Digital Commons Network^™

An Exploration Of Cultural Transmission Through The Application Of Jazz Theory To The Music Of Frederic Chopin, Aaron Michael King

MSU Graduate Theses

Connections between classical music and jazz were observed and detailed, providing an expanded understanding of the cultural underpinnings of Western music. This study featured explanations of concepts found in jazz theory, such as approach tones and ii⁷-V⁷-I⁷ progression, and comparisons of stylistic features of both music. These concepts were then applied to describe features in the music of Frederic Chopin, specifically “Nocturne No. 1,” “Berceuse,” and “Prelude No. 4.” Through cross-cultural analysis, this study aims to provide the reader with information and further appreciation of the elements found in jazz music and to delineate the …

Missa Brevis, Eunwha Kang

MSU Graduate Theses

Missa Brevis is a twenty-minute composition for mixed choir, horn, trumpet, and trombone. Because the piece is a “short mass,” it consists of only four movements, leaving out the Credo. It is composed more concisely than a general mass. The Mass is centered on the note E, and each movement is based on a different scale. The inspiration for this work came from composers of various historical periods and geographical regions. Elements of traditional South Korean music, as well as Neoclassical music elements similar to those found in the music of Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky are incorporated throughout …

Billion-Dollar Bride: Book 1—Godric's Academy For Young Ladies, Kaylin N. Stickley

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis contains the first five chapters of a young adult romance novel featuring a young woman named Theadosia Lee. The plot is heavily influenced by Cinderella, and the biblical braiding technique is heavily influenced by that of Kiera Cass and C. S. Lewis. The piece was inspired by my desire to create more young adult romance novels that contain the biblical values that are sorely lacking in most modern young adult literature. I seek to write a love story that is based on mutual respect, a strong foundation of friendship, and an intentional decision to avoid sexual activities …

K-8 General Music Educators And Technology: Beliefs, Application And Motivation, Nicole A. Loudis

MSU Graduate Theses

Technology is constantly evolving in the classroom, and some educators choose to embrace that technology more than others. This study investigates the uses and motivations of educators who integrate technology frequently in their K-8 general music classrooms in Missouri. Three music educators were identified with 10 years of experience who had established reputations for teaching with technology effectively. A single semi-structured interview with each participant was used to explore the participant’s motivations and beliefs and the specific technology applications that were frequently used in their classrooms. The analysis of the interviews revealed that the participants believed that integrating technology motivated …

Between The Lines: Reflexive Misogyny And Remediated Forms In A Secret Online Group Of Women Poets, Rae Elizabeth Snobl

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis examines an online, secret writing community for 1,800+ women-only poets called “The Retreat.” Analysis of two years of Facebook posts and interviews with group members revealed a noticeable membership split between those publishing through conventional literary venues, the “traditional poets,” and social media poets. These “Instapoets,” as labeled by popular media each had between 10,000 to 125,000+ followers on sites like Instagram and Facebook—significant numbers when seen in the context of readership and monetizing. Yet, their digital, snippet poems did not hold to the literary norms of poetry, both in form and publishing method. This led to a …

Without Personhood: The Missing Point Of Slaves In Missouri's Emancipation-By-Residency Freedom Suit Jurisprudence, 1824-1837, Jacob Alfred Brandler

MSU Graduate Theses

From 1824 to 1837, the Supreme Court of Missouri developed a sophisticated caselaw establishing emancipation-by-residency—where a Missouri court could liberate an enslaved petitioner because of their residence in a free jurisdiction—as a basis of freedom suits. In 1852, however, the Court undermined the precedential value of those decisions and dismantled this basis when deciding Dred Scott’s case, Scott v. Emerson. Scholarship on Missouri’s freedom suits has highlighted how partisanship and the political atmosphere in Missouri as well as across the nation contributed to this outcome. This study adds to the historiography how the previous caselaw itself predisposed the result; …

The 1918 Anti-British Revolt In Najaf: Local Primary Sources Vs National And Religious Narratives, Mohammed Harba

MSU Graduate Theses

This research examines the diverse historical narratives of the 1918 Najaf Revolt against British forces during the concluding months of World War I on the Mesopotamian front. For a century, two distinguishable narratives have been developed and promoted in Iraqi literature: Pan-Arabist and religious, reflecting the objectives, motivations, and present-mindedness of two political eras in modern Iraqi history. Several local primary sources, mostly memoirs of Najafis who witnessed or participated in the revolt, have been re-surfaced and re-visited during the past twenty years. These primary sources shed new light on the established Pan-Arabist narrative or the recent religious framing of …

Japanese American Internment During The Second World War Through The Preconditioning Of Anti-Japanese Rhetoric Emphasizing Military Threat Between 1898 And 1941 And Examination Of Military Necessity, Charlie Dewitt

MSU Graduate Theses

During the Second World War, over 120,000 Japanese American citizens were held in intern- ment for much of the conflict. The United States government supported this action by claiming military necessity required removal of all West Coast Japanese Americans as a national security threat. However, this process had little to do with military necessity and was set in motion dec- ades before by the rhetoric of the anti-Japanese movement, which through numerous works out- lined Japanese Americans as a military threat. This thesis, through review of significant pub- lished documents, argues that a multitude of writers representing a wide array …

The Unlimited Absorbs The Limits: Analyzing The Religious And Mystical Aspects Of Virginia Woolf's Work Through The Lens Of William James, Zachary J. Beck

MSU Graduate Theses

Commentators on the work of modernist author Virginia Woolf have frequently remarked upon the “religious” and “mystical” aspects that appear throughout Woolf’s oeuvre, but have found it difficult to reconcile these aspects of Woolf’s work with her self-expressed atheistic beliefs. For those who have sought to resolve the tension between the “religious” and “mystical” features of Woolf’s work and Woolf’s (lack of) personal religious beliefs, the work of American psychologist and philosopher William James has proven to be a starting point for investigations into selections of Woolf’s oeuvre that seem to exhibit “religious” and “mystical” characteristics. There continues to exist, …

Guerrilla Warfare In The Philippines: Dispersion, Cooperation, And Desperation, Alexander William Decker

MSU Graduate Theses

Guerrilla warfare in Central Luzon from 1942 to 1945 was extremely limited by available resources and manpower, especially following the mass surrender of U.S. troops in the Philippines to Imperial Japan during the surrender at Bataan on April 9th, 1942. By closely analyzing the primary accounts of Luzon guerrillas Doyle Decker and Robert Mailheau, I seek to confirm, confront, and consider many established expectations of guerrilla warfare, especially since much of the established literature espouses a loose set of guidelines for irregular warfare. In this paper, I analyze the pre-war Philippines in order to establish the decisive disadvantages that American …

A Path Unfolding, Sarah Lucille Parris

MSU Graduate Theses

A selection from A Path Unfolding, an original young adult fantasy novel about a girl named Al, who strives to fulfil a prophecy in order to restore the natural order in the magical land of Anthe. Preceded by a critical introduction detailing the genre and craft influences on the work. The novel explores themes of truth and deception, and asks the questions of what, exactly, it means to be a ‘chosen one’.

Effects Of Chair Testing In Orchestra On Student Motivation: Student Perspectives And Applications From Motivational Theories, Rosanna Christine Honeycutt

MSU Graduate Theses

The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine how string students perceive achievement on chair testing through the lens of attribution and achievement goal motivational self-theories. A teacher survey was administered to identify the goals of chair testing in two high school and seven middle school orchestra classrooms. A student survey was used to collect data in those same classrooms on (a) the reasons why students do and do not do well on chair tests, (b) the perceived goals of chair testing and (c) the ratings of motivation and self-achievement. Qualitative techniques were used to analyze attributions within both …

Character Development And Refiguration Of Narrative, Vladan Djordjevic

MSU Graduate Theses

Character development is the process of creating believable fictional characters by giving them depth and compelling visual characteristics, which reveal a narrative framework behind formal solutions. Character development is the creation of effective communication. It gives essential information about character progression and the thought process behind a character’s evolution over time in the practice of visual development. This approach is a procedure of creating visual forms that convey clear messages, very often intangible ones. Their meaning is constructed through the use of different iconographic and narrative structures that, when presented within the same context, give thought-provoking and unusual formal solutions. …

Not All Dreams Are Nightmares, Not All Nightmares Are Dreams, Neal G. Polallis

MSU Graduate Theses

My art deals with mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), and addiction.

It is how I work out the problems in my relationships and within my head. My art is where I explore

ideas, alternate possibilities, my dreams, and my fears. Drawing inspiration from photographers such as

Jerry Uelsmann, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn; painters like Caravaggio, Picasso, and Bacon, as well as,

concepts from the Surrealists and the Futurists, the art I produce is dream-like: familiar objects in unrelated

places. The work that I create stems from years of working with patients in their most acute states. …

Battlefield Of Bandages: A Case Study On Sanitation Policy, Medical Reform, And Disease Prevention During The War Of Rebellion, Ashley L. Simpson

MSU Graduate Theses

The American Civil War was a devastating conflict costing over 750,000 lives and millions of dollars in the aftermath. However, the most urgent threat was not musket balls, cannons or grapeshot. Afflictions such as typhoid fever, malaria, smallpox, measles, pneumonia, and diarrhea contracted from crowded, unsanitary camp and hospital conditions were responsible for two-thirds of all Civil War casualties. In April 1861, a group of Union women met at church to organize a relief agency whose goal was to aid the thousands of Union soldiers dying from disease. Armed with enlightenment ideas about medical care and sanitation, the Women's Central …

Brilliant Women: Prose And Poetry, Amelia Fisher

MSU Graduate Theses

This collection of creative writing explores themes and subjects relating to feminism, sexuality, performativity, societal woes, popular culture, and the different ways we communicate. The individual pieces often examine women’s empowerment and lack thereof. These stories, essays, and poems are introduced by a critical work situating the contents of the thesis within greater literary traditions, such as Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, which I claim can function on the structural level as well as the story level, and his theory of the Chronotope; time and place are significant threads I follow from one genre to the next to create a cohesive collection …

The Third Truth, John Paul Chapman

MSU Graduate Theses

This composition, scored for a full symphonic orchestra, is based on the theory of truth discussed by Bertrand Russell. Objective truth, he states, must satisfy three criteria. The first element of truth is to acknowledge that it has an opposite. The second element of truth is a property of belief, statement, and perception. The third requisite is to acknowledge that truth consists in coherence. The introduction to this composition invokes the confluence of the three elements by utilizing discordant harmonies. In the next two movements, a theme is developed for each element. The First Truth, representing conflict, possesses a dark …

Skin: Stories, Poems, And Essays, Amanda G. Hadlock

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis begins with a critical introduction which analyzes the use of objective correlative and varying points of view in creative writing in order to generate dialogue on cultural issues. I relate theories from Edward T. Hall, T.S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Lubomír Doležel to my own writing. Additionally, I situate my own multi-genre writing with work of contemporaries such as Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine. My hypothesis is that writers can use an objective correlative (Eliot) from the top of the cultural iceberg (Hall) as an entry point to representing deeper, more fraught cultural issues. Additionally, by experimenting with …

Critical Veganism: A Posthuman Understanding Of ‘Becoming With’ Others, Kensey Dressler

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis lays the groundwork for a critical vegan orientation to posthuman communication research. Critical veganism attempts to do the least amount of harm to nonhuman beings, a shift that decenters the human in scholarship and focuses on the material realities of nonhuman beings. This orientation helps create a praxis for posthuman research that is in line with a new materialist approach to ontology, is anti-capitalist, and strives to do the least harm. Previous research methods tend to be anthropocentric in nature, thus leaving out nonhuman experiences from communication research. Using both autoethnography and multi-species ethnography as my methods, I …

Imaginative Empathies: Exploring The Role Of Creative Writing In Developing Social Skills Of College Students With Autism, Rebekkah N. Richner

MSU Graduate Theses

Only one-third of students with autism who are enrolled in American universities go on to graduate (Cox & Williams, 2018; Newman et al., 2011; Wei et al., 2014). These students may be currently underserved by the writing curriculum of postsecondary institutions when it comes to facilitating social and personal development in college and beyond. This thesis begins with the hypothesis that creative writing classes already utilize pedagogical tools that could aid students with autism in strengthening their social skills, particularly through the more structured social environment of the creative writing workshop. This study examined a 200-level short story creative writing …