Music Commons^™

A Quiet Mind: The Key To Musical Performance, Rebecca Ann Percy

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Red Note New Music Festival Composition Competition Announcement, 2019, School Of Music, Carl Schimmel, Roy Magnuson

Red Note New Music Festival

The RED NOTE New Music Festival at Illinois State University is a week-long event which features outstanding performances of contemporary concert music.

Meaning Beyond Words: A Musical Analysis Of Afro-Cuban Batá Drumming, Javier Diaz

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of a musical analysis of Afro-Cuban batá drumming. Current scholarship focuses on ethnographic research, descriptive analysis, transcriptions, and studies on the language encoding capabilities of batá. However, this artistically sophisticated tradition demands a more in-depth study of its musical manufacture. Drawing from experience as a ritual batá player and as an oricha priest, I have completed the current study by following three primary analytical modalities: (1) sonic landscape, which encompasses: sound vocabulary, form, individual drum parts, and balance of musical elements; (2) timbral design, how the different batá sounds articulate meaningful and functionally distinguishable structures; (3) the ...

Grit & Ghetto: American Pop Music From The '90s To The '00s, Ernest M. Oleksy

The Downtown Review

Since music became easily accessible through technological advances, the industries progression has been largely dictated by the preferences of middle-class, adolescent Caucasians. When bearing this in mind, the prevalence of pop music that was either made or inspired by African American influences, particularly from an urban setting, or that invokes the persona of the white, suburban "rejects", like Nirvana, becomes an interesting inquiry. This article charts how both members and pretenders of the seemingly unpopular subgroups of black "ghetto" city-folk and awkward, friendless scruffy white males has led to some of the most critically-acclaimed and popularly adored genres of music ...

Shifting The Margins: Music Educators’ Self-Reported Inclusion Practices For Marginalized Students In Southeastern Public High Schools, Frances Barkley, Scot Rademaker

The Winthrop McNair Research Bulletin

There exists a significant underrepresentation of racial minorities, low-income students, and English Language Learners (ELLs) in the average American music program (Elpus & Abril, 2011; Hoffman, 2011). Factors that perpetuate this underrepresentation include cultural homogeneity of music educators, and a Eurocentric approach to music education that does not validate the musical skills of students from other cultures. This study examines the self-reported inclusion, diversification, and accommodation strategies of public high school music teachers in the southeastern United States. This study explores what measures music educators are taking to combat underrepresentation, and to what extent they are prioritizing inclusion. This study seeks to understand ...

The Inclusive Orchestra: Adapting String Instruments And Instruction For Musicians With Special Needs, Eric Baker

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Symposium

In recent years, there has been progress in strategies for teaching students to play string instruments in orchestra. However, special education in correlation with the string classroom is still lacking with useful information that can be used to aid our students and teachers. Due to this lack of information, it is difficult for teachers to have all their students feel involved in their class. After a thorough review of string special education literature, I compiled a list of resources that can be used to move this profession forward. These findings range from different teaching strategies to manipulating the instrument to ...

Music And The Act Of Song In Dante’S ‘Purgatorio’ And ‘Paradiso’, Kevin Brownlee

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

The present paper explores the relation between the vernacular words used to designate the Act of Song, and the inscribed texts of the Sung Music itself, by considering a set of key cases first in Purgatory and then in Paradise. It focuses on important moments of structural and literary transition, at the same time as showing how sung sacred texts relate to each other (and to other kinds of passages) in important functional ways. I examine how song works in five key moments of the protagonist’s journey: the exit from the final terrace of the Purgatorial mountain, and the ...

From Casella To Cacciaguida: A Musical Progression Toward Innocence, Thomas E. Peterson

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

The essay draws an arc between the episodes of Casella and Cacciaguida under the sign of music. It explores the symmetry between the brief encounter with the minstrel who sings lines from Dante’s poetry, and the extended episode with Dante’s ancestor, who instructs him about his destiny. The symmetry is at once biographical, as the two scenes are among the most personal in the Commedia, theoretical, as they exemplify the relations between poetry and music expounded on in De vulgari eloquentia and Convivio, and theological, in a sense consistent with the writings of Augustine and Boethius. If Mars ...

Dante, Liszt, And The Alienated Agony Of Hell, Tekla Babyak

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno portrays Hell as an alienated realm in which the doomed spirits must spend eternity in isolation and regret. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886) responded to this work with his Dante Symphony (1857) based on the Inferno and Purgatorio, in which he gave musical form to Dante’s textual expressions of agony. Throughout this two-movement work, Liszt offers a musical translation of the theological and emotional world portrayed in Dante’s Divina Commedia. This article examines Liszt’s evocations of silence, memory, regret, and redemption in the Dante Symphony. These evocations are enhanced by Liszt ...

Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century Musical Adaptations Of Dante’S ‘Commedia’: ‘Dante’S Greatest Hits’, Maria Ann Roglieri

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

Composers through the centuries have tried to depict Dante’s Commedia in music, using Dante’s verses, characters, and design for Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and their compositions. This paper looks at some of the trends in musical adaptations of the Commedia and also some of the “greatest hits”—in the author’s opinion. Works by James Norton, Patric Standford, Jacob ter Veldhuis, David Denniston, Franz Liszt, Donald Martino, Tod Machover, Anita Saij, Allik and Mulder, and Theodore Wiprud are discussed.

“Dentro A La Danza De Le Quattro Belle” (Purg. 31.104): Dance In Dante’S ‘Commedia’, Madison U. Sowell

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

Missing from standard reference works on Dante’s Commedia are separate entries devoted exclusively to dance or dancing. Primary sources for the history of dance in the Italian Trecento derive from tablatures (musical notations), scattered iconographic images, and literary works, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Dante’s Commedia. Representations of dancing in these works invariably double as a symbolic language or meta-commentary on the surrounding narrative. The interpretation of dance’s role in late medieval art and literature depends not only on the context but also on the type of dance depicted. This article focuses on the allegorical roles ...

Conversations With Francesca: Tchaikovsky, Liszt, And Wagner (And Zandonai And Granados And Rachmaninov) Go To Hell, Jess Tyre

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

Tchaikovsky completed his tone poem Francesca da Rimini in 1876, during the period he was attending the premiere of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at Bayreuth. Critics of the work drew comparisons with the Tetralogy and faulted what seemed to be Tchaikovsky’s derivative inspiration. Indeed, the composer him-self acknowledged Wagner’s influence. In this paper, I set aside influence to consider intertextual dialogues between Tchaikovsky’s work and others by Liszt, Zandonai, Rachmaninov, and not Wagner’s Ring, but Tristan und Isolde. Drawing upon theories by Klein and Peirce, I examine parallelisms of topic, melodic contour, tonal motion, and timbral ...

Singing For Dante In ‘Purgatorio’ 30–31, Helena Phillips-Robins

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

This essay investigates types of sociality enacted through song, as depicted in Dante’s Earthly Paradise. The first section of the essay argues that the singing of Psalm 30 (In te, Domine, speravi) in Purgatorio 30 is a way of enacting a particular mode of compassion. In the second section of the essay I argue that Dante’s depiction of Psalm 30—together with his depiction of the antiphon sung in Purgatorio 31, the Asperges me—invites a devotional response from the reader. The sociality of prayer can involve not only the characters, but also the readers of the Commedia ...

“Temprando Col Dolce L’Acerbo”: Instrumental And Vocal Polyphony In The ‘Commedia’, Francesco Ciabattoni

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

This essay tracks the historical-musicological context of the lemma “organi” / “organo” as it appears in Purg. 9.144 and Par. 17.44. Drawing from medieval treatises and monks’ descriptions such as Raban Maur, Notkerus Balbulus, Baldric of Dol, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Wulstan, the author uses intertextual evidence to show that Purg. 9.144 (“quando a cantar con organi si stea”) evokes a great pipe organ as was found in some medieval churches. The essay also argues that Par. 17.43–44 (“come viene ad orecchia / dolce armonia da organo”) should be understood as a polyphonic organum that serves the ...

Stasis And Carnal Song: Dante’S Medusa And The Siren, Fiorentina Russo

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

In his epic journey, Dante experiences entrapments, digressions, and ultimately new apertures, leading him forward on his journey to Paradise. The hag-siren of Purgatorio 19 is one of the primary figures, whose song sways the poet in a moment of reverie, embodying a de-mobilizing entrapment most unique and perilous within the poem. While the patristic and medieval traditions have traditionally portrayed the siren as a figure for the deleterious effects of music on the soul, Dante scholarship has glossed the dolce serena as a coordinate for the Medusa of Inferno 9. The siren's association with the Medusa implicitly harkens ...

Ironizing Ugolino, David Heinsen

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

This article analyzes an adaptation of Canto 33 of the Inferno, a musical setting of Count Ugolino composed by Gaetano Donizetti (1828). The composition is first presented within the frame of its contemporaneous aesthetic, one that treats Ugolino as a pathos-inspired tale of human suffering. Donizetti’s composition, however, fails to align itself to this tragic reading due to structural contradictions that prevent the listener from sympathizing with the musical agent. To address this divergence, the article extends the most recent theories of musical narrative by Byron Almén and Michael Klein to propose an ironic reading of the work, essentially ...

Dante Decrypted: Musica Universalis In The Textual Architecture Of The ‘Commedia’, C.S. Adoyo

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

For seven centuries scholars have speculated about the structural design of Dante’s Commedia but remain perplexed by the poem’s comprehensive ar-chitecture. This study undertakes a strictly empirical quantitative analysis of Dante’s magnum opus to address this lacuna. The outcome of this analysis enumerates the correspondence between the foundational rationale of the Commedia’s textual architecture and both physical and metaphysical concepts of Ptolemaic cosmology and Pythagorean principles of harmony and propor-tion as described by Boethius. The poem manifests a musically and mathemat-ically meticulous design conceptualized as musica universalis and expressed as musica instrumentalis that echoes Paschal and ...

“Canzone... T’Ho Allevato Per Figliuola D’Amore”: Three Songs Of Love In Dante’S ‘Vita Nuova’, Alfred R. Crudale

Bibliotheca Dantesca: Annual Journal of Research Studies

This paper examines the poetics and musicality of three canzoni of Dante’s Vita Nuova and explores how four fundamental musical elements produce specific meanings while evoking a desired emotion in the reader. “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore,” the first canzone of the Vita Nuova, initiates Dante’s poetry of praise as it contributes to the elation of the first third of the work. The two later canzoni, “Donna pietosa” and “Li occhi dolenti,” however, transition the Vita Nuova to a more somber and finally grief-stricken piece. Analysis of the musical elements of these three poems demonstrates how Dante ...

Elaia 2018, Stephen Case

ELAIA

Over the years, the Program has continued to grow and flourish, and the depth of its research continues to increase. This inaugural journal represents the fruits of that development, containing capstone research projects from the 2018 Honors Program senior class and their faculty mentors. The Table of Contents is diverse, and in that way it is a crystal clear reflection of our program’s community of scholars.

I, along with the members of the Honors Council, am gratified by the work of each student and faculty mentor printed within these pages. Congratulations, everyone!

- Stephen Lowe, Honors Program Director

2018-2019 Gingerbread Holiday Concert, Lynn University Philharmonia, Jon Robertson

Philharmonia

16th Annual Gingerbread Holiday Concert presented by Lynn University and Friends of the Conservatory of Music