According to the United Nations, two-thirds of the world's population, approximately 4 billion people, experiences water scarcity at least one month per year. To avoid the water quantity crisis experienced in many regions of the world and the United States, a path to sustainability must be forged. My research aims to identify and critique the salient features of the narrative that drives contemporary urban water decisions and practices and to provide a meta-narrative about the role of narratives as invisible lenses through which individuals see, interpret, and interact with the world often without realizing the existence of those frames. The purpose of this problem-oriented dissertation is twofold: to provide a philosophical policy analysis of contemporary water issues in the United States generally and North Central Texas in particular, and to offer a pragmatic and interdisciplinary approach to discovering a sustainable relationship to water. The intent of my research is not to produce a new metaphysical understanding of water, but to provide a pragmatic application of ideas that can be utilized in the field; ideas that can invoke a new narrative, vision, and direction for urban water issues in North Central Texas and in areas far beyond the Lone Star State. …

Eagles Overhead provides a critical history of US Air Force Forward Air Controllers and examines their role, status, and performance in the Air Force's history. It begins by examining the US's initial adoption of air power, and American participation in aerial combat during World War I and traces the FACs' contributions to every US Air Force air campaign from the Marne in 1918 to Mosul in 2017. However, since 2001 FACs' contributions have been sporadic. Eagles Overhead asks why, despite the critical importance of FACs, have they not been heavily used on US battlefields since 2001? It examines the Air Force FAC's theoretical, doctrinal, institutional, and historical frameworks in the first nine chapters to assess if the nature of air warfare has changed so significantly that the concept and utility of the FAC has been left behind. Or, has the FAC been neglected since 2001 because the Air Force dislikes the capability as it clouds the service's doctrinal preferences? From these examinations, Eagles Overhead draws conclusions about the potential future of Air Force FACs.

This dissertation investigates how W. A. Mozart applies the concept of key characteristics—the affective properties of each tonality—as discussed by three of his contemporaries, Johann Mattheson, C.F.D. Schubart and G.J. Vogler, to four soubrette and four prima donna characters from four of his late Italian operas: La Contessa and Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro; Donna Anna and Zerlina in Don Giovanni; Fiordiligi and Despina in Così fan tutte; Vitellia and Servilia in La clemenza di Tito. The analytical method of this dissertation provides a hermeneutical tool to search for meanings in Mozart's music. The application compares the libretto text and its corresponding tonal center with the description of key characteristics on a micro level, to reveal significant dramatic and practical implications from Mozart's key usage in his operas.

This anthology of late 19th- and early 20th-century Czech opera arias for soprano focuses on works that lack existing scholarship, bridging the language gap through translations and pronunciation materials for English-speaking singers. Its 24 arias supplement the works of Smetana, Dvořák, and Janáček with those of contemporaneous composers Karel Bendl, Zdeněk Fibich, Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Karel Kovařovic, Vítězslav Novák, and Otakar Ostrčil. Its musicological scope provides vignettes of the musical-cultural landscape of Czech opera around the turn of the 20th century, the transformation of Czech declamation during that period, and the language knowledge needed to sing the works thereof. Chapter 2 elucidates the methodology used in the anthology's phonetic transcriptions and discusses the unique articulatory demands of singing in Czech. Chapter 3 grounds contemporaneous discussion of Czech declamation as late 19th- and early 20th-century composers and librettists sought to shape a musical voice suited to the features of their language. The following chapter is a look at Janáček's unique solution to this challenge. In Chapter 5, the relationship between criticism and composition is examined for these two faces of Czech modernism. Finally, Chapter 6 includes new performance editions of the arias curated for the anthology. Each aria is accompanied by …