Musicology Commons^™

Rudolph Süss’S Lyrische Suite No. 1, Op. 23, Matanya Ophee

Soundboard Scholar

This article reproduces the Lyrische Suite [no. 1], op. 23, by the Austrian composer Rudolph Süss, with a short introductory commentary. First published in Vienna around 1921, this suite is a fine example of the enthusiasm for the guitar in early twentieth-century Austria and Germany, which resulted in much music that has been overlooked, overshadowed as it was by the emerging Spanish repertoire.

Note

This article is one of a series of seven celebrating the work of Matanya Ophee (1932–2017) on the ninetieth anniversary of his birth. Written between 1982 and 1991, these articles first appeared in early issues of …

Music Of The Divine: Interweaving Threads Connecting Contemporary Chant-Based Piano Repertoire, Jeremy D. Duck

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Creative Work, and Performance

The purpose of this document is to prove chant remains an important source of inspiration among living composers, and, despite the number of piano works already incorporating chant, composers today are still finding unique ways to include chant in their music. To achieve this objective, representative works have been selected for research and analysis for four of the major chant traditions. Connor Chee’s The Navajo Piano, Victoria Bond’s Illuminations on Byzantine Chant, and Hayes Biggs’ E.M. am Flügel: Poem-Étude for Piano Solo, though the chants from which they are inspired are diverse in concept and style, they …

The “Rebuff Chorus” In 1960–2000 Pop Music, David Heetderks

Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

In some verse–prechorus–chorus (VPC) songs from 1960–1990, the prechorus sets up an expectation for tonic arrival, only to have the subsequent chorus reject this tonal implication and either withhold tonic resolution, abruptly change to a new key, or contain a passage whose relation to the previous one is tonally ambiguous. I call this event a “rebuff” chorus. Formal analysis and intertextual comparison show how rebuff choruses use absent-tonic passages or modulatory “breakout” passages in order to swerve away from the implications of the previous section. The formal device often transforms the expressive effect of the chorus from arrival and sincerity …

Berlioz's Mysterious Amélie, Pascal Beyls, Peter Bloom

Music & Musical Performance

In September 1864, in a letter to his long-time confidante, the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Berlioz mentioned the name of the woman with whom, as he had earlier confided to the Princess, he had conducted a brief but passionate affair: “her name was Amélie.” Until now, the Berlioz scholars have been unable properly to identify this mysterious person. From other letters and documents, including Ernest Legouvé’s Soixante ans de souvenirs, we have known the approximate dates of the beginning and ending of the relationship. But only now, on the basis of the birth and death certificates of the …

Revolutionary Alchemy: Incantation And Collage As Magical Methods In Rock Of The Countercultural Era, Jay Keister

Music & Musical Performance

Magic held a special fascination for the post-war counterculture, a movement that valued music and art as tools of the imagination to counter what Theodore Roszak called the “technocracy” in which science was to blame for cultural disenchantment in the West. At a time when countercultural rhetoric was bolstering a newfound faith in the power of music to generate social change, rock music began to be conceived by many musicians and perceived by audiences as a kind of magic. This article considers music by the Beatles, the Doors, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and others to show how musicians …

The Dilemma Of Empty Halls, Joanna Lauer

Musical Offerings

Today, live classical concert attendance is low, a fact which threatens the careers of professional musicians. This paper examines recent statistics of classical concert attendance, theories as to why attendance rates are low, marketing methods for target audiences, and finally, recommendations to solve the dilemma of empty concert halls. To encourage concert attendance, classical music must be tastefully marketed to present-day audiences through the experience of technically excellent, musical, and interesting live performances. Ultimately, the relationship between art and its audience (the consumer) reveals that the key to the dilemma is the audience.

History Of Jazz, Charles "Trey" Wright

KSU Distinguished Course Repository

This course is an in-depth study of jazz styles, historical periods, and innovative artists in the jazz idiom.

Introduction To Music, Mus 10100, Daniel Beliavsky

Open Educational Resources

This course examines musical works, composers, and aesthetics from antiquity to the present. Central to our curriculum are the questions, “what are music’s meanings?” and “how can music communicate meaning?” Through the process of discovering the varied answers to these questions, we will learn about music history, music philosophy, composer biographies, and how aesthetic concerns change across time and place. As a result of our work, you will develop the critical skills needed to understand the socio-historical events that inspire musical compositions and styles.

Maurice Ravel’S Le Tombeau De Couperin: Human Emotions, Grief, And The History Of The Tombeau, Tin V. La

Dissertations, 2020-current

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) dedicated Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914-1917) to 17th-century French music and his friends who died in World War I. Although the work has an elegiac purpose, its music does not correlate with the common characteristic of an elegiac work. This document investigates the elegiac aspect of this work through the scope of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the theory of musical equilibration.

The first chapter briefly discusses the history of the "Tombeau" in 17th-century French literature and music. The second chapter compares Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin to three pieces titled "Tombeau" written by Johann Froberger (1616-1667), Louis Couperin …

Music As A Tool For Ecstatic Space Design, Pranav Amin

Masters Theses

Music and architecture share a sacred bond across cultures. Their histories intertwine and together, they shape ritualistic, religious, and popular practices. As one of the few remaining avenues of universal transcendental experiences that have been so integral to humans, music’s ability to create ecstatic spaces is ever more necessary for the modern human. This thesis uses spatial, artificial intelligence, visual, and aural tools—while engaging in a dialogue between rationalist architecture and shamanic conceptions of spaces—to create an ecstatic space that seeks to reimagine the union of music and architecture. It reveals new ways in which this union can be experienced …

"Voices In My Head:" Representations Of Mental Illness In Contemporary American Musical Theater, Mckay Perry

Masters Theses

In the years since 2010, themes of mental illness on the musical theater stage have increased dramatically, most notably with the Broadway premiere of Dear Evan Hansen in 2016, which quickly became a popular and critical success, winning six Tony Awards the following season. Despite scope and reach of the modern American musical, relatively little musicological scholarship has explored this area, and of that literature, even less has examined contemporary musicals. In this thesis, I will begin to fill this gap in the literature through the application of emerging critical musicological lenses to modern musical theater, both on and off …

Conference Report: Reassessing Haydn’S Sacred Music, 12–14 June 2023, Eisenstadt, Austria, Robert B. Wrigley

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

A conference entitled "Reassessing Haydn's Sacred Music" took place in Eisenstadt 12-14 June, 2023. Historical, political, and religious contexts, reception, compositional and religous influences upon Haydn, and stylistic characteristics of specific works were all discussed.

Form In The Preludes Of J.S. Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, Daniel E. Prindle

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the forms of the preludes in J.S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. The prelude originated as an improvised genre in the mid-fifteenth century. Treatises of the period gave instruction on how to improvise and eventually compose preludes and that tradition informed Bach’s compositional practice. However, an additional genre, the invention, played a similarly important role in influencing the composition of the preludes in the Well Tempered Clavier, particularly in Book II.

I analyze the forms of the preludes by proposing a new method: dimensional interplay. This method examines the form of each prelude in three musical dimensions: melody, …

Covering The Beatles: Tribute, Tradition, And Transformation, Alexander J. Prezzano

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on cover songs as they relate to the music of The Beatles. Before and after the 1969 break-up of the band, the number of Beatles songs that have been covered by artists of various genres and in different eras is immeasurable. The implications of the cover song phenomenon of the 20th century crosses musical, cultural, political, and global borders. From the view of cover songs, this thesis will analyze The Beatles' continued influence on popular music, and the way their music has become a template, or pedagogical device for composers and songwriters in the postmodern era.

The "Benfordness" Of Bach Music, Chadrack Bantange, Darby Burgett, Luke Haws, Sybil Prince Nelson

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

In this paper we analyze the distribution of musical note frequencies in Hertz to see whether they follow the logarithmic Benford distribution. Our results show that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Christian Bach is Benford distributed while the computer-generated music is not. We also find that computer-generated music is statistically less Benford distributed than human- composed music.

Music And Mind Games: Disability And Genre In The Psychonauts Series, Sophia Wetzel

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The cult-classic video game Psychonauts (2005) and its acclaimed sequel Psychonauts 2 (2021) are known for their depiction of mental illness and trauma. However, the depictions in each game reinforce different disability narratives: the first a “cure” narrative and the second an “accommodation” narrative (Mitchell & Snyder 2000; Howe 2016). Each level occurs within the mind of a different character, allowing the player to interact with manifestations of the character’s cognitive disability, such as fighting enemies called “Panic Attacks” or sorting their “Emotional Baggage.” The scoring for each level reflects the respective character by drawing from existing musical genres to …

(Special Section) The Hymn As Protest Song In England And Its Empire, 1819–1919, Oskar Cox Jensen

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Hymns played a role in envoicing the politics of protest in England long before their integration in the established Church – and do so to this day. Yet it was nineteenth-century radical movements that embraced the hymn as in many ways the ideal musical form. From the bloody field of Peterloo to the secularising South Place Society, from the mass meetings of Chartists to the top-down productions of the Fabian socialists, the century resounded with this increasingly familiar music.

Many writers laid claim to the rhetoric of the hymn to advance causes from abolitionism to solidarity with Poles exiled to …

(Special Section) Translating Race: Mission Hymns And The Challenge Of Christian Identity, Philip Burnett

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

“Ye seed of Israel’s chosen race,” “The race that long in darkness pined,” “To heal and save a race undone,” and “Sanctify a ransomed race” are a few examples of many references to “race” that exist in English-language hymnody. Throughout the nineteenth-century, hymns containing lines such as these, were exported from Britain into mission fields where translators had to find new ways to conceptualize notions of race and, in effect, created new group identities. This requires asking critical questions about the implications of what happened when ideas of race, in the Christian sense, interacted with non-religious notions of race in …

(Special Section Introduction) Hymns Beyond The Congregation: Constructions Of Identity And Legacies Of Meaning, Erin G. Johnson-Williams, Philip Burnett

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

We offer here the first of two special sections on the theme of "Hymns Beyond the Congregation." Divided into the two sub-themes of “Hymns Beyond the Congregation: Constructions of Identity,” and “Hymns Beyond the Congregation: Legacies of Meaning,” our authors (based in institutions both in the USA and the UK) comprise both early career and senior scholars and come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds in American history, South African colonial history, political history, the history of mission education, and historical musicology. Together, these two special issues will pave the way for facilitating new dialogues between historians, musicologists and congregational …

Observant Dominican Nuns’ Processionals In Fifteenth-Century Germany: Evidence From Manuscripts Of The Beinecke Library, Eleanor J. Giraud

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This article examines three Dominican processionals held in the Beinecke Library: Ms. 205, Music Deposit 60 and Music Deposit 61, all of which can be linked to the Observant Dominican convent of St Catherine in Nuremberg. Ms. 205 was undoubtedly used in Nuremberg, while Music Deposit 60 and 61 were likely copied from a Nuremberg Processional but made for use elsewhere, probably Regensburg. This small collection presents the opportunity to consider the Observant experience of procession, the dissemination of Observant liturgical books, and the relationship between the practices of Dominican nuns and friars. To a vast extent, these manuscripts reveal …