Music Theory Commons^™

Instruction, Devotion, And Affection: Three Roles Of Bach’S Well-Tempered Clavier, Rachel A. Lowrance

Musical Offerings

Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier has been analyzed from almost every angle imaginable, yet it has not often been studied from the position of discovering what forces influenced Bach while he was writing it. For example, Bach was a keyboard teacher for most of his professional years, and this influenced many of the styles and genres in which he chose to write his preludes and fugues. This also influenced his desire to gather the preludes and fugues into a unified collection. Additionally, Bach was a devout Lutheran who never discarded his religion when he sat down at the keyboard to compose ...

From Neumes To Notes: The Evolution Of Music Notation, Hope R. Strayer

Musical Offerings

New things are often viewed as being better and more advanced than older counterparts; however, new does not denote superior. Music notation serves as one example of an innovation that is both lauded and derided. Early forms of music notation appear vague and ambiguous according to modern standards. But when combined with oral traditions, early music notation contained all the information required for a successful performance. Most facts pertaining to the notation of each period are clear, but multiple interpretations of early notation exist. The objective of this research is to critically analyze key periods of Western music notation to ...

Romantic Exoticism: The Music Of Elsewhere In The Nineteenth Century, Josiah Raiche

Senior Honors Papers

Western art music has drawn on many sources. One of these is non-western music, which can be integrated into European classical music tradition in the form of exoticism. This paper will highlight musical elements used by composers seeking to create exoticism, examine selected works, and note common elements of western music that have exotic roots. In the nineteenth century, there were three general trends in exoticism. The first, non-musical exoticism, utilizes conventional western music alongside extra-musical exotic elements. Romantic exoticism portrays distant lands using musical elements, drawing these from the audience’s perceptions of the music represented. Realistic exoticism attempts ...

A Neo-Riemannian Approach To Jazz Analysis, Sara B.P. Briginshaw

Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology

No abstract provided.

Varying Degrees Of Difficulty In Melodic Dictation Examples According To Intervallic Content, Michael Hines Robinson

Masters Theses

Melodic dictation has long been a daunting task for students in aural skills training. Research has found that interval identification is a factor when taking melodic dictation. Research has also found that some intervals are easier to identify than other intervals. The goal of this thesis is to determine whether the difficulty of melodic dictation examples can be categorized by their intervallic content. A popular aural skills text was used as the source for the melodic dictation examples. The adjacent intervals in each melodic dictation example were counted and recorded by interval type. The analysis of the melodic dictation examples ...

Anarchy In The Unity: Compositional And Aesthetic Tensions In Mauricio Kagel's Antithese Für Einen Darsteller Mit Elektronischen Und Öffentlichen Klängen (1962), Makoto Mikawa

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 1962 the Argentine-German composer Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) completed an innovative multimedia/interdisciplinary piece, Antithese für einen Darsteller mit elektronischen und öffentlichen Klängen. The unique compositional style and formal structure consisting of heterogeneous compositional components reflected his profound insights into issues inherent in postwar avant-garde music. Kagel remarked strikingly that “anarchy in the piece was omnipresent.” Indeed, his use of the term ‘anarchy’ is a keystone not only of the structural features of Antithese, but also of Kagel’s aesthetic of music in the piece. The present study seeks to reveal Kagel’s idea of anarchy in musical context and ...

"The Performance Of 16th-Century Music: Learning From The Theorists" By Anne Smith, Kenneth Kreitner

Performance Practice Review

Kenneth Kreitner discusses and reviews Smith's 2011 work.

Smith, Anne. The Performance of 16th-Century Music: Learning from the Theo­rists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

ISBN 978-0-19974261-5.

Narrativity In Postmodern Music: A Study Of Selected Works Of Alfred Schnittke, Karen K. Ching

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The validity of music narratives has engendered much debate and research. This dissertation traces the development of narratology from its pre-structuralist phase to the post-structuralist phase where the discipline went through a narrative turn and blossomed into a broad-spectrum expansion that takes the form of interdisciplinary narratological studies such as music narratology. By adopting the viewpoints of postmodern philosophers and psychologists such as Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Ihab Hassan, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Carl Jung, we develop a cognitive narratological theory for postmodern music that is veracious both epistemologically and philosophically.

We then analyze formally and contextually four concertos by ...