Digital Commons Network^™

Todesfuge, Casey Hale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Todesfuge (2008-2010) is a setting, for tenor and chamber orchestra, of Paul Celan's poem of the same name. Celan wrote his landmark work on the Holocaust in the years after he himself was freed from internment in a Romanian forced labor camp in 1944, though its imagery is drawn from accounts of the death camps in Poland. From the outset, I was ambivalent about setting this text to music, but felt compelled, and my response was to frame it with idiomatic references to German music from Wagner to Weill, exploring the discomfort of using aesthetic artifice to represent unspeakable atrocities. …

Different Placements Of Spirit: African American Musicians Historicizing In Sound, Casey Hale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines two recent projects by African American musicians that enact critical and historiographic agency by reconstructing the music of the past: William Parker's project The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield, dedicated to re-imagining the works of the soul music icon with an ensemble featuring the poetic recitation of Amiri Baraka; and Marcus Roberts's reinvention of the Jazz Age rhapsodies of George Gershwin and James P. Johnson, Rhapsody in Blue and Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody. Rooted in African American interpretive traditions, and working both within and against such discursive categories as "jazz," "black music," and "American music," these artists …

Nikolai Medtner's First Piano Concerto: A Metrotectonic Analysis, Aleksandra Sarest

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the work of the Russian-born composer Nikolaĭ Medtner, presenting an original analysis of his Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Minor, op. 33. The analysis is preceded with an overview of Medtner's life and his entire body of music, and with a discussion of the composer's artistic beliefs and musical style. Medtner lived at a time when most composers searched for new paths, believing that nothing original could be produced unless there were drastic changes to musical language itself. Medtner was among the few composers who remained loyal to the Western classical tradition. Working within its …

Secrets Of A Toy-Box: A Study Of Claude Debussy's La Boîte À Joujoux, Mirna Lekic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The influence of Claude Debussy's inventive musical language can be traced through to the most modern classical repertoire. Yet of the composer's three ballets, which provided the counterweight to the Russian dominance of Parisian ballet culture in the early 1900s, only Jeux has received substantial scholarly attention. The following document is a monograph on La Boîte à joujoux (1913), Debussy's innovative ballet for children or marionettes. It offers an exploration of the work's broader significance and contextualizes it both within Debussy's oeuvre and in a broader historical realm. Included is a survey of the ballet's performance history, as well as …

A Derivation Of The Tonal Hierarchy From Basic Perceptual Processes, David Smey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades music psychologists have explained the functioning of tonal music in terms of the tonal hierarchy, a stable schema of relative structural importance that helps us interpret the events in a passage of tonal music. This idea has been most influentially disseminated by Carol Krumhansl in her 1990 monograph Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. Krumhansl hypothesized that this sense of the importance or centrality of certain tones of a key is learned through exposure to tonal music, in particular by learning the relative frequency of appearance of the various pitch classes in tonal passages. The correlation of pitch-class …

The Art Of The Commonplace: Found Sounds In Compositional Practice, Jennifer Stock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation contains a historical analysis of the emergence of found sounds or everyday noises as a compositional strategy in Western art music through the first half of the 20th century. Pioneering works are examined to determine the motives and aesthetic goals that first led composers to bring noise to the musical surface, including the avant-garde collaboration Parade, Futurist noise experiments, and Pierre Schaeffer's early work with musique concrète. These early works are used to create two analytical spectra with which to analyze contemporary pieces that incorporate founds sounds with instrumental music: one spectrum that considers the level of integration …

Gendered Practices And Conceptions In Korean Drumming: On The Negotiation Of "Femininity" And "Masculinity" By Korean Female Drummers, Yoonjah Choi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Korean drumming, one of the most popular musical practices in South Korea, currently exists in a state of contradiction as drumming, historically performed by men, is increasingly practiced by women. Women drummers who enter this male-dominated realm confront the "masculinization" of the practice, which is naturalized and normalized through the field's discourse and performance. At the same time, they seek a "femininity" that may help them to survive in the field. To examine these gendered conceptions and practices, I draw on the ways in which contemporary Korean traditional drum performers, predominantly professional female drummers, conceptualize, experience, perform, reinforce, and/or resist …

Musical Rhetoric, Narrative, Drama, And Their Negation In Morton Feldman's Piano And String Quartet, Ryan Michael Howard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Though Morton Feldman famously expressed his aversion to conventional compositional rhetoric early in his career, an examination of his music from the late 1970s onward reveals a more complex and ambiguous relationship with musical rhetoric than has often been acknowledged. In his own writings Feldman hinted at the notion of illusory function and directionality in his music, as well as to the phenomenon of "negation." It is my contention that the extended-length works written in the last years of the composer's life, which frequently feature tantalizing suggestions of conventional musical narrative, provide rich opportunity for readings of these statements. My …

Ralph Shapey And The Search For A New Concept Of Musical Continuity, 1939-66, Barry Wiener

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation creates a narrative for the stylistic development of the American composer, Ralph Shapey, during the first half of his career. Shapey's music represents a fusion of Schoenbergian metamorphic process and Varèsian stasis, methods for the creation of musical continuity that are usually considered incompatible. I show how Shapey formulated his compositional techniques, influenced by his teacher, Stefan Wolpe, and his friend, Edgard Varèse.

Shapey's interest in the music of Schoenberg was mediated through the prism of Wolpe's musical ideas. Wolpe used unordered pitch-class sets to present the aggregate in his music, and avoided Schoenberg's neo-classic and neo-baroque forms …

October In Galicia, Karen J. Siegel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

October in Galicia is a setting of selections from the Czech poet Ewald Murrer’s fantastical book, The Diary of Mr. Pinke, translated into English by Alicie Pi!t’ková. The surreal day-to-day happenings of Mr. Pinke occur in a timeless group of villages revealed by a translator’s note to be modeled on the historical region of Galicia (now part of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia). The tape part (or more accurately the digital audio files), which appears in “October 23rd,” consists of an organ recording that has been manipulated electronically. The electronic manipulations are subtle enough that the original pitches are always …

Timbral Transformations In Kaija Saariaho's From The Grammar Of Dreams, Karen J. Siegel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of Kaija Saariaho's 1988 vocal work From the Grammar of Dreams, with a focus on timbre. It begins with background on Saariaho, and research on timbre in music theory and psychoacoustics (Chapters 1 and 2). Chapter 3 shows how Saariaho manipulates timbre to expressive and formal ends in From the Grammar of Dreams, including creating timbral tension and release, applying Robert Morris' Contour Theory in its analyses. Chapter 4 then explores how the timbral transformations interact with non-timbral musical elements. The conclusion (Chapter 5) puts the compositional techniques of this work in the context of …

Redefining Diaspora Consciousness: Musical Practices Of Moroccan Jews In Brooklyn, Samuel Reuben Thomas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the role of musical practices in the synagogue life of Maroka'im (Moroccan Jews) in Brooklyn, New York. Living in an urban setting known for its diverse and robust Jewish life, community members utilize several different types of musical expression to emblematize three distinct diasporic ethnic identities: Jewish (of ancient Israel), Sephardi (Spanish), and Maroka'i (Moroccan). Based upon ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2008 and 2013, this study demonstrates how Maroka'im in Brooklyn use musical expressions to evoke more than one sense of diaspora consciousness--Jewish, Sephardi, and Maroka'i--to foster what I term a layered diaspora consciousness.

To illustrate …

The Kalophonic Settings Of The Second Psalm In The Byzantine Chant Tradition Of The Fourteenth And Fifteenth Centuries, Arsinoi Ioannidou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The kalophonic settings of the second Psalm emerged in music manuscripts of the Byzantine Empire during the early fourteenth century and were long considered the exemplary specimens of their kind, yet no scholarly study has ever examined the reasons behind their significant production, purposeful usage and abrupt vanishing, two centuries later, from the church repertory. In this dissertation, I explore the historical and political circumstances of the Palaiologan period (1261-1453) that determined the creation and usage of these settings as an artistic propagandistic vehicle that glorified the image of the emperor. The politics of imitation of Christ by the imperial …

The Mad Science Of Hip-Hop: History, Technology, And Poetics Of Hip-Hop's Music, 1975-1991, Patrick Rivers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1979, the first commercial recordings of hip-hop music were released. The music's transition from the parks and clubs of the Bronx to recorded media resulted in hip-hop music being crafted and mediated in a recording studio before reaching the ears of listeners. In this dissertation I present a comprehensive investigation into the history of the instrumental component of hip-hop music heard on recordings, commonly referred to as beats. My historical narrative is formed by: the practices involved in the creation of hip-hop beats; the technologies that facilitated and defined those practices; and the debates around these two aspects that …

At The Threshold: Edgard Varese, Modernism, And The Experience Of Modernity, Robert Jackson Wood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The writings of composer Edgard Varese have long been celebrated for their often ecstatic, optimistic proclamations about the future of music. With manifesto-like brio, they put forth a vision of radically new instruments and sounds, delineate the parameters for spatially oriented composition, and initiate the discourse of what would become electronic music. Yet just as important for understanding Varese is the other side of the coin: a thematics of failure concerning the music of the present--a failure of old instruments to transcend their limitations, a failure of technique to achieve certain compositional ideals, and a failure of music to connect …

Analysis And Performance Suggestions For Witold Lutoslawski's Grave: Metamorphoses For Cello And Piano, Marta Reilly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation gives an analysis and performance suggestions for Witold Lutoslawski's Grave: Metamorphoses for Cello and Piano. The analysis is grounded in set-class theory, while the performance suggestions are based on my own experience as a concert cellist. The introduction describes background, circumstances of the composition, editions, publications, performance, reception history, and summarizes other Lutos³awski compositions for cello. The analysis describes the melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, articulation, agogic, texture, and compositional techniques. Sketches of Grave are used for further analysis and comparison. The dissertation also explores connections with other compositions, such as Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande and Lutoslawski's Funeral Music.

Musical Landscapes: Theophile Gautier And The Evolution Of Nineteenth Century French Poetry, Dana Milstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Theophile Gautier's first edition of Emaux et camees (1852) marks the juncture at which Romantic, Neoclassical, and nascent Symbolist poetic theories converged under the umbrella ideology of "Parnassianism." Emaux et camees synthesizes the aesthetics promoted by these diverse groups, primarily by 1) using "musical" and "painterly" language, 2) emphasizing correspondences among arts, and 3) paradoxically demanding an attention to form and the artist's labor while also emphasizing art's inutility during a century characterized by Progress. Gautier's Emaux et camees bridges painterly and musical poetics to create a new model for poetry.

While the vocabulary of painting captivated many nineteenth century …

Rotational Form And Sonata-Type Hybridity In The First Movement Of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, Charity Lofthouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines Dmitri Shostakovich's sonata-form movements--often framed as "sonata arch" or "reverse recapitulation" structures, wherein the primary- and secondary-zone themes return in reverse order after the development--through the lens of rotation. Using methodology from Hepokoski and Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory (2006), I explore concepts of rotation in Symphony No. 4's opening movement and its interaction with a larger effect of boundary blurring and typological hybridity, manifest as a blending of double- and triple-rotational sonata-form types. This blurring effect is heightened by use of nontonal boundary sonorities at moments of expected tonal closure.

I begin by outlining double- and …

A Structural Approach To The Analysis Of Rock Music, Drew F. Nobile

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation situates itself in the middle of an ongoing debate about the applicability of Schenkerian analytical techniques to the analysis of pop and rock music. In particular, it investigates ways in which the standard conceptions of voice leading, harmonic function, and counterpoint may be updated to better apply to this new repertoire. A central claim is that voice-leading structure is intimately related to formal structure such that the two domains are mutually informing.

Part I of the dissertation focuses on harmonic and melodic theory. Chapter 2, "Harmonic Syntax," advocates for a conception of harmonic function based on syntax and …

The Music And Multiple Identities Of Kurdish Alevis From Turkey In Germany, Ozan Aksoy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the experiences of Kurdish Alevis, currently living in Germany, who trace their background to locations within the boundaries of the Republic of Turkey. I argue that music has been a particularly important mode through which Kurdish Alevis in Germany have articulated collective histories and have fashioned narratives of belonging and multiple and sometimes contradictory identities. The subjects of my research are immigrants and refugees who are ethnically Kurdish and whose religion is Alevi, an Anatolian religion whose relations to both Sunni and Shi'a Islam are historically controversial. They speak Turkish along with Kurdish, in most cases are …

Coming Of Age During The Sixties: A Narration Of Lives Through Music And Battle, Jennifer L. Oliveri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis has been written based on my retrieved memory, as it concentrates on autobiographical memories and the lives of two politically opposing men, from the American sixties. I discuss the effect of music and the war in Vietnam as it was experienced by these men--a moderately angry veteran and a "hippie." I examine how their stories were "retold" to me, which in turn created new memories. This is a study in the memory of memories.

Emerging Musical Structures: A Method For The Transcription And Analysis Of Electroacoustic Music, Mario Mazzoli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a method for transcribing "electroacoustic" music, and subsequently a number of methods for its analysis, utilizing the transcription as main ground for investigation. The core of the investigation is on pieces that seem particularly resistant to traditional musical analysis, as they present at least three crucial differences with respect to the "standard" repertoire: they utilize (completely or in part) non-pitched sounds, they focus on timbre avoiding traditional strategies of pitch and rhythm organization, and they are not traditionally notated. Pieces by Agostino di Scipio and Douglas Henderson serve as case studies to demonstrate the efficacy of the …

Xenakis In America, Charles Wolcott Turner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Iannis Xenakis had a long-standing interest in the U.S., but given the five years he spent here, little has been written about his experiences. This study attempts, through archival research and interviews, to document Xenakis’ time in the United States. Its subject is his relationship to American cultural institutions, and in what lured Xenakis here for musical composition and research.

The narrative treats the period from Copland’s invitation to Tanglewood in 1963, through Xenakis’ 1972 investment by France as a state-supported artist. While he visited the U.S. many times thereafter, he no longer sought long-term engagement with U.S. institutions, but …

Melodic Function And Modal Process In Gregorian Chant, Richard Porterfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study proposes a theory and method of analysis for voice leading in the melody of Gregorian chant. It draws on historical theories and practices, particularly those of the cantus tradition which 1) pre-dates the imposition on Western ecclesiastical chant of scale theories based in the Ancient Greek science of harmonics, 2) observes and predicts actual melodic behavior, and 3) remains basic to pedagogy through the centuries. Central to cantus-tradition doctrine is the investment of melodic tones with structural functions which articulate modes as melodic archetypes; idiomelic antiphons are analyzed according to five melodic functions derived from formulaic psalmody …