Composition Commons^™

A Study On The Compositional Style Of The Flute Chamber Works Of Mel Bonis, Geraldine Margaret Padilla

Dissertations

Mélanie Hélène Bonis (1858-1937) was a female French composer born at a time when musical trends started shifting away from Romanticism. Amidst the various styles that emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, Bonis remained faithful to the practices of the Late-Romantic period. Her style, characterized by its adherence to tonality and classical forms, was considered outdated by the Parisian public and proved to be detrimental in her career. This document focuses on the four chamber works originally written for flute. Bonis’ chamber works demonstrated a composer who was willing to experiment with the modern techniques of the twentieth ...

Midwestern Portrait For Chamber Jazz Ensemble And Solo Tenor Saxophone, Andrew Janak

Student Research, Creative Activity, and Performance - School of Music

“Midwestern Portrait” for Chamber Jazz Ensemble and Solo Tenor Saxophone is an original composition consisting of three main movements, an introduction, and two interludes. The piece is written for a full ensemble of 17 musicians – one solo tenor saxophone, four woodwinds, four brass, four strings, and four rhythm section players. The “Introduction,” “Interlude 1,” and “Interlude 2” feature smaller performing forces while the three main movements (“For GK,” “The Tradition,” “The Search) are written for the full ensemble.

“Movement 1: For GK (Lincoln)” is a tribute to my time at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and showcases the solo tenor saxophone ...

...And The Songs Of Another... For Six Voices & Live Electronics, Matthew David Becker

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

…and the songs of another… is a composition of five songs for six voices and live electronics. Voice is the principal tool of sound generation, and the sounds produced by voice are transformed using extended and non-conventional vocal techniques plus electronics. I hence use voice in this manner with electronics to create unique sound development in a new work.

The text in the composition is generated using phonemes through which syllabic sounds are constructed. The electronics are pre-installed modules that come with the software Max/MSP, and each of the five songs applies different processing. These modules are: a spectral ...

Generating Audio Using Recurrent Neural Networks, Andrew Pfalz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Long Short Term Memory cells are a type of recurrent neural network that perform well when predicting sequence data. This works presents four approaches to modeling audio data. The models are trained to predict either raw audio samples or magnitude spectrum windows based on prior input audio. In a process called sampling, the models can then be employed to generate new audio using what they learned about the data they were trained on.

Four methods for sampling are presented. The first has the model predict a vector for each vector in the input. The second has the model predict one ...

Transformations Of Chant In Marcel Grandjany's Rhapsodie Pour La Harpe, Caitlin A. Thom

Celebration of Learning

Marcel Grandjany’s Rhapsodie pour la Harpe is a standard in pedal harp literature. This essay explores Grandjany’s use of the Gregorian Easter Chant Salve festa dies.

The Composer, The Musicologist, His Wife, And Her Lover: On Lacan’S Relevance To Music, Thomas Reiner

Directions of New Music

This paper asks what it is to write about music. When we ask students or colleagues to write about music are we asking them to describe music structurally, or to cope with music’s ever-shifting signifieds? The paper attempts to answer this question by clarifying the relationship between composition, musicology, and music “itself” by way of a Lacanian reading of Peter Greenaway's film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Lacan’s existential concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real are first introduced in relation to music with reference to music by Hans Werner Henze ...

"Lehadlik": Radical Jewish Music, Gender And Disidentification In Aviva Endean’S Work, Shoshana Rosenberg

Directions of New Music

This paper undertakes a hermeneutic analysis of Aviva Endean’s “Lehadlik”, exploring the complex relationship between the player, a Jewish woman living in Australia, and traditional Jewish culture and rituals. This analysis connects Endean’s work to the larger body of Radical Jewish Music, a movement which seeks to diversify and expand the meaning of contemporary Jewish music beyond the confines of Klezmer and religious hymns. The analysis includes an exploration of the relationship between Endean’s womanhood, Orthodox Jewish traditions, and women’s historical place in Judaism.

Steve Reich's ‘Music For 18 Musicians’ As A Soundscape Composition, Jesse Budel

Directions of New Music

Over the past half century, there has been much research into the acoustic qualities of soundscapes from a variety of perspectives: the humanities and social sciences as per the ‘acoustic ecology’ movement (established by Schafer, Truax, and Westerkamp et al.), and more recently the environmental science and ecology as per ‘soundscape ecology’ (established by Farina, Pijanowski, and Krause, et al.). Collectively, these disciplines provide diverse methods for engagement with analysis of acoustic environments. Simultaneous to the rise of the acoustic ecology movement in the 1970s (marked by the publication of Schafer’s ‘The Tuning of the World (1974)), the composition ...

America : A History In Sound, Hunter J. Dunn

Honors Theses

A history of America in audiovisual form.

Melting Crayons, Ho Lam Tang

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

Melting Crayons was inspired by a conversation with a clarinetist and a good friend, Jena Nahnsen, last summer in Italy. As we were waiting for our friend to finish her shopping for souvenirs next to Ponte Vecchio, Jena and I had a conversation about combining visual colors and music.

A few months go by, and Melting Crayons is created. A collection of melodies is generated using the six-digit crayon color code based on the fundamental E-flat. Using Mango Tango #e77200 as an example, the color code is a combination of letters and numbers. Letters reference for pitch, with my choice ...

Operabbit, Mariel C. Mayz

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

OPERAbbit takes place in an unknown country with unnamed characters who are struggling for basic necessities amongst a political, social, and economic crisis. Questions of loyalty, trust, and nationalism are brought to the foreground as our Protagonist receives an unconventional government hand-out: a bunny. This fictional story— written by the composer and her brother— is met with humor and the liveliness of Latin American culture. The underlying truth, however, is more tragic. Many countries in Latin America have faced deep political, economic, or societal problems throughout their histories. None, however, have faced them all simultaneously as the country of Venezuela ...

Two Suites For Solo Instruments, Matthew O. Thomas

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

TWO SUITES FOR SOLO INSTRUMENTS:

MA Thesis

Matthew O. Thomas, Composer

This Thesis contains two Suites for Solo Instruments: Suite Médiévale for guitar and Seven Recital Studies for Intermediate Grade for piano solo. The recital studies were conceived as a way to fill a void in music literature for beginning advanced pianists; those students not quite ready for the large works of the masters, but are seeking challenging repertoire beyond the formulaic lesson and recital books. Each of the seven is an example of a different style, form, or theoretical concept. Notes for the performer have been included with recommendations ...

Guitar Suite, Stephanie Boyer

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

Guitar Suite is a two movement piece composed for solo guitar. In addition to the guitar suite, an orchestral arrangement of its second movement, "Dance of the Fields," concludes this thesis, presenting the same melody in various textures.

The Destruction Of Sol In Three Acts, Panagiotis-Mario Christodoulou

Eckardt Scholars Projects

Conductor's score for The Destruction of Sol in Three Acts.

I. Awe: The Destruction of Sol

II. Despair: Floating in Space

III. Acceptance: The Starry Day

Scored for flute, alto flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, glockenspiel, chimes, percussion, piano, and strings.

8scenes, Spencer G. Perkins

Student Research, Creative Activity, and Performance - School of Music

This work explores the juxtaposition of a live ensemble, and pre-collected field recordings. The material for the ensemble is divided into eight sections, or “scenes,” which unfold one after the other without pause, at times blending musical material to where it is unclear when the music has transitioned to the next section. The field recordings are divided into three main sections, which are defined by the underlying loop as follows: “sunny day recording”; “people talking recording”; and “rainy day recording.” Atop these structural loops, it is the responsibility of the “electronics player” to que other recordings in a manner that ...

Tuba Concerto In D Minor, Eric Dreggors

Theses and Dissertations

Writing the Tuba Concerto in D minor was a long and tedious process that required help and inspiration from many different people. The process began with a suggestion from a friend to write a tuba concerto for him, and soon progressed into a thesis. Since only one tuba concerto exists in the standard repertoire (the concerto by Ralphe Vaughan-Williams), the challenge to create a new concerto was very powerful.

Eleven minutes long, it is much shorter than the average concerto, but only a minute or two behind the Vaughan-Williams concerto. The first movement, the Prelude, is made to sound just ...

Asylum For Mezzo-Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone, & Chamber Orchestra., Cullyn D. Murphy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1884, Daniel Paul Schreber was admitted into an asylum in an attempt to help treat his paranoid schizophrenia. He documented his time in the asylum through a memoir titled Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. His memoir noted the extremely poor living conditions and treatment of patients, while also illustrating Schreber’s slowly deteriorating mental state. Prior to his admittance, Schreber was a well respected judge in Germany and the son of a renown child psychologist. This societal decline contributed to the acceptance of these memoirs as a serious account of the events that transpired on a daily basis for ...

The Far Green Country., Lincoln A. Sandham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work was inspired by a beautiful image from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: “And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.” ~The Return of The King, Book VI chapter 9. This imagery inspired the three movements of this work. The first, The Gray Raincurtain, depicts a violent end, the world crashing down around you. The musical material of ...

When The Ground Shakes., James May

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the spring of 2017, I approached friend and writer Mickey Osthimer about collaborating on text for a song cycle. I was concerned about questions of identity, especially in America—why and how do certain ideologies lay “claim” to American values? Are protesters less representative of our values than police or government? More? Why do we ignore certain sub–communities, uphold others, and mourn or empathize with them accordingly? What emerged from our discussions was a series of poems and prose selections about community, identity, memory, and trauma. Some of the text deals with childhood and nostalgia, while we culled ...

The Experience Of Live And Recorded Music: A Cello Solo, Sarah Hunter

Honors Projects

Americans experience 98.5% of their music in a recorded medium such as radio, online streaming, TV, CDs, or other physical mediums. As a composer of classical concert music, I challenged myself to compose music that offered audiences a meaningful experience as a live performance and as a recorded piece of music.