Nikolai myaskovsky biography of barack obama

Undeterred, he created a campaign committee in and began raising funds to run for a seat in the U. Senate in With the help of political consultant David Axelrod, Obama began assessing his prospects for a Senate win. Encouraged by poll numbers, Obama decided to run for the open U. Senate seat, vacated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald. In the Democratic primary, he defeated multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes with 52 percent of the vote.

That summer, he was invited to deliver the keynote speech in support of John Kerry at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Obama emphasized the importance of unity and made veiled jabs at the George W. Bush administration and the diversionary use of wedge issues. After the convention, Obama returned to his U. Senate bid in Illinois.

His opponent in the general election was supposed to be Republican primary winner Jack Ryan, a wealthy former investment banker. However, Ryan withdrew from the race in June following public disclosure of unsubstantiated sexual deviancy allegations by his ex-wife, actor Jeri Ryan. That August, diplomat and former presidential candidate Alan Keyes accepted the Republican nomination to replace Ryan.

With his win, Obama became only the third African American elected to the U. Senate since Reconstruction. Sworn into office on January 3,Obama partnered with Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana on a bill that expanded efforts to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Eastern Europe and Russia. Then, with Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, he created a website to track all federal spending.

In FebruaryObama made headlines when he announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. He was locked in a tight battle with then-U. He campaigned on an ambitious agenda of financial reform, alternative energy, and reinventing education and health care—all while bringing down the national debt. Because these issues were intertwined with the economic well-being of the nation, he believed all would have to be undertaken simultaneously.

When he took office at age 47, Obama inherited a global economic recession, two ongoing foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the lowest-ever nikolai myaskovsky biography of barack obama favorability rating for the United States. They are serious, and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America: They will be met.

Obama coaxed Congress to expand health care insurance for children and provide legal protection for women seeking equal pay. Housing and credit markets were put on life support, with a market-based plan to buy U. The government made loans to the auto industry, and new regulations were proposed for Wall Street. Obama cut taxes for working families, small businesses, and first-time home buyers.

He reached out to improve relations with Europe, China, and Russia and to open dialogue with Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. He lobbied allies to support a global economic stimulus package. He committed an additional 21, troops to Afghanistan and set an August date for withdrawal of nearly all U. Obama was an early opponent of President George W.

In more dramatic incidents, Obama ordered an attack on pirates off the coast of Somalia and prepared the nation for a swine flu outbreak. He signed an executive order banning excessive interrogation techniques and ordered the closing of the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba within a year—a deadline that ultimately would not be met.

Obama signed his signature health care reform plan, the Affordable Care Act, into law in March The new law prohibited the denial of coverage based on preexisting conditions, allowed citizens under 26 years old to be insured under parental plans, provided for free health screenings for certain citizens, and expanded insurance coverage and access to medical care to millions of Americans.

In Octobera dispute over the federal budget and Republican desires to defund or derail the Affordable Care Act caused a day shutdown of the federal government. The rollout of the reforms were initially bumpy. October saw the failed launch of HealthCare. Extra technical support was brought in to work on the troubled website, which was plagued with glitches for weeks.

The health care law was also blamed for some Americans losing their existing insurance policies, despite repeated assurances from Obama that such cancellations would not occur. The legislation has faced numerous challenges in court and wound up at the U. Supreme Court three times. In the summer ofthe Supreme Court upheld part of the Act regarding health care tax subsidies.

Without these tax credits, buying medical insurance might have become too costly for millions of people. The latest Supreme Court decision about the Affordable Care Act began in when Congressional Republicans dropped the individual mandate tax penalty to zero. His career vividly illustrates the challenges facing artists as they sought to work out a modus vivendi with Soviet power.

Zuk's account depicts the composer and his milieu against the backdrop of his turbulent times, examining his involvement with Soviet musical institutions and his relationships with Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and other notable musicians. Myaskovsky emerges as a man who displayed remarkable courage and integrity in the face of many pressures.

Do you have thoughts and time to share a few of your ideas on this topic? I am also wondering if you might be able to recommend a few good books that compare presidents and their leadership traits? Thanks again so very much. December 21, at am. The rifle-shot topic which has long been of great interest to me is the question of what makes a great president and how would one really attempt to go about comparing presidents from different eras who each faced a variety of dissimilar challenges.

Like Loading Steve said: February 18, at pm. Many thanks for the project, for your reviews. Best of luck. Thank you! John said: February 28, at pm. Steve said: February 28, at pm. While he remained in close contact with Prokofiev during the latter's years of exile from the USSR, he never followed him there. Myaskovsky's reaction to the events of —21 inspired his Symphony No.

The finale contains quite a few quotes—the Dies Irae theme, as well as French revolutionary tunes. The years —, the first years of his teaching at the Moscow Conservatory, were the years in which he experimented most, producing works such as the Tenth and Thirteenth symphonies, the fourth piano sonata and his first string quartet. Perhaps the best example of this experimentative phase is the Thirteenth symphony, which was the only one of his works to be premiered in the United States.

His works were issued by Universal Editionone of Europe's most prestigious publishers. The next few years after are characterized mostly by his apparent discontinuation of his experimental trend, though with no general decrease in craftsmanship. The Violin Concerto dates from these years, the first of two or three concerti, depending on what one counts, the second being for celloand a third if one counts the Lyric ConcertinoOp.

Another work from the period up to is the one-movement Symphony No. Despite his personal feelings about the Stalinist regime, Myaskovsky did his best not to engage in overt confrontation with the Soviet state.

Nikolai myaskovsky biography of barack obama

While some of his works refer to contemporary themes, they do not do so in a programmatic or propagandistic way. The Symphony No. This symphony, sketched immediately after the disaster and premiered in Moscow on 24 Octoberincludes a big funeral march as its slow movement, and the finale is built on Myaskovsky's own song for the Red Air Force'The Aeroplanes are Flying'.

The Salutation Overture was dedicated to Stalin on his sixtieth birthday. The year saw Myaskovsky evacuated, along with Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian among others, to what were then the Kabardino-Balkar regions. There he completed the Symphony-Ballade Symphony No. The sonata-works symphonies, quartets, etc. He does not deny himself a teasingly neurotic scherzo, as in his last two string quartets that in the Thirteenth Quartet, his last published work, is frantic, and almost chiaroscuro but certainly contrasted and the general paring down of means usually allows for direct and reasonably intense expression, as with the Cello Concerto dedicated to and premiered by Sviatoslav Knushevitsky and Cello Sonata No.

While not particularly experimental, there is no suggestion—as with some earlier works—that Scriabin or Arnold Schoenberg might still have been an influence. In Myaskovsky was singled out, with Shostakovich, Khachaturian and Prokofiev, as one of the principal offenders in writing music of anti-Soviet, 'anti-proletarian' and formalist tendencies.

Myaskovsky refused to take part in the proceedings, despite a visit from Tikhon Khrennikov inviting him to deliver a speech of repentance at the next meeting of the Composers' Union. Myaskovsky was long recognized as an individualist, even by the Soviet establishment. In the s the critic Boris Asafyev commented that he was "not the kind of composer the Revolution would like; he reflects life not through the feelings and spirit of the masses, but through the prism of his personal feelings.

He is a sincere and sensible artist, far from 'life's enemy', as he has been portrayed occasionally. He speaks not only for himself, but for many others". Myaskovsky never married and was shy, sensitive and retiring; Pierre Souvtchinsky believed that a "brutal youth in military school and service in the war " left him "a fragile, secretive, introverted man, hiding some mystery within.

It was as if his numerous symphonies provide a convenient if not necessary refuge in which he could hide and transpose his soul into sonorities". Stung by the many accusations in the Soviet press of "individualism, decadence, pessimism, formalism and complexity", Myaskovsky wrote to Asafyev in"Can it be that the psychological world is so foreign to these people?

Myaskovsky exercised an important influence on his many pupils, as a professor of composition at the Moscow Conservatory from until his death. The young Shostakovich considered leaving Leningrad to study with him.