Digital Commons Network^™

Engaging With The Score: Wadada Leo Smith, Graphic Notation, And The Performer’S Perspective, Kennedy Taylor Dixon

Masters Theses

As a Composer/Performer, my work exists in both realms. This thesis reflects the principle that my experience as a violist influences my compositional process and vice versa. Since identifying under both artistic skill sets, it has become evident that the two areas that exist as a creative and presentational output, thrive off one another’s success.

In June 2019, I had the chance to play Wadada Leo Smith’s String Quartet No. 3: Black Church, The First World Gathering of the Spirit (1995) at the Nief-Norf Summer Festival. This encounter was the first time I interacted with graphically notated scores as a …

The Best Is Yet To Come: Approaches To Rhythmic Development, Robert W. Lindsay Ii

Masters Theses

For my Masters of Arts thesis, I recorded a number of songs that I had written between 2015 and 2020 for an album titled “The Best is Yet to Come.” In this adjunct essay, I will analyze four of those pieces to demonstrate my use of rhythmic development; I use rhythmic development extensively in my work in order to generate cohesion between songs. The opening song, “Fresh Vegetables,” demonstrates the rhythmic motive that all other songs develop from. If anyone chooses to learn or analyze my music in the future, this document can be a reference.

Compositions For 0 Or 1 Performers, Rodrigo Valente Pascale

Masters Theses

This thesis includes a collection of pieces composed for 0 or 1 performers – unaccompanied solo, solo and electronics or fixed media. The compositions for solo instruments include “Unnest” for bassoon solo, premièred by Ariane Petri during the V Congress of Music and Mathematics in 2020, and “Assemblage” for baritone saxophone solo, premièred by Erin Rogers in 2020. “Reizantwort” is a composition for viola and electronics which was first recorded by Laura Parra in summer 2020. Finally, "Discontinuous Mediation I" and "Discontinuous Mediation II" are fixed media compositions that were composed in Summer 2020 and Spring 2021, respectively. This collection …

Prescribed Freedom, Proscribed Freedom: Compositional And Improvisational Balances In Jazz, Andrew W. Saliba

Masters Theses

Jazz is a recent and flexible art form, rooted in the twin musical strains of occidental canon and folkloric African-American music. From its genesis, jazz musicians have had the difficult task of reconciling these seemingly opposite musical parents while simultaneously building a new musical canon that respects and upholds its past, even as it celebrates new individual voices. Like any multifaceted challenge this balancing of elements has not always gone smoothly, and attempts to codify the delineation and categorization of jazz remain controversial even now. There is additional challenge in defining the nature of “free” improvised music. While free music …

Curtis Otto Bismarck Curtis-Smith, Hollis Claire Wittman

Masters Theses

Curtis Otto Bismarck Curtis-Smith, composer and pianist, spent the majority of his career serving the community at Western Michigan University. His development of the bowed piano technique contributed significantly to the course of music in the late twentieth century; his prolific compositions stand on their own artistic merit. This document attempts to provide a summation of the composer’s life, particularly in regard to his compositional activity. The first section, a biography, discusses Curtis-Smith’s life and the changes to his compositional style over his lifetime. Next, a catalog of works details the available information about the many pieces written by the …

Mal_Functions For String Quartet And Live Electronics, Elliott Andrew Lupp

Masters Theses

Mal_Functions is a four-movement work for string quartet and live electronic that takes as its subject the timbrally rich and expansive acoustic capabilities of a string quartet and twists, warps, and expands upon them with the addition of the live electronic processing. The addition of electronics acts as only an extension of the performer, and therefore, appears to be generated by the performers themselves - as opposed to the computer. The overall goal of this piece is to take a well-established object of the musical past (the string quartet) and add to it something from the present day (live electronic …

Gradus Ad Parnassum: A Reader's Edition And Commentary, Sara Miller Schulte

Masters Theses

The seminal eighteenth-century counterpoint treatise Gradus ad Parnassum by Johann Joseph Fux exists in Latin, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and a host of other languages in its entirely, but in English only the second book of two has been translated, and even that is available only in a collection of partial translations. While a complete English translation is well beyond the scope of this project, toward that end, this research makes a case for its completion and provides a modernized edition and commentary of the as-yet-untranslated first book.

The Bended Tree, Graeme Shields

Masters Theses

The Bended Tree is a multi-movement, 40-minute cantata for chorus, organ, piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet, violin, and percussion. It explores timbral, textural, and harmonic development within loosely a symmetrical form divided in the center by 30 seconds of silence. The text for the cantata stems from a series of Lutheran hymns and Biblical passages, set to original music.

In the interest of facilitating flexibility for performances, the movements are written so that they can be performed individually, in any subset, or in the piece’s entirety. The instrumentation is also variable: the core ensemble is comprised of chorus, piano, and …