Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amesha Spenta is a 9-minute musical composition for two pianos and orchestra (2fls., 2cls., 2obs., 2bsns., 2hns., 2tpts., tbn. b. tbn. , timp., perc., and strings). It incorporates the Zoroastrian story of creation as its narrative framework and is the account of a struggle between the Zorastrian supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, and its adversary, Angra Mainyu (the destructive spirit). Angra Mainyu, later referred to as Ahriman, is the oldest known portrayal of the devil in a sacred text. The Amesha Spenta (divine sparks) are six divinities, each possessing a different divine character, created by Ahura Mazda with the intention of protecting the world, and defeating the evil Angra Mainyu. There is a close correlation between the dualism of good and evil as portrayed in Zoroastrianism, and the concerto form utilized in the composition: in both, we see a struggle for dominance between the various forces present. This piece is on one hand an attempt to cultivate better understanding of the Zoroastrian culture particularly in the United States, Canada, and Iran, and on the other, demonstrates the interconnectivity of musical traditions as far East as India, and as far West as Greece. My research shows a clear relationship between Zoroastrian chant, which dates back to 1500 BCE, and its successors, Western plainchant, and the Quranic recitation. While the work doesn’t contain any direct references to Zoroastrian chant, it incorporates Persian folk melodies, and shares commonalities with descendants of the above styles. Amesha Spenta is written in an attempt to address important current global concerns, including the persecution and unjust treatment of ethnic and religious minorities in countries such as Iran, while bringing these issues to the attention of a morally divided North American society. It aims to find cultural and artistic commonalities between various ethnic groups, to unite the followers of these religions through the language of music, and to celebrate them for their diversity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".