The Central African Republic (CAR), formerly known as Ubangi-Shari, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Chad to the north, Sudan to the northeast, South Sudan to the east, the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the south, the Republic of the Congo to the southwest, and Cameroon to the west. The Central African Republic covers a land area of about . , it had an estimated population of around  million. , the Central African Republic is the scene of a civil war, which is ongoing since 2012.

Most of the Central African Republic consists of Sudano-Guinean savannas, but the country also includes a Sahelo-Sudanian zone in the north and an equatorial forest zone in the south. Two-thirds of the country is within the Ubangi River basin (which flows into the Congo), while the remaining third lies in the basin of the Chari, which flows into Lake Chad.

What is today the Central African Republic has been inhabited since at least 8,000 BCE. The country's borders were established by France, which ruled the country as a colony starting in the late 19th century. After gaining independence from France in 1960, the Central African Republic was ruled by a series of autocratic leaders, including an abortive attempt at a monarchy.

By the 1990s, calls for democracy led to the first multi-party democratic elections in 1993. Ange-Félix Patassé became president, but was later removed by General François Bozizé in the 2003 coup. The Central African Republic Bush War began in 2004 and, despite a peace treaty in 2007 and another in 2011, civil war resumed in 2012. The civil war perpetuated the country's poor human rights record: it was characterized by widespread and increasing abuses by various participating armed groups, such as arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and restrictions on freedom of the press and freedom of movement.

Despite its significant mineral deposits and other resources, such as uranium reserves, crude oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, lumber, and hydropower, as well as significant quantities of arable land, the Central African Republic is among the ten poorest countries in the world, with the lowest GDP per capita at purchasing power parity in the world as of 2017. , according to the Human Development Index (HDI), the country had the fourth-lowest level of human development, ranking 188 out of 191 countries. The country had the lowest inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI), ranking 156th out of 156 countries. The Central African Republic is also estimated to be the unhealthiest country as well as the worst country in which to be young.

The Central African Republic is a member of the United Nations, the African Union, the Economic Community of Central African States, the  and the Non-Aligned Movement.

Etymology
The name of the Central African Republic is derived from the country's geographical location in the central region of Africa and its republican form of government. From 1976 to 1979, the country was known as the Central African Empire.

During the colonial era, the country's name was Ubangi-Shari (), a name derived from the Ubangi River and the Chari River. Barthélemy Boganda, the country's first prime minister, favored the name "Central African Republic" over Ubangi-Shari, reportedly because he envisioned a larger union of countries in Central Africa.

History

Early history
Approximately 10,000 years ago, desertification forced hunter-gatherer societies south into the Sahel regions of northern Central Africa, where some groups settled. Farming began as part of the Neolithic Revolution. Initial farming of white yam progressed into millet and sorghum, and before 3000 BCE the domestication of African oil palm improved the groups' nutrition and allowed for expansion of the local populations. This Agricultural Revolution, combined with a "Fish-stew Revolution", in which fishing began to take place, and the use of boats, allowed for the transportation of goods. Products were often moved in ceramic pots, which are the first known examples of artistic expression from the region's inhabitants.

The Bouar Megaliths in the western region of the country indicate an advanced level of habitation dating back to the very late Neolithic Era (c. 3500–2700 BCE). Ironworking developed in the region around 1000 BCE.

The Ubangian people settled along the Ubangi River in what is today Central and East Central African Republic while some Bantu peoples migrated from the southwest from Cameroon.

Bananas arrived in the region during the first millennium BCE and added an important source of carbohydrates to the diet; they were also used in the production of alcoholic beverages. Production of copper, salt, dried fish, and textiles dominated the economic trade in the Central African region.

16th–19th century

In the 16th and 17th centuries slave traders began to raid the region as part of the expansion of the Saharan and Nile River slave routes. Their captives were enslaved and shipped to the Mediterranean coast, Europe, Arabia, the Western Hemisphere, or to the slave ports and factories along the West and North Africa or South along the Ubanqui and Congo rivers. In the mid 19th century, the Bobangi people became major slave traders and sold their captives to the Americas using the Ubangi river to reach the coast. During the 18th century Bandia-Nzakara Azande peoples established the Bangassou Kingdom along the Ubangi River. In 1875, the Sudanese sultan Rabih az-Zubayr governed Upper-Oubangui, which included present-day Central African Republic.

French colonial period

The European invasion of Central African territory began in the late 19th century during the Scramble for Africa. Europeans, primarily the French, Germans, and Belgians, arrived in the area in 1885. France seized and colonized Ubangi-Shari territory in 1894. In 1911 at the Treaty of Fez, France ceded a nearly 300,000 km2 portion of the Sangha and Lobaye basins to the German Empire which ceded a smaller area (in present-day Chad) to France. After World War I France again annexed the territory. Modeled on King Leopold's Congo Free State, concessions were doled out to private companies that endeavored to strip the region's assets as quickly and cheaply as possible before depositing a percentage of their profits into the French treasury. The concessionary companies forced local people to harvest rubber, coffee, and other commodities without pay and held their families hostage until they met their quotas.

In 1920 French Equatorial Africa was established and Ubangi-Shari was administered from Brazzaville. During the 1920s and 1930s the French introduced a policy of mandatory cotton cultivation, a network of roads was built, attempts were made to combat sleeping sickness, and Protestant missions were established to spread Christianity. New forms of forced labour were also introduced and a large number of Ubangians were sent to work on the Congo-Ocean Railway. Through the period of construction until 1934 there was a continual heavy cost in human lives, with total deaths among all workers along the railway estimated in excess of 17,000 of the construction workers, from a combination of both industrial accidents and diseases including malaria. In 1928, a major insurrection, the Kongo-Wara rebellion or 'war of the hoe handle', broke out in Western Ubangi-Shari and continued for several years. The extent of this insurrection, which was perhaps the largest anti-colonial rebellion in Africa during the interwar years, was carefully hidden from the French public because it provided evidence of strong opposition to French colonial rule and forced labour.
French colonization in Oubangui-Chari is considered to be the most brutal of the French colonial Empire.

In September 1940, during the Second World War, pro-Gaullist French officers took control of Ubangi-Shari and General Leclerc established his headquarters for the Free French Forces in Bangui. In 1946 Barthélemy Boganda was elected with 9,000 votes to the French National Assembly, becoming the first representative of the Central African Republic in the French government. Boganda maintained a political stance against racism and the colonial regime but gradually became disheartened with the French political system and returned to the Central African Republic to establish the Movement for the Social Evolution of Black Africa (Mouvement pour l'évolution sociale de l'Afrique noire, MESAN) in 1950.

Since independence (1960–present)
In the Ubangi-Shari Territorial Assembly election in 1957, MESAN captured 347,000 out of the total 356,000 votes and won every legislative seat, which led to Boganda being elected president of the Grand Council of French Equatorial Africa and vice-president of the Ubangi-Shari Government Council. Within a year, he declared the establishment of the Central African Republic and served as the country's first prime minister. MESAN continued to exist, but its role was limited. The Central Africa Republic was granted autonomy within the French Community on 1 December 1958, a status which meant it was still counted as part of the French Empire in Africa.

After Boganda's death in a plane crash on 29 March 1959, his cousin, David Dacko, took control of MESAN. Dacko became the country's first president when the Central African Republic formally received independence from France at midnight on 13 August 1960, a date celebrated by the country's Independence Day holiday. Dacko threw out his political rivals, including Abel Goumba, former Prime Minister and leader of Mouvement d'évolution démocratique de l'Afrique centrale (MEDAC), whom he forced into exile in France. With all opposition parties suppressed by November 1962, Dacko declared MESAN as the official party of the state.

Bokassa and the Central African Empire (1965–1979)

On 31 December 1965, Dacko was overthrown in the Saint-Sylvestre coup d'état by Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who suspended the constitution and dissolved the National Assembly. President Bokassa declared himself President for Life in 1972 and named himself Emperor Bokassa I of the Central African Empire (as the country was renamed) on 4 December 1976. A year later, Emperor Bokassa crowned himself in a lavish and expensive ceremony that was ridiculed by much of the world.

In April 1979, young students protested against Bokassa's decree that all school pupils were required to buy uniforms from a company owned by one of his wives. The government violently suppressed the protests, killing 100 children and teenagers. Bokassa might have been personally involved in some of the killings. In September 1979, France overthrew Bokassa and restored Dacko to power (subsequently restoring the official name of the country and the original government to the Central African Republic). Dacko, in turn, was again overthrown in a coup by General André Kolingba on 1 September 1981.

Central African Republic under Kolingba
Kolingba suspended the constitution and ruled with a military junta until 1985. He introduced a new constitution in 1986 which was adopted by a nationwide referendum. Membership in his new party, the Rassemblement Démocratique Centrafricain (RDC), was voluntary. In 1987 and 1988, semi-free elections to parliament were held, but Kolingba's two major political opponents, Abel Goumba and Ange-Félix Patassé, were not allowed to participate.

By 1990, inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, a pro-democracy movement arose. Pressure from the United States, France, and from a group of locally represented countries and agencies called GIBAFOR (France, the US, Germany, Japan, the EU, the World Bank, and the UN) finally led Kolingba to agree, in principle, to hold free elections in October 1992 with help from the UN Office of Electoral Affairs. After using the excuse of alleged irregularities to suspend the results of the elections as a pretext for holding on to power, President Kolingba came under intense pressure from GIBAFOR to establish a "Conseil National Politique Provisoire de la République" (Provisional National Political Council, CNPPR) and to set up a "Mixed Electoral Commission", which included representatives from all political parties.

When a second round of elections were finally held in 1993, again with the help of the international community coordinated by GIBAFOR, Ange-Félix Patassé won in the second round of voting with 53% of the vote while Goumba won 45.6%. Patassé's party, the Mouvement pour la Libération du Peuple Centrafricain (MLPC) or Movement for the Liberation of the Central African People, gained a plurality (relative majority) but not an absolute majority of seats in parliament, which meant Patassé's party required coalition partners.

Patassé government (1993–2003)
Patassé purged many of the Kolingba elements from the government and Kolingba supporters accused Patassé's government of conducting a "witch hunt" against the Yakoma. A new constitution was approved on 28 December 1994 but had little impact on the country's politics. In 1996–1997, reflecting steadily decreasing public confidence in the government's erratic behavior, three mutinies against Patassé's administration were accompanied by widespread destruction of property and heightened ethnic tension. During this time (1996), the Peace Corps evacuated all its volunteers to neighboring Cameroon. To date, the Peace Corps has not returned to the Central African Republic. The Bangui Agreements, signed in January 1997, provided for the deployment of an inter-African military mission, to the Central African Republic and re-entry of ex-mutineers into the government on 7 April 1997. The inter-African military mission was later replaced by a U.N. peacekeeping force (MINURCA). Since 1997, the country has hosted almost a dozen peacekeeping interventions, earning it the title of "world champion of peacekeeping".

In 1998, parliamentary elections resulted in Kolingba's RDC winning 20 out of 109 seats. The next year, however, in spite of widespread public anger in urban centers over his corrupt rule, Patassé won a second term in the presidential election.

On 28 May 2001, rebels stormed strategic buildings in Bangui in an unsuccessful coup attempt. The army chief of staff, Abel Abrou, and General François N'Djadder Bedaya were killed, but Patassé regained the upper hand by bringing in at least 300 troops of the Congolese rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba and Libyan soldiers.

In the aftermath of the failed coup, militias loyal to Patassé sought revenge against rebels in many neighborhoods of Bangui and incited unrest including the murder of many political opponents. Eventually, Patassé came to suspect that General François Bozizé was involved in another coup attempt against him, which led Bozizé to flee with loyal troops to Chad. In March 2003, Bozizé launched a surprise attack against Patassé, who was out of the country. Libyan troops and some 1,000 soldiers of Bemba's Congolese rebel organization failed to stop the rebels and Bozizé's forces succeeded in overthrowing Patassé.

Civil wars

François Bozizé suspended the constitution and named a new cabinet, which included most opposition parties. Abel Goumba was named vice-president, which gave Bozizé's new government a positive image. Bozizé established a broad-based National Transition Council to draft a new constitution, and announced that he would step down and run for office once the new constitution was approved.

In 2004, the Central African Republic Bush War began, as forces opposed to Bozizé took up arms against his government. In May 2005, Bozizé won the presidential election, which excluded Patassé, and in 2006 fighting continued between the government and the rebels. In November 2006, Bozizé's government requested French military support to help them repel rebels who had taken control of towns in the country's northern regions.
Though the initial public details of the agreement pertained to logistics and intelligence, by December the French assistance included airstrikes by Dassault Mirage 2000 fighters against rebel positions.

The Syrte Agreement in February and the Birao Peace Agreement in April 2007 called for a cessation of hostilities, the billeting of FDPC fighters and their integration with FACA, the liberation of political prisoners, integration of FDPC into government, an amnesty for the UFDR, its recognition as a political party, and the integration of its fighters into the national army. Several groups continued to fight but other groups signed on to the agreement, or similar agreements with the government (e.g. UFR on 15 December 2008). The only major group not to sign an agreement at the time was the CPJP, which continued its activities and signed a peace agreement with the government on 25 August 2012.

In 2011, Bozizé was reelected in an election which was widely considered fraudulent.

In November 2012, Séléka, a coalition of rebel groups, took over towns in the northern and central regions of the country. These groups eventually reached a peace deal with the Bozizé's government in January 2013 involving a power sharing government but this deal broke down and the rebels seized the capital in March 2013 and Bozizé fled the country.

Michel Djotodia took over as president. Prime Minister Nicolas Tiangaye requested a UN peacekeeping force from the UN Security Council and on 31 May former President Bozizé was indicted for crimes against humanity and incitement of genocide.
By the end of the year there were international warnings of a "genocide" and fighting was largely from reprisal attacks on civilians from Seleka's predominantly Muslim fighters and Christian militias called "anti-balaka". By August 2013, there were reports of over 200,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs)

French President François Hollande called on the UN Security Council and African Union to increase their efforts to stabilize the country. On 18 February 2014, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on the UN Security Council to immediately deploy 3,000 troops to the country, bolstering the 6,000 African Union soldiers and 2,000 French troops already in the country, to combat civilians being murdered in large numbers. The Séléka government was said to be divided, and in September 2013, Djotodia officially disbanded Seleka, but many rebels refused to disarm, becoming known as ex-Seleka, and veered further out of government control. It is argued that the focus of the initial disarmament efforts exclusively on the Seleka inadvertently handed the anti-Balaka the upper hand, leading to the forced displacement of Muslim civilians by anti-Balaka in Bangui and western Central African Republic.

On 11 January 2014, Michael Djotodia and Nicolas Tiengaye resigned as part of a deal negotiated at a regional summit in neighboring Chad. Catherine Samba-Panza was elected as interim president by the National Transitional Council, becoming the first ever female Central African president. On 23 July 2014, following Congolese mediation efforts, Séléka and anti-balaka representatives signed a ceasefire agreement in Brazzaville. By the end of 2014, the country was de facto partitioned with the anti-Balaka in the southwest and ex-Seleka in the northeast. In March 2015, Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said 417 of the country's 436 mosques had been destroyed, and Muslim women were so scared of going out in public they were giving birth in their homes instead of going to the hospital. On 14 December 2015, Séléka rebel leaders declared an independent Republic of Logone.

Touadéra government (2016–present)

Presidential elections were held in December 2015. As no candidate received more than 50% of the vote, a second round of elections was held on 14 February 2016 with run-offs on 31 March 2016. In the second round of voting, former Prime Minister Faustin-Archange Touadéra was declared the winner with 63% of the vote, defeating Union for Central African Renewal candidate Anicet-Georges Dologuélé, another former Prime Minister. While the elections suffered from many potential voters being absent as they had taken refuge in other countries, the fears of widespread violence were ultimately unfounded and the African Union regarded the elections as successful.

Touadéra was sworn in on 30 March 2016. No representatives of the Seleka rebel group or the "anti-balaka" militias were included in the subsequently formed government.

After the end of Touadéra's first term, presidential elections were held on 27 December 2020 with a possible second round planned for 14 February 2021. Former president François Bozizé announced his candidacy on 25 July 2020 but was rejected by the Constitutional Court of the country, which held that Bozizé did not satisfy the "good morality" requirement for candidates because of an international warrant and United Nations sanctions against him for alleged assassinations, torture and other crimes.

As large parts of the country were at the time controlled by armed groups, the election could not be conducted in many areas of the country. Some 800 of the country's polling stations, 14% of the total, were closed due to violence. Three Burundian peacekeepers were killed and an additional two were wounded during the run-up to the election. President Faustin-Archange Touadéra was reelected in the first round of the election in December 2020. Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group have supported President Faustin-Archange Touadéra in the fight against rebels. Russia's Wagner group has been accused of harassing and intimidating civilians.   In December 2022 Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Times "Wagner shock troops form a Praetorian Guard for Mr. Touadéra, who is also protected by Rwandan forces, in return for an untaxed license to exploit and export the Central African Republic's resources" and "one Western ambassador called the Central African Republic...a 'vassal state' of the Kremlin."

On 8 September 2023, a United Nations-backed court in the Central African Republic charged ex-rebel leader Abdoulaye Hissène for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Geography

The Central African Republic is a landlocked nation within the interior of the African continent. It is bordered by Cameroon, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Republic of the Congo. The country lies between latitudes 2° and 11°N, and longitudes 14° and 28°E.

Much of the country consists of flat or rolling plateau savanna approximately  above sea level. In addition to the Fertit Hills in the northeast of the Central African Republic, there are scattered hills in the southwest regions. In the northwest is the Yade Massif, a granite plateau with an altitude of . The Central African Republic contains six terrestrial ecoregions: Northeastern Congolian lowland forests, Northwestern Congolian lowland forests, Western Congolian swamp forests, East Sudanian savanna, Northern Congolian forest-savanna mosaic, and Sahelian Acacia savanna.

At , the Central African Republic is the world's 44th-largest country. It is comparable in size to Ukraine, as Ukraine is  in area, according to List of countries and dependencies by area.

Much of the southern border is formed by tributaries of the Congo River; the Mbomou River in the east merges with the Uele River to form the Ubangi River, which also comprises portions of the southern border. The Sangha River flows through some of the western regions of the country, while the eastern border lies along the edge of the Nile River watershed.

It has been estimated that up to 8% of the country is covered by forest, with the densest parts generally located in the southern regions. The forests are highly diverse and include commercially important species of Ayous, Sapelli and Sipo. The deforestation rate is about 0.4% per annum, and lumber poaching is commonplace. The Central African Republic had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 9.28/10, ranking it seventh globally out of 172 countries.

In 2008, Central African Republic was the world's least light pollution affected country.

The Central African Republic is the focal point of the Bangui Magnetic Anomaly, one of the largest magnetic anomalies on Earth.

Wildlife

In the southwest, the Dzanga-Sangha National Park is located in a rain forest area. The country is noted for its population of forest elephants and western lowland gorillas. In the north, the Manovo-Gounda St Floris National Park is well-populated with wildlife, including leopards, lions, cheetahs and rhinos, and the Bamingui-Bangoran National Park is located in the northeast of the Central African Republic. The parks have been seriously affected by the activities of poachers, particularly those from Sudan, over the past two decades.

In 2021, the rate of deforestation in the Central African Republic increased by 71%.

Climate

The climate of the Central African Republic is generally tropical, with a wet season that lasts from June to September in the northern regions of the country, and from May to October in the south. During the wet season, rainstorms are an almost daily occurrence, and early morning fog is commonplace. Maximum annual precipitation is approximately  in the upper Ubangi region.

The northern areas are hot and humid from February to May, but can be subject to the hot, dry, and dusty trade wind known as the Harmattan. The southern regions have a more equatorial climate, but they are subject to desertification, while the extreme northeast regions of the country are a steppe.

Prefectures and sub-prefectures

The Central African Republic is divided into 16 administrative prefectures (préfectures), two of which are economic prefectures (préfectures economiques), and one an autonomous commune; the prefectures are further divided into 71 sub-prefectures (sous-préfectures).

The prefectures are Bamingui-Bangoran, Basse-Kotto, Haute-Kotto, Haut-Mbomou, Kémo, Lobaye, Mambéré-Kadéï, Mbomou, Nana-Mambéré, Ombella-M'Poko, Ouaka, Ouham, Ouham-Pendé and Vakaga. The economic prefectures are Nana-Grébizi and Sangha-Mbaéré, while the commune is the capital city of Bangui.

Politics and government

Politics in the Central African Republic formally take place in a framework of a presidential republic. In this system, the President is the head of state, with a Prime Minister as head of government. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and parliament.

Changes in government have occurred in recent years by three methods: violence, negotiations, and elections. A new constitution was approved by voters in a referendum held on 5 December 2004. The government was rated 'Partly Free' from 1991 to 2001 and from 2004 to 2013.

Executive branch
The president is elected by popular vote for a six-year term, and the prime minister is appointed by the president. The president also appoints and presides over the Council of Ministers, which initiates laws and oversees government operations. However, as of 2018 the official government is not in control of large parts of the country, which are governed by rebel groups.

Acting president since April 2016 is Faustin-Archange Touadéra who followed the interim government under Catherine Samba-Panza, interim prime minister André Nzapayeké.

Legislative branch
The National Assembly (Assemblée Nationale) has 140 members, elected for a five-year term using the two-round (or Run-off) system.

Judicial branch
As in many other former French colonies, the Central African Republic's legal system is based on French law. The Supreme Court, or Cour Supreme, is made up of judges appointed by the president. There is also a Constitutional Court, and its judges are also appointed by the president.

Foreign relations

Foreign aid and UN Involvement
The Central African Republic is heavily dependent upon foreign aid and numerous NGOs provide services that the government does not provide. In 2019, over US$100 million in foreign aid was spent in the country, mostly on humanitarian assistance.

In 2006, due to ongoing violence, over 50,000 people in the country's northwest were at risk of starvation, but this was averted due to assistance from the United Nations. On 8 January 2008, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon declared that the Central African Republic was eligible to receive assistance from the Peacebuilding Fund. Three priority areas were identified: first, the reform of the security sector; second, the promotion of good governance and the rule of law; and third, the revitalization of communities affected by conflicts. On 12 June 2008, the Central African Republic requested assistance from the UN Peacebuilding Commission, which was set up in 2005 to help countries emerging from conflict avoid devolving back into war or chaos.

In response to concerns of a potential genocide, a peacekeeping force – the International Support Mission to the Central African Republic (MISCA) – was authorized in December 2013. This African Union force of 6,000 personnel was accompanied by the French Operation Sangaris.

In 2017, Central African Republic signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Human rights

The 2009 Human Rights Report by the United States Department of State noted that human rights in the Central African Republic were poor and expressed concerns over numerous government abuses. The U.S. State Department alleged that major human rights abuses such as extrajudicial executions by security forces, torture, beatings and rape of suspects and prisoners occurred with impunity. It also alleged harsh and life-threatening conditions in prisons and detention centers, arbitrary arrest, prolonged pretrial detention and denial of a fair trial, restrictions on freedom of movement, official corruption, and restrictions on workers' rights.

The State Department report also cites widespread mob violence, the prevalence of female genital mutilation, discrimination against women and Pygmies, human trafficking, forced labor, and child labor. Freedom of movement is limited in the northern part of the country "because of actions by state security forces, armed bandits, and other non-state armed entities", and due to fighting between government and anti-government forces, many persons have been internally displaced.

Violence against children and women in relation to accusations of witchcraft has also been cited as a serious problem in the country. Witchcraft is a criminal offense under the penal code.

Freedom of speech is addressed in the country's constitution, but there have been incidents of government intimidation of the media. A report by the International Research & Exchanges Board's media sustainability index noted that "the country minimally met objectives, with segments of the legal system and government opposed to a free media system".

Approximately 68% of girls are married before they turn 18, and the United Nations' Human Development Index ranked the country 188 out of 188 countries surveyed. The Bureau of International Labor Affairs has also mentioned it in its last edition of the List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.

Demographics

The population of the Central African Republic has almost quadrupled since independence. In 1960, the population was 1,232,000; as of a  UN estimate, it is approximately .

The United Nations estimates that approximately 4% of the population aged between 15 and 49 is HIV positive. Only 3% of the country has antiretroviral therapy available, compared to a 17% coverage in the neighboring countries of Chad and the Republic of the Congo.

The nation is divided into over 80 ethnic groups, each having its own language. The largest ethnic groups are the Baggara Arabs, Baka, Banda, Bayaka, Fula, Gbaya, Kara, Kresh, Mbaka, Mandja, Ngbandi, Sara, Vidiri, Wodaabe, Yakoma, Yulu, Zande, with others including Europeans of mostly French descent.

Religion

According to the 2003 national census, 80.3% of the population was Christian (51.4% Protestant and 28.9% Roman Catholic), 10% was Muslim and 4.5 percent other religious groups, with 5.5 percent having no religious beliefs. More recent work from the Pew Research Center estimated that, as of 2010, Christians constituted 89.8% of the population (60.7% Protestant and 28.5% Catholic) while Muslims made up 8.9%. The Catholic Church claims over 1.5 million adherents, approximately one-third of the population. Indigenous belief (animism) is also practiced, and many indigenous beliefs are incorporated into Christian and Islamic practice. A UN director described religious tensions between Muslims and Christians as being high.

There are many missionary groups operating in the country, including Lutherans, Baptists, Catholics, Grace Brethren, and Jehovah's Witnesses. While these missionaries are predominantly from the United States, France, Italy, and Spain, many are also from Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other African countries. Large numbers of missionaries left the country when fighting broke out between rebel and government forces in 2002–3, but many of them have now returned to continue their work.

According to Overseas Development Institute research, during the crisis ongoing since 2012, religious leaders have mediated between communities and armed groups; they also provided refuge for people seeking shelter.

Languages

The Central African Republic's two official languages are French and Sango (also spelled Sangho), a creole developed as an inter-ethnic lingua franca based on the local Ngbandi language. The Central African Republic is one of the few African countries to have granted official status to an African language.

Healthcare

The largest hospitals in the country are located in the Bangui district. As a member of the World Health Organization, the Central African Republic receives vaccination assistance, such as a 2014 intervention for the prevention of a measles epidemic. In 2007, female life expectancy at birth was 48.2 years and male life expectancy at birth was 45.1 years.

Women's health is poor in the Central African Republic. , the country had the fourth highest maternal mortality rate in the world.
The total fertility rate in 2014 was estimated at 4.46 children born/woman. Approximately 25% of women had undergone female genital mutilation. Many births in the country are guided by traditional birth attendants, who often have little or no formal training.

Malaria is endemic in the Central African Republic and one of the leading causes of death.
According to 2009 estimates, the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate is about 4.7% of the adult population (ages 15–49). This is in general agreement with the 2016 United Nations estimate of approximately 4%. Government expenditure on health was US$20 (PPP) per person in 2006 and 10.9% of total government expenditure in 2006. There was only around 1 physician for every 20,000 persons in 2009.

Education

Public education in the Central African Republic is free and is compulsory from ages 6 to 14. However, approximately half of the adult population of the country is illiterate. The two institutions of higher education in the Central African Republic are the University of Bangui, a public university located in Bangui, which includes a medical school; and Euclid University, an international university.

Economy

The per capita income of the Republic is often listed as being approximately $400 a year, one of the lowest in the world, but this figure is based mostly on reported sales of exports and largely ignores the unregistered sale of foods, locally produced alcoholic beverages, diamonds, ivory, bushmeat, and traditional medicine.

The currency of the Central African Republic is the CFA franc, which is accepted across the former countries of French West Africa and trades at a fixed rate to the euro. Diamonds constitute the country's most important export, accounting for 40–55% of export revenues, but it is estimated that between 30% and 50% of those produced each year leave the country clandestinely.
On 27 April 2022, Bitcoin (BTC) was adopted as an additional legal tender. Lawmakers unanimously adopted a bill that made Bitcoin legal tender alongside the CFA franc and legalized the use of cryptocurrencies. President Faustin-Archange Touadéra signed the measure into law, said his chief of staff Obed Namsio.

Agriculture is dominated by the cultivation and sale of food crops such as cassava, peanuts, maize, sorghum, millet, sesame, and plantain. The annua growth rate of real GDP is slightly above 3%. The importance of food crops over exported cash crops is indicated by the fact that the total production of cassava, the staple food of most Central Africans, ranges between 200,000 and 300,000 tonnes a year, while the production of cotton, the principal exported cash crop, ranges from 25,000 to 45,000 tonnes a year. Food crops are not exported in large quantities, but still constitute the principal cash crops of the country because Central Africans derive far more income from the periodic sale of surplus food crops than from exported cash crops such as cotton or coffee. Much of the country is self-sufficient in food crops; however, livestock development is hindered by the presence of the tsetse fly.

The Republic's primary import partner is France (17.1%). Other imports come from the United States (12.3%), India (11.5%), and China (8.2%). Its largest export partner is France (31.2%), followed by Burundi (16.2%), China (12.5%), Cameroon (9.6%), and Austria (7.8%).

The Central African Republic is a member of the Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa (OHADA). In the 2009 World Bank Group's report Doing Business, it was ranked 183rd of 183 as regards 'ease of doing business', a composite index which takes into account regulations that enhance business activity and those that restrict it.

Infrastructure

Transportation

Bangui is the transport hub of the Central African Republic. As of 1999, eight roads connected the city to other main towns in the country, Cameroon, Chad and South Sudan; of these, only the toll roads are paved. During the rainy season from July to October, some roads are impassable.

River ferries sail from the river port at Bangui to Brazzaville and Zongo. The river can be navigated most of the year between Bangui and Brazzaville. From Brazzaville, goods are transported by rail to Pointe-Noire, Congo's Atlantic port. The river port handles the overwhelming majority of the country's international trade and has a cargo handling capacity of 350,000 tons; it has  length of wharfs and  of warehousing space.

Bangui M'Poko International Airport is Central African Republic's only international airport. As of June 2014 it had regularly scheduled direct flights to Brazzaville, Casablanca, Cotonou, Douala, Kinshasa, Lomé, Luanda, Malabo, N'Djamena, Paris, Pointe-Noire, and Yaoundé.

Since at least 2002 there have been plans to connect Bangui by rail to the Transcameroon Railway.

Energy

The Central African Republic primarily uses hydroelectricity as there are few other low cost resources for generating electricity. Access to electricity is very limited with 15.6% of the total population having electrification, 34.6% in urban areas and 1.5% in rural areas.

Communications

Presently, the Central African Republic has active television services, radio stations, internet service providers, and mobile phone carriers; Socatel is the leading provider for both internet and mobile phone access throughout the country. The primary governmental regulating bodies of telecommunications are the Ministère des Postes and Télécommunications et des Nouvelles Technologies. In addition, the Central African Republic receives international support on telecommunication related operations from ITU Telecommunication Development Sector (ITU-D) within the International Telecommunication Union to improve infrastructure.

Culture

Sports

Football is the country's most popular sport. The national football team is governed by the Central African Football Federation and stages matches at the Barthélemy Boganda Stadium.

Basketball also is popular  and its national team won the African Championship twice and was the first Sub-Saharan African team to qualify for the Basketball World Cup, in 1974.

See also

 Outline of the Central African Republic
 List of Central African Republic–related topics

Notes

References

Citations

Bibliography

 Balogh, Besenyo, Miletics, Vogel: La République Centrafricaine

Further reading

 Doeden, Matt, Central African Republic in Pictures (Twentyfirst Century Books, 2009).
 Petringa, Maria, Brazza, A Life for Africa (2006). .
 Titley, Brian, Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa, 2002.
 Woodfrok, Jacqueline, Culture and Customs of the Central African Republic  (Greenwood Press, 2006).

External links

Overviews
 Country Profile from BBC News
 Central African Republic. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency.
 Central African Republic from UCB Libraries GovPubs

 Key Development Forecasts for the Central African Republic from International Futures

News
 Central African Republic news headline links from AllAfrica.com

Other
 Central African Republic at Humanitarian and Development Partnership Team (HDPT)
 Johann Hari in Birao, Central African Republic. "Inside France's Secret War" from The Independent, 5 October 2007

French-speaking countries and territories
Landlocked countries
Least developed countries
Member states of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie
Member states of the African Union
Member states of the United Nations
Republics
States and territories established in 1960
Central African countries
1960 establishments in the Central African Republic
Countries in Africa
Observer states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation

Central African Republic


Michael David Carter  (born 13 November 1980) is an English former footballer who played in the Football League for Darlington, in the Icelandic 1.deild for Leiftur, and for numerous non-league clubs in the north-east of England. He played as a forward.

Carter was born in Darlington, and represented County Durham schools at under-15 level. He came through the youth system of his hometown club, Darlington F.C., and scored on his only appearance in the Football League, in a 3–0 win at home to Scarborough in November 1998. He played once more, as a substitute in the FA Cup defeat at Manchester City, before moving on to non-league football with Spennymoor United. He then spent the 2001 season in the Icelandic 1. deild with Leiftur before returning to non-league football in the north-east of England. His clubs included Whitby Town, West Auckland Town, Whitley Bay, Darlington Railway Athletic, and Darlington Cleveland Bridge.

References

1980 births
Living people
Footballers from Darlington
English men's footballers
Men's association football forwards
Darlington F.C. players
Spennymoor United A.F.C. players
Whitby Town F.C. players
West Auckland Town F.C. players
Whitley Bay F.C. players
Darlington Railway Athletic F.C. players
Darlington Cleveland Bridge F.C. players
English Football League players
Northern Premier League players
1. deild karla players
Northern Football League players

Michael Carter (footballer, born 1980)


Antony I Kassymatas (), (? – 21 January 837) Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from January 821 to January 837.

Life
Antony was of undistinguished background, but received a good education, becoming a lawyer in Constantinople in c. 800. He later became a monk and advanced to the position of abbot. By 814, he had become the bishop of Syllaion in Anatolia.  Although Antony was an Iconodule, he became an Iconoclast in 815, when Emperor Leo V the Armenian reinstituted Iconoclasm. The reason for Antony's change of heart is said to have included his hope for attaining the patriarchate. The emperor appointed him a member of the committee headed by the future Patriarch John Grammatikos to find patristic support for Iconoclasm. In 821, the new Emperor Michael II appointed Antony patriarch, disappointing the Stoudites, who were hoping that icons would be restored. When the patriarch of Antioch crowned Thomas the Slav rival emperor, Antony had him excommunicated in 822.  The iconodule historians record that Antony was stricken with a wasting disease as divine punishment for his participation in Iconoclast councils.  The patriarch died early in 837 and was later anathematized in the Orthodox synodika.

References
 The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, Oxford University Press, 1991.

837 deaths
9th-century patriarchs of Constantinople
Byzantine Iconoclasm
Year of birth unknown

Antony I of Constantinople


Bungie Studios is an American video game developer. They are most famous for developing the award winning Halo series of video games. They also made Destiny. The studio was founded in May 1991 under the name Bungie Software Products Corporation by two students of the University of Chicago, Alex Seropian (Eng.) rus. and Jason Jones (Eng.) rus.. Originally based in Chicago, the company focused mainly on developing games for Macintosh computers and in the first 9 years of its existence created two successful series of games - Marathon and Myth, while Bungie West - a division of Bungie on the West Coast of the United States - was developing Oni games for PC and consoles.

In 2000, Bungie was acquired by Microsoft, and the Halo: Combat Evolved project, which was in development at that time, was reoriented to the upcoming Microsoft console — Xbox. The game was included in the console's starter game package, and subsequently became the so-called "killer application" of the Xbox platform, selling millions of copies and bringing billions of dollars in profits. Bungie has been releasing Halo series games for several years, but on October 5, 2007, it announced its independence from Microsoft, becoming a private company of Bungie (LLC); at the same time, the rights to Halo remained with Microsoft. In return, Bungie signed a contract with another game publishing company, Activision, in 2010, developing and releasing the multiplayer games Destiny (2014) and Destiny 2 (2017). In 2019, Bungie announced the end of the contract with Activision, expressing its intention to release further Destiny series games independently.

References

halo
American video game companies

Bungie Studios


Glen Gerald Charles (born February 18, 1943) and Les Charles (born March 25, 1948) are American screenwriters and television producers, best known for Taxi and Cheers.

Early lives and careers
The Charles brothers attended University of Redlands. Glen graduated in 1965, and Les graduated in 1971. Glen began his professional life as an advertising copywriter but moved into television. Both Glen and Les began their television careers together as writers for M*A*S*H. They later wrote for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Phyllis and The Bob Newhart Show, and were head writers and producers on the TV series Taxi. They then formed the Charles-Burrows-Charles production company with James Burrows, and created and produced the television series Cheers. The brothers also co-wrote the screenplay for the 1999 film Pushing Tin. Both were credited in every episode of Frasier as the creators of the "Frasier Crane" character from Cheers.

Cheers
Cheers is a sitcom that ran on NBC from September 30, 1982, to May 20, 1993, with a total of 275 half-hour episodes for eleven seasons. The show was produced by Charles/Burrows/Charles Productions in association with Paramount Network Television. The show is set in a bar named Cheers in Boston, Massachusetts, where a group of locals meet to drink, relax, and socialize. The Cheers finale aired on May 20, 1993, and was watched in an estimated 42.4 million households across the country.

Filmography

Television

Film
 Pushing Tin (1999)

Personal lives
They were raised in Henderson, Nevada, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

References

External links

Living people
American male television writers
American television writers
American television producers
University of Redlands alumni
San Francisco State University alumni
Showrunners
Primetime Emmy Award winners
Writers Guild of America Award winners
Latter Day Saints from Nevada
People from Henderson, Nevada
Place of birth missing (living people)
Screenwriters from Nevada
Screenwriting duos
Sibling duos
Year of birth missing (living people)

Glen and Les Charles


Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is an American experimental composer, educator, music theorist, improviser and multi-instrumentalist who is best known for playing saxophones, particularly the alto. Braxton grew up on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, and was a key early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He received great acclaim for his 1969 double-LP record For Alto, the first full-length album of solo saxophone music.

A prolific composer with a vast body of cross-genre work, the MacArthur Fellow and NEA Jazz Master has released hundreds of recordings and compositions. During six years signed to Arista Records, the diversity of his output encompassed work with many members of the AACM, including duets with co-founder and first president Muhal Richard Abrams; collaborations with electronic musician Richard Teitelbaum; a saxophone quartet with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett; compositions for four orchestras; and the ensemble arrangements of Creative Orchestra Music 1976, which was named the 1977 DownBeat Critics' Poll Album of the Year. Many of his projects are ongoing, such as the Diamond Curtain Wall works, in which Braxton implements audio programming language SuperCollider; the Ghost Trance Music series, inspired by his studies of the Native American Ghost Dance; and Echo Echo Mirror House Music, in which musicians "play" iPods containing the bulk of Braxton's oeuvre. He has released the first six operas in a series called the Trillium Opera Complex.

Braxton identifies as a "trans-idiomatic" composer and has repeatedly opposed the idea of a rigid dichotomy between improvisation and composition. He has written extensively about the "language music" system that forms the basis for his work and developed a philosophy of "world creativity" in his Tri-Axium Writings.

Braxton taught at Mills College from 1985 to 1990 and was Professor of Music at Wesleyan University from 1990 until his retirement at the end of 2013. He is the artistic director of the Tri-Centric Foundation, a nonprofit he founded in 1994 to support the preservation and production of works by Braxton and other artists "in pursuit of 'trans-idiomatic' creativity".

Early life
Braxton was born in Chicago, Illinois to Julia Samuels Braxton, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Clarence Dunbar Braxton Sr., from Greenville, Mississippi; Braxton's father worked for the Burlington and Quincy Railroad. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother remarried Lawrence Fouche, a worker at the Ford Motor Company. Braxton grew up living with his mother, stepfather, and three brothers, but still saw his father regularly. He grew up in a poorer district on the South Side, where he attended Betsy Ross Grammar School and had a paper route delivering The Chicago Defender. He sang in a church choir and had an early love of rock music, with Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and Bill Haley & His Comets among his favorites, but as a child was more excited by rocketships, television, and technology.

As was the case after World War I, post-WWII Chicago faced increased rates of white mob violence against Black people, and Braxton heard about incidents such as the Cicero race riot of 1951, protests at the White City Roller Rink near his home, and the lynching of Chicagoan Emmett Till, who was killed when Braxton was 10.

Education and military service

In his early teens, Braxton took his at-home explorations of technology and electronics to Chicago Vocational High School, where drafting courses and time in shop studying wiring schematics set the course for his future compositional diagrams.

After high school Braxton attended Wilson Junior College for one semester, but was unable to continue his studies due to financial difficulties; he instead applied and was admitted to the United States Fifth Army Band in 1963. He was initially stationed in Highland Park, Illinois, where he could continue studies with Jack Gell at the Chicago School of Music, but he later traveled to South Korea with The Eighth Army Band. While in South Korea he met a number of improvising musicians and even led his own group, though many in the barracks did not appreciate the more esoteric works in his collection, and he purchased headphones due to rules restricting his listening time.

After a few years Braxton left the army and moved back to Chicago; he later studied philosophy and music composition at Roosevelt University, though he did not complete his degree.

Career

Shortly after returning to Chicago, Braxton's cousin told him about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and he attended a concert. Following the performance he met Roscoe Mitchell, who invited him to come practice with, and later join, the group.

Braxton played over ten instruments on his 1968 debut, 3 Compositions of New Jazz, the influences for which he identified as Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Jackie McLean, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Miles Davis, James Brown, and the Chicago Transit Authority. The album's trio arrangement included Leroy Jenkins and Wadada Leo Smith, with Muhal Richard Abrams joining on the B-side recordings.

In 1969, Braxton recorded the double LP For Alto. There had previously been occasional unaccompanied saxophone recordings (notably Coleman Hawkins' "Picasso"), but For Alto was the first full-length album for unaccompanied saxophone. The work has been described as "one of the greatest solo saxophone records ever made, and maybe one of the greatest recordings ever issued" and "an album of solo free improvisation that still remains a paragon of technical, aesthetic and emotional excellence". The album influenced other artists like Steve Lacy, Joe McPhee, and Evan Parker, who went on to record their own solo albums. Tracks on For Alto were dedicated to Cecil Taylor and John Cage, among others.

Braxton was initially pessimistic about making a living as a working musician and began hustling chess, but in 1970 he joined pianist Chick Corea's trio with Dave Holland (double bass) and Barry Altschul (drums) to form the short-lived avant garde quartet Circle. After Corea left to form the fusion band Return to Forever, Holland and Altschul remained with Braxton for much of the 1970s as part of a quartet that variously included Kenny Wheeler, George E. Lewis, and Ray Anderson. The core trio plus saxophonist Sam Rivers recorded Holland's Conference of the Birds. In 1970, Muse released his album Creative Construction Company, with the group of the same name, consisting of Richard Davis (bass), Steve McCall (drums), Muhal Richard Abrams (piano, cello), Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet), and Leroy Jenkins (violin)--this album was released in the late 1970s by the Italian label, Vedette, under the title, Muhal. Creative Orchestra Music 1976 was inspired by jazz and marching band traditions. Braxton also recorded duets with George Lewis and Richard Teitelbaum in the 1970s.

Braxton's regular group in the 1980s and early 1990s was a quartet with Marilyn Crispell (piano), Mark Dresser (double bass) and Gerry Hemingway (drums). In 1981, he performed at the Woodstock Jazz Festival to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Creative Music Studio.

In 1994, Braxton was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Braxton created a large body of jazz standard recordings, often featuring him as a pianist rather than saxophonist. He released multidisc sets, including three quadruple-CD sets for Leo that were recorded on tour in 2003. He worked with several groups, including a quintet crediting bassist Mario Pavone as co-leader with Thomas Chapin on saxophone, Dave Douglas on trumpet, and Pheeroan akLaff on drums. From 1995 to 2006, he concentrated what he called Ghost Trance Music, which introduced a pulse to his music and allowed the simultaneous performance of any piece by the performers; many of the earliest Ghost Trance recordings were released on his Braxton House label.

His Falling River Musics compositions were documented on 2+2 Compositions (482 Music, 2005). In 2005, he was a guest performer with the noise group Wolf Eyes at the FIMAV Festival. Black Vomit, a recording of the concert, was described by critic François Couture as sympathetic and effective collaboration: "something really clicked between these artists, and it was all in good fun."

Braxton is known for a sprawling and extremely diverse discography which has continued to grow in his later career: in introducing his 13-CD box set Quartet (Standards) 2020, Bandcamp Daily wrote, "Anthony Braxton's discography has been massive for decades. [...] Since 2012, he's released two 4-CD operas; a 12-CD set of duos with various partners; a 7-CD set of the music of Lennie Tristano and associated artists; an 11-CD set of Charlie Parker's music; a 12-CD set of vocal music; an 8-CD set of duos with Eugene Chadbourne; a 4-CD set of collaborations with Nels Cline, Greg Saunier, and Taylor Ho Bynum; and an audio Blu-Ray of 12 compositions for sextet, septet, and nonet, totaling over 11 hours of music. And that's probably not all of it."

Compositional style and systems

Braxton has written several volumes to explain his theories and works, such as the three-volume Tri-Axium Writings and the five-volume Composition Notes, both published by Frog Peak Music.

Titles

Braxton often titles his compositions with diagrams or numbers and letters. Some diagrams have a clear meaning or signification, as on For Trio, where the title indicates the physical positions of the performers. The titles can themselves be musical notation indicating to the performer how a piece is played. Some letters are identifiable as the initials of Braxton's friends and musical colleagues, but many titles remain inscrutable to critics. By the mid-to-late 1980s, Braxton's titles began to incorporate drawings and illustrations, as in the title of his four-act opera cycle, Trillium R. Others began to include lifelike images of inanimate objects such as train cars, which were most notably seen after the advent of his Ghost Trance Music system. Braxton settled on a system of opus-numbers to make referring to these pieces simpler, and earlier pieces have had opus-numbers retroactively added to them.

Language Music
Language Music was Braxton's original composition system, first used as an approach to solo improvisation. By limiting the music to a single parameter (for example, trills), Braxton was able to explore beyond the surface particulars of a given parameter. These language "types", which serve as the vocabulary of his Language Music, are often signaled by hand cues.

He has said that "language music is the basis of my work" and that it also serves as the basis for his other compositional systems. Braxton emphasizes working with "notation as practiced in black improvised creativity", where it functions "as both a recall-factor as well as a generating factor". Accordingly, the language types function as both parameters and prompts in ensemble settings, where they may be used to structure improvisation or signal other performers.

While he has catalogued over 100 sound "classifications" or "relationships", Braxton uses twelve types in most of his work.

Collage forms
Braxton's various quartets in the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s were laboratories for his experiments in collage forms, or what he refers to as a constructor set approach to composition, giving musicians different compositions to be performed simultaneously. This collage strategy became an integral feature of Braxton's approach to composition and band-leading.

One important part of these collage structures was the pulse-track structures. These pulse tracks were graphic notation given to the rhythm section that allowed them to break free from traditional rhythm section approaches but still play a supportive role behind the other instruments.

Ghost Trance Music
The Ghost Trance Music compositional series comprises approximately 150 pieces written from 1995 to 2006. Inspired by 19th century Native American Ghost Dances, the GTM works are written to provide a "gateway to ritual space" with elements "designed to function as pathways between Braxton's various musical systems".

The central thread in a GTM composition is a ceaseless "primary melody", which Braxton describes as "a melody that never ends". This line of music, which may extend for 80 pages or more, is written to be played in unison by any performer who wishes to participate in the "ritual circle dance". Musicians are also able to move in and out of the primary melody, with notes marked by a shape—a circle, triangle, or square—signaling opportunities to move to a different composition, or mode of composing, in the system. A circle indicates that a performer can engage in an open or a "language music" improvisation; if the latter, performers may also give visual cues prompting others to follow the logics of a specific Braxtonian "language type". Triangles and squares are both invitations to play other notated compositions (or "stable identities"). Triangles represent specific "secondary material" included with each GTM score, whereas squares signify pre-selected "outside" materials; these tertiary works, chosen prior to a given performance, may include any compositions in Braxton's oeuvre (including other Ghost Trance Music works).

Braxton's notational devices also ensure variation within the primary melody itself, often by the orders they refuse to give: for example, a traditional clef assigns a note to a specific line, but the diamond-shaped "open clef" of a GTM composition allows performers to choose any clef or transposition. Micro-level interventions include "open accidentals" that can be played either sharp or flat.

The Ghost Trance Music works went through four phases over the eleven years of their composition, with each phase considered a different "species" of GTM. Changes across species include increasing range and variation of elements such as rhythm, dynamics, and articulation. The escalation in complexity and intensity culminates in Fourth Species GTM, also called Accelerator Class Ghost Trance Music; these works have been described by a performer as "a labyrinth of hyper-notated activities", featuring irregular polyrhythms, dynamic extremes, color-coding to denote additional variables––and no geometric invitations to depart.

Falling River Musics
In his Falling River Musics Braxton began to work on "image logics", resulting in graphic scores with large paintings and drawings with smaller legends of various symbols. Performs must find their own meanings in the symbols and construct a path through the score, balancing "the demands of traditional notation interpretation and esoteric inter-targeting."

Graphic scores
The scoring techniques used in 76 are reminiscent of a number of graphic works by other experimental composers. In a lecture about Composition 76, Braxton "cite[d] as inspirations" Karlheinz Stockhausen's Zyklus (1959), for a soloist playing thirteen percussion instruments, as well as the fi ve pieces in John Cage's Imaginary Landscape series (1939– 1952), some of which employ unconventional percussion akin to the AACM's little instruments. All of these pieces are aleatoric— in other words, the performers have to improvise (although Stockhausen and Cage would instead use terms like "intuitive music" and "indeterminacy"). Composition 76 also recalls other improvisatory Stockhausen works for winds, percussion, and voice, including Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Sternklang(1971). However, few of the musicians in Stockhausen's orbit could have played the dozens of instruments that Braxton wanted to feature in Composition 76. Fortunately, Braxton could turn to another community of musicians, one much closer to home.

Personal life

Braxton's son Tyondai Braxton is also a musician, and the former guitarist, keyboardist and vocalist with American math rock band Battles.

Discography

Awards
Braxton's awards include a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1994 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a 2014 NEA Jazz Master Award, and a 2020 United States Artists Fellowship.

In 2009, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège in Belgium; fellow honorees included Archie Shepp, Frederic Rzewski, Robert Wyatt, and Arvo Pärt. In 2016, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from the New England Conservatory in the United States.

References

External links

 The Tri-Centric Foundation Official Website
 Research papers by Anthony Braxton
 Interview of Braxton by Ted Panken for WKCR, 1995
 "The Third Millennial Interview" by Mike Heffley, 2001
 Interview of Braxton by Ted Panken at Intakt Records, 2002
 Comprehensive discography through 2016
 Sessionography
 List No. 82: An Introduction to the Music of Anthony Braxton

1945 births
20th-century African-American musicians
20th-century American composers
20th-century American male musicians
20th-century American pianists
20th-century clarinetists
20th-century classical composers
20th-century American saxophonists
21st-century African-American musicians
21st-century American composers
21st-century American pianists
21st-century clarinetists
21st-century classical composers
21st-century American saxophonists
Academics from Illinois
21st-century African-American academics
21st-century American academics
African-American classical composers
American classical composers
African-American classical pianists
African-American jazz composers
African-American jazz musicians
African-American jazz pianists
African-American male classical composers
African-American music educators
African-American opera composers
American classical clarinetists
American classical pianists
American experimental musicians
American flautists
American jazz alto saxophonists
American jazz baritone saxophonists
American jazz bass saxophonists
American jazz clarinetists
American jazz composers
American jazz soprano saxophonists
American jazz tenor saxophonists
American male classical composers
American male classical pianists
American male jazz composers
American male saxophonists
American multi-instrumentalists
American music educators
Antilles Records artists
Arista Records artists
Avant-garde jazz musicians
Big band bandleaders
BYG Actuel artists
Circle (jazz band) members
Clean Feed Records artists
Creative Construction Company members
Delmark Records artists
ECM Records artists
Experimental composers
Firehouse 12 Records artists
Free jazz saxophonists
Freedom Records artists
Globe Unity Orchestra members
Intakt Records artists
Jazz musicians from Illinois
Jazz-influenced classical composers
Leo Records artists
Living people
MacArthur Fellows
Male opera composers
Mills College faculty
Music & Arts artists
Musicians from Chicago
Pi Recordings artists
RogueArt artists
Roosevelt University alumni
Sackville Records artists
Wesleyan University faculty
Okka Disk artists
20th-century flautists
21st-century flautists
Emanem Records artists
African-American philosophers

Anthony Braxton


El Domo is an 11,000-seat indoor arena located in San Luis Potosi City.  It is used primarily for bullfighting and concerts, but can also accommodate other events, including circuses, lucha libre, ice hockey, basketball and other special events.  The arena contains 32 luxury suites, each containing 18 seats, plus parking for 9,000 cars.  There are four interior ramps and two elevators in the arena.  The arena concourse includes 40 points of sale and eight concession stands.

The arena opened in 2010 and displaced Auditorio Miguel Barragan as San Luis Potosi's primary indoor venue.  Luis Miguel, Gloria Trevi, Yuri, El Bando de Recodo, Aracely Arambula, Lorena Herrera and Los Tigres del Norte have performed here since it opened.  It has been the site of CMLL matches and several preseason basketball games.

External links
Official website

References

Indoor arenas in Mexico
San Luis Potosí City
Sports venues completed in 2010
2010 establishments in Mexico
Bullrings in Mexico
Volleyball venues in Mexico
Basketball venues in Mexico

El Domo


The word Uralic refers to the Uralic languages and their speakers. It is named for the Ural region of Russia. See also:
 Eskimo–Uralic languages
 Indo-Uralic languages
 Proto-Uralic homeland hypotheses
 Proto-Uralic language
 Uralic neopaganism
 Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
 Uralic–Yukaghir languages
 Uralo-Siberian languages

See also

 Ural (disambiguation)

Uralic (disambiguation)


Alfred Edward "Bill" Luders, Jr. (December 31, 1909 – January 31, 1999) was an American naval architect, who designed all but one of the Sea Sprite Sailing Yachts.

Born in Stamford, Connecticut, Luders attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, then forwent further education to undertake an apprenticeship in naval architecture. Luders later became the director of the family business, Luders Marine Construction Company in Stamford, which was founded by his father, A.E. Luders, Sr., in 1908.

In 1946, Luders was one of a committee of five boat designers (including George Hinman, Arthur Knapp, Emil "Bus" Mosbacher and Cornelius Shields) who codified and regulated the International One Design class of yachts.

With the revival of the America's Cup yacht race with 12-meter yachts in 1958, Luders built the yacht Weatherly to a design by Philip Rhodes. Although the yacht was not selected that year, it successfully defended the Cup at the 1962 America's Cup against the Australian yacht Gretel.

Designs
Sea Sprite 27
Sea Sprite 34

References

1909 births
1999 deaths
Engineers from Connecticut
American yacht designers
The Hill School alumni

Bill Luders


The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, also known as Dr. Wiley's Law, was the first of a series of significant consumer protection laws which was enacted by Congress in the 20th century and led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. Its main purpose was to ban foreign and interstate traffic in adulterated or mislabeled food and drug products, and it directed the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry to inspect products and refer offenders to prosecutors. It required that active ingredients be placed on the label of a drug's packaging and that drugs could not fall below purity levels established by the United States Pharmacopeia or the National Formulary.

In the late 1800s, the quality of food in the United States decreased significantly as populations moved to cities and the time from farm to market increased. Many food producers turned to using dangerous preservatives, even formaldehyde, to keep food fresh. Simultaneously, the quality of medicine was abysmal. Quack medicine was frequent, and many drugs were addictive or dangerous without actually providing a curative effect. Opium and alcohol were chief ingredients, even in infant medicines. The work of muckraking journalists exposed the horrific practices of both industries and caused public outcry.

Foremost among such exposés was The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, published the same year as the act. With its graphic and revolting descriptions of unsanitary conditions and unscrupulous practices rampant in the meatpacking industry, it was an inspirational piece that kept the public's attention on the important issue of unhygienic meat processing plants.  Sinclair quipped, "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach," as outraged readers demanded and got the Pure Food and Drug Act, as well as the 1906 Federal Meat Inspection Act.

Historical significance
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was a key piece of Progressive Era legislation, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt on the same day as the Federal Meat Inspection Act. Enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Act was assigned to the Bureau of Chemistry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture which was renamed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1930. The Meat Inspection Act was assigned to what is now known as the Food Safety and Inspection Service, which remains in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The first federal law regulating foods and drugs, the 1906 Act's reach was limited to foods and drugs moving in interstate commerce. Although the law drew upon many precedents, provisions, and legal experiments pioneered in individual states, the federal law defined "misbranding" and "adulteration" for the first time and prescribed penalties for each. The law recognized the U.S. Pharmacopeia and the National Formulary as standards authorities for drugs, but made no similar provision for federal food standards. The law was principally a "truth in labeling" law designed to raise standards in the food and drug industries and protect the reputations and pocketbooks of honest businessmen.

Particular drugs deemed addictive
Under the law, drug labels, for example, had to list any of 10 ingredients that were deemed "addictive" and/or "dangerous" on the product label if they were present, and could not list them if they were not present. Alcohol, morphine, opium, and cannabis were all included on the list of these "addictive" and/or "dangerous" drugs. The law also established a federal cadre of food and drug inspectors that one Southern opponent of the legislation criticized as "a Trojan horse with a bellyful of inspectors and other employees." Penalties under the law were modest, but an under-appreciated provision of the Act proved more powerful than monetary penalties. Goods found in violation of various areas of the law were subject to seizure and destruction at the expense of the manufacturer. That, combined with a legal requirement that all convictions be published as Notices of Judgment, proved to be important tools in the enforcement of the statute and had a deterrent effect upon would-be violators.

Deficiencies in this original statute, which had become noticeable by the 1920s, led to the replacement of the 1906 statute with the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act which was enacted in 1938 and signed by President Franklin Roosevelt. This act, along with its numerous amendments, remains the statutory basis for federal regulation of all foods, drugs, biological products, cosmetics, medical devices, tobacco, and radiation-emitting devices by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

History of passage
An 1882 article in Scientific American describes "New Laws for Analyzing Food and Drugs" and highlights historical aspects. Part of the draft stated:"An article shall be deemed to be adulterated within the meaning of this act.A.-In the case of drugs:* If, when sold under or by a name recognized in the United States Pharmacopeia, it differs from the standard of strength, quality, or purity laid down in such work.* If when sold under or by a name not recognized in the United States Pharmacopeia, but which is found in some other pharmacopeia or ether standard work on materia medica, it differs from the standard of strength, quality, or purity laid down in such work.* If its strength or purity fall below the professed standard under which it is soldB.-In the case of food or drink:* If any substance or substances has or have been mixed with it as to reduce or lower or injuriously affect its quality of strength* If any inferior or cheaper substance or substances have been substituted wholly or in part for the article*If any valuable constituent of the article has been wholly or is part abstracted* If it be an imitation of or be sold under the name of another article* If it consists wholly or in part of a diseased or decomposed, or putrid or rotten, animal or vegetable substance, whether manufactured or not, or in the case of milk, if it is the produce of a diseased animal* If it be colored, or coated, or polished, or powdered, whereby damage is concealed, or it is made to appear better than it really is, or of greater value"―Scientific American, 7 Jan 1882

It took 27 years to adopt the 1906 statute, during which time the public was made aware of many problems with foods and drugs in the U.S. Muckraking journalists, such as Samuel Hopkins Adams, targeted the patent medicine industry with its high-alcoholic content patent medicines, soothing syrups for infants with opium derivatives, and "red clauses" in newspaper contracts providing that patent medicine ads (upon which most newspapers of the time were dependent) would be withdrawn if the paper expressed support for food and drug regulatory legislation.

The Chief Chemist of the Bureau of Chemistry, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, captured the country's attention with his hygienic table studies, which began with a modest Congressional appropriation in 1902. The goal of the table trial was to study the human effects of common preservatives used in foods during a period of rapid changes in the food supply brought about by the need to feed cities and support an industrializing nation increasingly dependent on immigrant labor. Wiley recruited young men to eat all their meals at a common table as he added increased "doses" of preservatives including borax, benzoate, formaldehyde, sulfites, and salicylates. The table trials captured the nation's fancy and were soon dubbed "The Poison Squad" by newspapers covering the story. The men soon adopted the motto "Only the Brave dare eat the fare" and at times the publicity given to the trials became a burden. Though many results of the trial came to be in dispute, there was no doubt that formaldehyde was dangerous and it disappeared quickly as a preservative. Wiley himself felt that he had found adverse effects from large doses of each of the preservatives and the public seemed to agree with Wiley. In many cases, most particularly with ketchup and other condiments, the use of preservatives was often used to disguise insanitary production practices. Although the law itself did not proscribe the use of some of these preservatives, consumers increasingly turned away from many products with known preservatives.

The 1906 statute regulated food and drugs moving in interstate commerce and forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of poisonous patent medicines. The Act arose due to public education and exposés from public interest guardians such as Upton Sinclair and Samuel Hopkins Adams, social activist Florence Kelley, researcher Harvey W. Wiley, and President Theodore Roosevelt.

Beginnings of the Food and Drug Administration
The 1906 Act paved the way for the eventual creation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is generally considered to be that agency's founding date, though the agency existed before the law was passed and was not named FDA until later. "While the Food and Drug act remains a foundational law of the FDA mission, it's not the law that created the FDA. [Initially,] the Bureau of Chemistry (the precursor to the FDA) regulated food safety. In 1927, the Bureau was reorganized into the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration and the Bureau of Chemistry and Soils. The FDIA was renamed the FDA in 1930."

The law itself was largely replaced by the much more comprehensive Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938.

Enforcement of labeling and future ramifications
The Pure Food and Drug Act was initially concerned with ensuring products were labeled correctly. Later efforts were made to outlaw certain products that were not safe, followed by efforts to outlaw products which were safe but not effective. For example, there was an attempt to outlaw Coca-Cola in 1909 because of its excessive caffeine content; caffeine had replaced cocaine as the active ingredient in Coca-Cola in 1903. In the case United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola, the judge found that Coca-Cola had a right to use caffeine as it saw fit, although Coca-Cola eventually lost when the government appealed to the Supreme Court. It reached a settlement with the United States government to reduce the caffeine amount.

In addition to caffeine, the Pure Food and Drug Act required that drugs such as alcohol, cocaine, heroin, morphine, and cannabis, be accurately labeled with contents and dosage. Previously many drugs had been sold as patent medicines with secret ingredients or misleading labels. Cocaine, heroin, cannabis, and other such drugs continued to be legally available without prescription as long as they were labeled. It is estimated that sale of patent medicines containing opiates decreased by 33% after labeling was mandated. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 is cited by drug policy reform advocates such as Jim Gray as a successful model for re-legalization of currently prohibited drugs by requiring accurate labels, monitoring of purity and dose, and consumer education.

References

Sources

 For years preceding and following passage of the Act:
1896, First report of the station on adulterated food products; 1897; 1898; 1899;  1900; 1901; 1902; 1903; 1904; 1905; 1906; 1907: Food, Food, Drugs; 1908: Not located; 1909: Not located; 1910: Not located; 1911: Food, Drugs

James Harvey Young, Pure Food:  Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (New Jersey:  Princeton University Press, 1989).
Mitchell Okun, Fair Play in the Marketplace:  The First Battle for Pure Food and Drugs (Dekalb:  University of Illinois Press, 1986).
Suzanne White Junod, Chemistry and Controversy:  Food Additive Regulation, unpublished dissertation, Emory University, 1994.
Andrew F. Smith, Pure Ketchup:  A History of America's National Condiment (Columbia:  University of South Carolina Press, 1996)
Goodwin, Pure Food, Drug, and Drink Crusaders

External links

1906 in American politics
1906 in American law
Food and Drug Administration
Food law
Food safety in the United States
Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt
Progressive Era in the United States
United States federal controlled substances legislation
United States federal health legislation

Pure Food and Drug Act


In probability theory, the Chinese restaurant process is a discrete-time stochastic process, analogous to seating customers at tables in a restaurant.
Imagine a restaurant with an infinite number of circular tables, each with infinite capacity. Customer 1 sits at the first table. The next customer either sits at the same table as customer 1, or the next table. This continues, with each customer choosing to either sit at an occupied table with a probability proportional to the number of customers already there (i.e., they are more likely to sit at a table with many customers than few), or an unoccupied table. At time n, the n customers have been partitioned among m ≤ n tables (or blocks of the partition). The results of this process are exchangeable, meaning the order in which the customers sit does not affect the probability of the final distribution. This property greatly simplifies a number of problems in population genetics, linguistic analysis, and image recognition.

The restaurant analogy first appeared in a 1985 write-up by David Aldous, where it was attributed to Jim Pitman (who additionally credits Lester Dubins).

Formal definition
For any positive integer , let  denote the set of all partitions of the set . The Chinese restaurant process takes values in the infinite Cartesian product .

The value of the process at time  is a partition  of the set , whose probability distribution is determined as follows.  At time , the trivial partition  is obtained (with probability one). At time  the element "" is either:
 added to one of the blocks of the partition , where each block is chosen with probability  where  is the size of the block (i.e. number of elements), or
 added to the partition  as a new singleton block, with probability .
The random partition so generated has some special properties. It is exchangeable in the sense that relabeling  does not change the distribution of the partition, and it is consistent in the sense that the law of the partition of  obtained by removing the element  from the random partition  is the same as the law of the random partition .

The probability assigned to any particular partition (ignoring the order in which customers sit around any particular table) is

where  is a block in the partition  and  is the size of .

The definition can be generalized by introducing a parameter  which modifies the probability of the new customer sitting at a new table to  and correspondingly modifies the probability of them sitting at a table of size  to . The vanilla process introduced above can be recovered by setting . Intuitively,  can be interpreted as the effective number of customers sitting at the first empty table.

Alternative definition
An equivalent, but subtly different way to define the Chinese restaurant process, is to let new customers choose companions rather than tables. Customer  chooses to sit at the same table as any one of the  seated customers with probability , or chooses to sit at a new, unoccupied table with probability . Notice that in this formulation, the customer chooses a table without having to count table occupancies---we don't need .

Distribution of the number of tables

The Chinese restaurant table distribution (CRT) is the probability distribution on the number of tables in the Chinese restaurant process. It can be understood as the sum of  independent Bernoulli random variables, each with a different parameter:

The probability mass function of  is given by

where  denotes Stirling numbers of the first kind.

Generalization
This construction can be generalized to a model with two parameters,  & , commonly called the strength (or concentration) and discount parameters respectively.  At time , the next customer to arrive finds  occupied tables and decides to sit at an empty table with probability

or at an occupied table  of size  with probability

In order for the construction to define a valid probability measure it is necessary to suppose that either  and  for some ; or that  and .

Under this model the probability assigned to any particular partition  of , in terms of the Pochhammer k-symbol, is

where, by convention, , and for

Thus, for the case when  the partition probability can be expressed in terms of the Gamma function as

In the one-parameter case, where  is zero, this simplifies to

Or, when  is zero,

As before, the probability assigned to any particular partition depends only on the block sizes, so as before the random partition is exchangeable in the sense described above.  The consistency property still holds, as before, by construction.

If , the probability distribution of the random partition of the integer  thus generated is the Ewens distribution with parameter , used in population genetics and the unified neutral theory of biodiversity.

Derivation

Here is one way to derive this partition probability.  Let  be the random block into which the number  is added, for .  Then

The probability that  is any particular partition of the set  is the product of these probabilities as  runs from  to .  Now consider the size of block : it increases by one each time we add one element into it. When the last element in block  is to be added in, the block size is . For example, consider this sequence of choices: (generate a new block )(join )(join )(join ). In the end, block  has 4 elements and the product of the numerators in the above equation gets .  Following this logic, we obtain  as above.

Expected number of tables
For the one parameter case, with  and , the number of tables is distributed according to the chinese restaurant table distribution. The expected value of this random variable, given that there are  seated customers, is

where  is the digamma function. In the general case () the expected number of occupied tables is

however, note that the  function here is not the standard gamma function.

The Indian buffet process
It is possible to adapt the model such that each data point is no longer uniquely associated with a class (i.e., we are no longer constructing a partition), but may be associated with any combination of the classes. This strains the restaurant-tables analogy and so is instead likened to a process in which a series of diners samples from some subset of an infinite selection of dishes on offer at a buffet. The probability that a particular diner samples a particular dish is proportional to the popularity of the dish among diners so far, and in addition the diner may sample from the untested dishes. This has been named the Indian buffet process
and can be used to infer latent features in data.

Applications
The Chinese restaurant process is closely connected to Dirichlet processes and Pólya's urn scheme, and therefore useful in applications of Bayesian statistics including nonparametric Bayesian methods. The Generalized Chinese Restaurant Process is closely related to Pitman–Yor process. These processes have been used in many applications, including modeling text, clustering biological microarray data, biodiversity modelling, and image reconstruction

See also
Ewens sampling formula
Preferential attachment
Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel

References

External links
Introduction to the Dirichlet Distribution and Related Processes by Frigyik, Kapila and Gupta
 A talk by Michael I. Jordan on the CRP:
 http://videolectures.net/icml05_jordan_dpcrp/

Stochastic processes
Nonparametric Bayesian statistics

Chinese restaurant process


The Federal Authority for Audiovisual Communication Services (, AFSCA) was an Argentine state agency. It was created by the Audiovisual Communication Services Law as the authority in charge of enforcing law.

History
The entity began its activities on December 10, 2009. It was established by presidential decree 1525/2009. Martín Sabbatella was appointed as its president, at the head of a board of directors made up of parliamentarians from the three main blocks, representatives of the universities and of the Federal Council.

On December 23, 2015, the AFSCA was intervened by the President Mauricio Macri. This was through a decision challenged before the Justice. On December 30, 2015, the Chief of Staff Marcos Peña announced that President Macri had sanctioned a decree of necessity and urgency. The number was not specified. In addition, the date was not published in the Official Gazette, which provided for the elimination of the AFSCA and its merger with the AFTIC. This led to a new public body called the National Communications Entity (ENACOM).

On January 4, 2016, the decree of necessity and urgency 267/2015 signed on December 29, 2015, announced by the Chief of Staff, was published in the Official Gazette.

Composition
The AFSCA was led by a seven-member board, consisting of the following:

1 president and 1 director named by the president.
3 directors nominated by parliamentary committee, each representing one of the top three parliamentary blocs.
2 directors nominated by the Federal Council for Audiovisual Communication; one of these had to be an academic in the fields of information sciences, communications or journalism from a national university.

Other websites
Official website

2009 establishments in South America
2016 disestablishments


Bryan Christopher Williams, better known by his stage name Birdman (formerly Baby), is an American rapper and record executive. He is the co-founder of Cash Money Records with his brother. In 1997, he became part of a rap duo called Big Tymers. He was the mentor and father figure of Lil Wayne and is currently one of the richest rappers in the United States. Birdman has a reported net worth of $160 million in 2014.

Discography

Solo albums

Singles
2001: Do That (featuring P. Diddy, Mannie Fresh and Tateeze)
2002: What Happened to That Boy (featuring Clipse)
2002: Baby You Can Do It (featuring Toni Braxton)
2004: Shine On (featuring Lil Wayne)
2004: Neck of the Woods (featuring Lil Wayne)
2007: Pop Bottles (featuring Lil Wayne and Jadakiss)
2007: 100 Million (featuring Rick Ross, Dre', Young Jeezy and Lil Wayne)
2008: I Run This (featuring Lil Wayne)
2009: Always Strapped (featuring Lil Wayne and Mack Maine)
2009: Written on Her (featuring Jay Sean)
2009: Money to Blow (featuring Drake and Lil Wayne)
2009: 4 My Town (Play Ball) (featuring Drake and Lil Wayne)
2010: Loyalty (featuring Tyga and Lil Wayne)
2010: Fire Flame (featuring Lil Wayne)
2011: I Get Money (featuring Mack Maine and Lil Wayne)
2011: Y.U.Mad (featuring Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne)
2012: B-Boyz (featuring Kendrick Lamar, Ace Hood, Mack Maine and DJ Khaled)
2012: Born Stunna (featuring Rick Ross)
2012: Dark Shades (featuring Lil Wayne and Mack Maine)
2012: "Shout Out" (featuring French Montana and Gudda Gudda)

References

Other websites

1969 births
Living people
20th-century American rappers
21st-century American musicians
Rappers from Louisiana
Musicians from New Orleans

Birdman (rapper)


"Inganno" () is an Italian term for one of the two musical devices: an interrupted cadence, or a type of transposition used in 16th- and early 17th-century Italian music. This article will concentrate on the latter meaning.

The earliest explanation of the term is given by Giovanni Artusi in his Seconda parte dell'Artusi (1603). An inganno occurs when one voice states a theme, and then the other picks it up without using the same intervals, but retaining the names of the hexachord syllables. Artusi provides the following example:

Here the original theme is in the natural hexachord. The first note is then transposed to the hard hexachord (G sol into D sol), the second is retained, the third and the fourth are transposed to the soft hexachord F fa into B fa, C ut into F ut), and so on.

Only one piece is known to explicitly refer to inganni in the title: Giovanni Maria Trabaci's Recercare con tre fughe et inganni from 1603. But numerous other pieces from the era make use of the technique. Examples include numerous works by Girolamo Frescobaldi (for instance, Fantasia seconda of 1608) and ricercares attributed to Jacques Brunel (the first recorded systematic use of inganno); it has been suggested by scholar Roland Jackson that the technique played an important part in the development of the late Italian madrigal, including the famous works of Carlo Gesualdo.

References

Musical techniques

Inganno