?  With rock, pop, zydeco, bluegrass, ska, reggae, punk?

Most pertinent: why not know the difference between medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic, atonal, aleatoric, minimalist art music?  Instead, it all gets lumped into “classical” music.

It’s not all “classical.”  All fish swim but not all things that swim are fish.  A seal is not a fish.  Describing Bach as a composer of classical music is like describing a seal as a type of fish.

There is a striking illiteracy when it comes to genre identification, and it’s hindering art music’s reputation.  The sad thing is, we have been promoting it, as a “classical” music community.  “Classical” musicians use the proper genre identification around their brethren, but once they are thrust into the real world, that largely stops.

Consider the following:

“Hey, what was that classical piece used in the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey?”

“Also Sprach Zarathustra.  But it wasn’t classical, it was late Romantic, maybe early modern.  Not classical.  The classical period lasted from the 1750’s to around 1830 and – ”

“Way to be a snob.  You classical music guys are all the same, a bunch of know-it-alls.  I’m never going to another symphony concert again.”

Is this what we, as art musicians, are afraid of doing?  Why are we afraid of correctly identifying genres in the public sphere?  Public genre fluency will never get better until will do.  Reggae bands don’t talk down to the public and describe themselves as rock bands; why should we perpetuate the myth that all art music is simply “classical”?

Consider the radio.  There’s a country station, a classic rock station, a pop station.  The options are even greater on satellite radio.  There are so many nuances, and yet there’s also the art music catch-all: the “classical” station.

Don’t tune in expecting a steady diet of Stamitz, Mozart, and Haydn.  You’ll hear everything, from Gregorian chant (around Christmas, especially) to Phrygian Gates.

Even Wikipedia’s in on the act.  Type in “classical music,” and the first page you come to is not the genre period’s but rather the page for western art music.

To be fair, critics, program note writers, and symphonies try to fight the good fight.  When in their own arena, these entities will proudly label Composer X and Composition Y as Romantic, Baroque, etc.  If only we – myself included – could carry that rigorous dedication out into our public lives.

Do you have any idea how hard it would be to decide which film to go see if it everything you read about it just said “MOVIE”?  If the terms comedy, horror, drama, romance, science-ficition, dark comedy, fantasy/comedy mashup weren’t in our cultural lexicon?  What if there were no trailers?  Would you have any idea whether or not you liked anything showing at the theater?

Simply put, over-simplification in describing “classical” music is hurting art music’s business.  The umbrella term “classical” obscures how different and varied art music can be.

I also posit that audiences, at their core, want to know what they’re purchasing.  The more musical genres we can educate them on, the more likely they are to know what they’re spending $65.00 to go see.

I encourage anyone reading this to ardently familiarize themselves with different genres.  Look up acid jazz, music of the counter-reformation, and death metal.  Be able to describe things the way that they truly are.

Familiarity breeds affinity.  Let’s create some familiarity with the public on what types of art music are out there.

The week of Thanksgiving saw the Cutchin family in New Orleans.  I had prepared a checklist of live music – mostly jazz – for us to see, and I relished the opportunity to catch the world’s cutting-edge performers in their element.  The oft-used cliché comparing New Orleans to a gumbo is true; cultural influences blend together and create a roux unlike anything else on earth.

Hurricane Katrina didn’t just displace NOLA citizens, it displaced jazz as well, though the latter stayed within the town’s borders.  With a handful of exceptions, you won’t hear jazz on Bourbon Street.  In 2011, you need to get out of the French Quarter.  Take a trip to Frenchman Street, the Lower Wards, or the Treme neighborhood.

Or Midtown.  The Cutchins arrived in the city, ate dinner, and headed straight to Bullet’s Sports Bar, a hole-in-the-wall where Kermit Ruffins & the Barbecue Swingers perform every Tuesday night.

Before entering Bullet’s, I was aware of Kermit’s reputation.  What I didn’t know, however, is that I would emerge feeling as though I had seen the future of New Orleans jazz, a synthesis of older styles and newer sounds, effortlessly blending Dixieland with funk and hip-hop.  I didn’t know I would feel that Kermit was the heir-apparent to Louis Armstrong.

But he is.  And his show was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.

Crossing Bullet’s threshold on a show night is shocking.  Everything is bathed in red light.  To your immediate right is Kermit, wailing away on trumpet so close that you have to step around the band.  If he’s in between songs and it’s November, your entrance is likely to solicit his smile and greeting, “It must be Thanksgiving, ‘cause a turkey just walked through the door.”  Wave and proceed to the bar – you’ll be laughing at someone in the exact same position soon enough.

Within minutes of entering, we knew that we’d stumbled upon something incredibly special.  Our second round of drinks sparked a conversation with a gentleman who went to school with Kermit, and was thrilled we’d discovered his buddy’s joint.  The conversation quickly evolved into a dance lesson, punctuated by laughter.

Everyone knows Kermit at Bullet’s, it seems, and that speaks less to the makeup of the audience and more to the fact that Kermit is a new breed of performer: completely approachable and humble.

There were more amazing moments that night than there are to recount here – our cocktail waitress taking the stage to sing freestyle hip-hop, a bass player who ranks among the top five I’ve ever heard, homemade BBQ smoking on grills outside.  By the time someone brought in dessert on trays just before Kermit finished playing, I realized what we had really discovered: a family.

I also realized that I was staring at the solution to so many of the problems we face in the 21^st century: racism, crime, and disconnectedness stemming from our technology-centered lives.

At Bullet’s, different races mix together for the same reasons.  They come to hear good live music, have fun, and – most importantly – share the experience with one another.  Walking into all this as an outsider, my sense of being out-of-place quickly changed to one of safety and welcome.

I promise all of these things are not drenched in hyperbole.  This is the absolute truth.

Anyone reading this should look up Kermit Ruffins and give his music a listen (the album Livin’ a Treme Life is particularly outstanding).  You’ll get a slice of what I experienced this week, I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

I credit my love of classical music to the aural landscape of my childhood.  My family was a family of cinephiles, and the first music I ever heard was most likely a movie soundtrack.

Soundtracks continue to remain an arena in which orchestral music thrives.  Film scores and their composers have popped up in this blog before, but here are several of my favorites.

Lord of the Rings – While it’s an obvious choice for this list, composer Howard Shore really outdid himself in scoring the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Simply everything about the score is epic, with sweeping Wagnerian leitmotivs that recur time and again, often utilized just as Wagner would, providing insight into character’s thoughts and motivations.  Moreover, the instrumentation is amazingly quirky and unorthodox, employing instruments such as the cimbalom (a type of dulcimer, employed in “Gollum’s Theme”) and the hardingfele (a Norwegian fiddle, used to great effect in the “The Rohan Fanfare”).

Signs – Much of James Newton Howard’s score to Signs plays like “Minimalism with ADD”, but it’s so perfect for M. Knight Shyamalan’s 2002 alien invasion pic that it makes this list too… if for no other reason than the fact that it’s heinously under-loved.  The incessant recurring ostinato is some of the most chilling horror movie music ever composed, and is nigh-impossible to listen to alone.  What I find especially fascinating about the score is how it illustrates how different styles are perfect for different films.  Signs is far too intimate for a Wagnerian approach, so J.N.H. channeled a little bit of Terry Riley instead.  The end result is a score that threatens to jar your nerves until the last minute, when the music’s character changes dramatically in conjunction with the protagonist’s newfound faith.  The result is one of the most cathartic moments ever heard in a soundtrack.

The Name of the Rose - The Name of the Rose, scored by James Horner, is a 1986 adaptation of Umberto Eco’s eponymous novel.  Horner drew upon the plot – featuring a monk (Sean Connery) investigating murders in a medieval abbey – to provide inspiration for the  (also) underrated soundtrack, and the end result is truly haunting.  The score combines medieval music theory (modes, perfect intervals, etc.) with synthesizers.  I actually wrote part of my Master’s document on the score, and the conclusion I came to was that Horner was representing Connery’s character through the music.  The monk, religious and but not superstitious, employs highly empirical deductive methods to solve the murder: he is a man with one foot in the past and one foot in the future, a contradiction.  The marriage of medieval chant and synthesizers is a similar contradiction.

The Twilight Zone – Yeah, I know, I’m cheating: the original The Twilight Zone was a TV series.  But what a pedigree it had!  Bernard Herrmann – the laudable composer of the great Hitchcock soundtracks and Citizen Kane – worked on much of the first season, while Marius Constant, Nathan van Cleave, and Rene Garriguenc filled out the roster in later seasons.  One of the outstanding compositions of the original run were the “Jazz Themes” written by Garriguenc and Jerry Goldsmith (another outstanding film composer).  The duo tapped into what Gunther Schuller coined in 1957 “Third Stream” music – a hybrid of classical and jazz.  The “Jazz Themes” of The Twilight Zone sound like they could have come from the pen of Schuller himself, or even Stravinsky, and would be at home in both the night club and the concert stage.

First Cobb Symphony Award goes to Kennesaw choreographer

The Cobb Symphony Orchestra presented its first Award for Artistic Excellence on Saturday to Ivan Pulinkala, founding director of Kennesaw State University’s dance program.

The award was presented during the Cobb Symphony Master Works Concert at the Murray Arts Center of Mount Paran Christian School in Kennesaw.

“We selected Ivan to be the first award recipient because he embodies the spirit of the award,” said Michael Alexander, music director of the Cobb Symphony. “He has made a major contribution to the cultural landscape of Georgia with his groundbreaking artistic work and his commitment to the next generation of artists.”

Mr. Pulinkala has been Director of the Program in Dance at Kennesaw State University since 2005 and is artistic director of the Kennesaw University Dance Company. He teaches modern dance, choreography, dance history, and performance.

The university enrolls more than 80 dance majors and offers a Bachelor of Arts in Dance.

Originally from New Delhi, Mr. Pulinkala was the choreographer and director of Delhi Music Theatre. He was named one of the Indian Artists of the Millennium by India Today Magazine.  In 1998, he moved to the United States to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in Dance. He was recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005 and received the Kennesaw State University Board of Regents Teaching Excellence Award the same year. His recent work, Chakra, was performed by KSU students at the National Dance Festival in Washington, D.C.

“Over the years, the Cobb Symphony Orchestra has collaborated with diverse cultural organizations nationwide,” said Bob Sanna, Executive Director of the Symphony. “This award recognizes Georgia’s diverse cultural offerings and expresses our support for all the arts.”