Musicology Commons^™

A New Approach To The Analysis Of Timbre, Megan L. Lavengood

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two distinct approaches to timbre analysis exist, each with complementary strengths and limitations. First, music theorists from the 1980s adopt a positivist mindset and look for ways to quantify timbral phenomena, often using spectrograms, while avoiding any cultural dimensions in their work. Second, writings of the past five years focus on the cultural aspects of timbre but make no use of spectrograms. This dissertation builds upon these two approaches by synthesizing them: discussion is grounded in spectrogram analysis, but situated within a broad cultural context, through interactions with listener experience and ethnographic study of music periodicals and other published interviews ...

"Jim Along Josey": Play-Parties And The Survival Of A Blackface Minstrel Song, Maya Brown

Excellence in Performing Arts Research

The play-party was a social activity once practiced in rural America amongst Protestants in the latter half of the nineteenth century. With a desire to circumvent the church’s strict no dancing rules, as well as avoid reprimand, play-party adolescents adapted the lyrics and instrumentation of blackface minstrel songs to create a vocal music to accompany their play-party games. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate that play-parties offered the space for the continuation and reinterpretation of minstrel practices, particularly song repertoire. In this paper, the children’s song “Jim Along Josey” is used as a case study ...

Inculturation Of Liturgical Music In The Roman Catholic Church Of Igbo Land: A Compositional Study, Benedict Nwabugwu Agbo

Journal of Global Catholicism

A study of inculturation, composition and music among Catholics is Igbo Land, Nigeria. The article insects with contemporary discussions of inculturation/enculturation after Vatican II and the recommendation of St. John Paul II in his Ecclesia in Africa.

Audio Mastering As A Musical Competency, Matthew T. Shelvock

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I demonstrate that audio mastering is a musical competency by elucidating the most significant, and clearly audible, facets of this competence. In fact, the mastering process impacts traditionally valued musical aspects of records, such as timbre and dynamics. By applying the emerging creative scholarship method used within the field of music production studies, this dissertation will aid scholars seeking to hear and understand audio mastering by elucidating its core practices as musical endeavours. And, in so doing, I hope to enable increased clarity and accuracy in future scholarly discussions on the topic of audio mastering, as well ...

The Synchretic Network: Linking Music, Narrative, And Emotion In The Video Game Journey, Ivan Mouraviev

Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology

In the 2012 video game Journey, music is an important component of the playing experience. This study adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on narratology, semiology, and film-sound theory to examine the relationship between music, narrative, and emotion in Journey. After first discussing video games’ interactivity in general, philosopher Dominic Lopes’ theory of digital art is presented as a means of articulating the interactive aspects of Journey’s soundtrack. Theories set out by scholars Jochen Kleres and Michel Chion—which deal with the narrativity of emotions and audiovisual meaning, respectively—are then integrated to produce the “synchretic network”: a theoretical framework ...

The Poetry Is The Pity: The War Requiem And Poetic Consolation, Gabrielle Ferrari

Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem sets nine of Wilfred Owen’s war poems alongside the words of the Missa pro defunctis, allowing these texts to interrogate and comment on each other. Owen’s poems describe the horrors of trench warfare, and often, harshly indict both church and state for their complicity in war-mongering. Scholars such as Philip Rupprecht, Heather Wiebe, David B. Greene, and George D. Herbert have explored how Owen’s texts work to subvert the text of the Mass, and deny religious and musical consolation. Such readings place the War Requiem in line with Owen’s preface to ...

Buying Into The Ideal Performance Of Womanhood: Gendered Marketing In The Recontextualization Of “She’S Always A Woman” For John Lewis’ Advertising Campaign, Emma Doherty

Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology

This paper investigates the role of Fyfe Dangerfield’s cover of “She’s Always a Woman” by Billy Joel, within the presentation of heteronormative gender roles in John Lewis’ 2010 advertising campaign. After outlining the narrative of the advertisement and the ways in which the female protagonist is gendered from girlhood to womanhood, this paper draws upon the work of feminist scholar Judith Butler to problematize John Lewis’s portrayal of gender to show how it perpetuates heteronormative stereotypes. Then, drawing on theories of popular music surrounding identity and the importance of lyrics, John Lewis’ use of Fyfe Dangerfield’s ...

In Coelo Et In Terra: Lutheran Theological Structure Of The Troped Magnificats Of Michael Praetorius’S Megalynodia Sionia, Adrian D. J. Ross

Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology

Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) ranks among the most prolific German musical figures of the seventeenth century. Despite his stature, many of his works, especially his earlier collections, remain largely understudied and underperformed. This paper examines one such early collection, the Megalynodia Sionia, composed in 1602, focussing on the relationship between formal structure of its first three Magnificat settings and the Lutheran theological ideal of uniting the Word of God with music. Structurally, these three Magnificats are distinguished by their interpolation of German chorales within the Latin text. In order to understand his motivations and influences behind the use of this ...

Foreword And Front Matter, Nota Bene Editors-In-Chief

Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology

No abstract provided.

Key Inference From Irish Traditional Music Scores And Recordings, Pierre Beauguitte, Bryan Duggan, John Kelleher

Conference papers

The aim of this paper is to present techniques and results for identifying the key of Irish traditional music melodies, or tunes. Several corpora are used, consisting of both symbolic and audio representations. Monophonic and heterophonic recordings are present in the audio datasets. Some particularities of Irish traditional music are discussed, notably its modal nature. New key-profiles are defined, that are better suited to Irish music.

Paper Disc Record: A Consumption-Based Account Of Musical Identity, David Prescott-Steed

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Since 1991, I have been keeping a pen and paper list of my CD's, added to with each new purchase. With the increasing availability of digital media, not everything that I now listen to comes from a disc. Nevertheless, I have never bought digital music downloads, and so every new album purchase is a physical product with the band name and release title still added to the list. I keep it rolled up in a desk draw (the first composition-pages of which are yellowing nicely). The list comprises approximately 280 entries. Each entry until March 5, 2006 is numbered ...

Empirical Aesthetics And The Philosophy Of John Cage: A Literature Review And Experimental Study, Braden J. Gillispie

Honors Projects

This paper examines the musical philosophy of composer John Cage in terms of psychological theories and experimental design. A literature review was first conducted to extract testable hypotheses from Cage’s musical works, writings, and interviews relevant to theories and research in empirical aesthetics. A study was then devised to examine the relationships between cognitive appraisals of the interestingness, enjoyableness, orderliness, and musicality of general sound events, as well as to determine the influence of openness to experience and the effect of two intentional-listening strategies, inspired by Cage’s ideas, on these relationships. Participants (n = 21) completed an openness to ...

Gustave Vogt's Musical Album Of Autographs: A Scholarly Edition, Kristin Leitterman

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gustave Vogt (1781–1870) was the most famous oboist in Europe during the mid-nineteenth century. Throughout his career he played with the best orchestras in Paris, toured Europe widely, and also taught the next generation of oboists at the Paris Conservatoire from 1802–1853. Although many of the details of his life have been lost to history, he did leave behind a record of the esteem in which he was held. This is preserved physically in the form of an album of short musical compositions honoring Vogt, collected between 1831 and 1859. The album has never been published, and is ...

Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines developments in the production practices of black popular music in the recording studio from 1970 to 1990. The year 1970 marked a transition in the recording practice of popular music that had a distinct impact on styles marketed as R&B, soul, and funk. Multitracking in the 1950s and 1960s had paved the way for a transformed production process, one initiated by Les Paul’s and Sidney Bechet’s overdubbing experiments in the 1940s. The collective sound of instrumentalists and vocalists heard on records no longer resulted from live-to-tape recordings of group performances, but was increasingly the product of constructed representations, as separate layered events were cut to multitrack tape.

When mixed together, these overdubbed tracks presented the listener with the impression of collective, interactive performances. Features central to the ethos of R&B music making – vocals in call and response, instruments in apparent rhythmic dialogues, and funky syncopation usually resulting from interactive group dynamism – were increasingly the product of the technologically mediated process of overdubbing, and performed often by one musician singing all of the parts or layering several instruments. By 1990, in part due to the popularity of newly developed drum machines, MIDI sequencers, samplers, and digital synthesizers, to record collectively in R&B-based black popular music was the exception rather than the norm.

This study considers new practices of record production that developed in this era of multitrack recording and electronic experimentation through an examination of four case studies: Stevie Wonder’s recordings in the early 1970s; Prince’s recordings from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s; Michael Jackson’s composition and recording process from this same period; and the mid-to-late 1980s sampling and sequencing processes of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production collective. The producers of these recordings, well aware of the collective ethos of earlier black music styles, conceived imaginative ways ...

From The Concert Hall To The Cinema: The Journey Of The Classical American Sound, Rebecca Stegall

Masters Theses

American classical music has enjoyed a long-standing presence around the world as its own entity within the classical music genre. As early as the 1920s, American classical music has had its own unique sound. The early 20th Century was a time of musical experimentation and social unrest in America. Due to its relative newness and experimentation by numerous composers, identifying the defining characteristics of American music, an experimental music itself, became difficult and ambiguous. Also, the continuation of American classical music became increasingly problematic as classical music was replaced in popular culture by other genres of music. The research for ...

Beyond England's "Green And Pleasant Land": English Romantics Outside The Musical Renaissance, Christopher Little

C. Scott Little PhD

England experienced a resurgence of musical talent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries known as the "English Musical Renaissance." This rebirth spanned the years 1880 – 1945 and is credited to the work of Edward Elgar, Frederick Delius, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Their break with Continental compositional models and the subsequent rediscovery of Tudor music and English folk song eventually created a "pastoral" musical style, heard as the authentically English musical voice.

A strain of English musical Romanticism continued parallel to the Renaissance, however, represented by Granville Bantock, Joseph Holbrooke, Rutland Boughton, Arnold Bax, and Havergal Brian ...

The Contributions Of The Melbourne Festival Of Organ And Harpsichord And Its Successors: 1971-2010, Marcus R. Wigan

Marcus R Wigan

The Partimento Tradition In The Shadow Of Enlightenment Thought, Deborah Longenecker

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

How did Enlightenment ideals influence seventeenth-century music theory and composition pedagogy? This article investigates the relationship between partimento pedagogy and Rameau’s music theories as influenced by Enlightenment thought. Current research on partimento has revealed its importance in Neapolitan music schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Along with counterpoint, partimento was a core subject in the study of composition in the Neapolitan schools; however, as pedagogy and theory began to be influenced by Enlightenment ideals such as the scientific method or a preference for clear systemization, the partimento tradition began to wane. Juxtaposing the Enlightenment ideals of Rameau’s ...

Out Of The Shadows: Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn, And The Will To Persist, Juella Baltonado

School of Arts & Sciences Theses

Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn are known most commonly for their associations with their male counterparts, and often have their identities and accomplishments overshadowed by these men. This thesis shines a light on these women, uncovering the struggles with gender, agency, and societal expectations.

A Discussion Regarding Various Animals' Abilities To Make Music And Move Rhythmically To Songs, Emilie R. Bufford

Capstone Projects and Theses

This project involves exploring the presence of music and rhythmic abilities in specific animal species. The main subjects are whales, sea lions, gorillas, elephants, birds, and mice. The goal of this project was to compare their abilities to those of humans, and overall, determine whether such abilities are considered musical. Cases where animals demonstrate the ability, both learned and innate, to move to a beat are analyzed, along with animals who demonstrate musical vocal abilities naturally in the wild. The previously unknown frequencies of whales, mice, and elephants, are brought to light. These findings bring up the possibility of even ...