The goals are: to develop high temperature oxide melt solution calorimetric techniques for a variety of nitrides and oxynitrides; to determine thermodynamics of silicon nitride and of ternary phases in rare earth oxide-silica-alumina-nitrogen systems relevant to silicon nitride processing, thermal barrier coatings, and other applications; to develop systematic understanding of the energetics of oxygen-nitrogen substitution, often coupled with altervalent cation substitution, in a variety of oxynitride systems; and to measure enthalpies of formation of a number of binary and ternary nitrides, often containing transition metals, and to begin to develop a systematic understanding of structure-energy relations analogous to that developed for oxide compounds.