Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Whatever Happened To The Movie Theme Song?, Luka Vasic

Capstones

Film music is as important as it’s ever been and a good theme song can absorb you into the world of a movie. Despite this, our idea of the theme song has changed a lot, and the kinds of themes that have traditionally been memorable parts of classic cinema have now lost their importance and role in modern filmmaking.

http://lukavasic.com/capstone/

Composition Portfolio, Alexander J. Juhan

Theses and Dissertations

A selection of works. Includes contemporary pieces, as well as music scored to picture.

Tonicizations, Periods, And Period-Like Structures In The Music Of Dvořák, Xieyi Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Discussions of the tonal construction of parallel periods usually focus on the standard eighteenth-century layout in which the cadence at the end of the antecedent is either an imperfect authentic cadence (IAC) or half cadence (HC) in the main key. In exceptional cases, antecedents may deploy a reinterpreted HC—i.e., a perfect authentic cadence (PAC) in V that is reinterpreted as a tonic-key HC. Especially in music of the nineteenth century, however, one also often finds periods in which the antecedent concludes with a PAC in a key other than V. In these modulating antecedents, cadences of the antecedent and consequent …

Imagining Africa: An Analysis Of Tropes And Motifs In Turn Of The Century Black Music, Shane Ortale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

References to Africa exist in different forms in diasporic music from every country in the New World. In the case of the United States, an abundance of song lyrics of black writers and musicians from the turn of the twentieth century contain imaginings of the African continent. This thesis analyzes the many ways that these depictions were produced within the minstrel and vaudeville genres. While these artists faced many obstacles that limited the scope of their lyrical content, they used diverse strategies to undermine the racist world in which they lived. By juxtaposing and conflating tropes about black folks in …

Unlearning Don Carlos: Historical And Fictional Elements Of Innovation In César Vichard De Saint-Réal’S 'Dom Carlos, Nouvelle Historique,' Friedrich Schiller’S 'Don Karlos, Infant Von Spanien,' And Giuseppe Verdi’S 'Don Carlos', Maria-Cristina Necula

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The story of the sixteenth-century Spanish prince, Don Carlos, has inspired numerous literary and musical adaptations that, despite the artistic limitations of historically-based content, reflect an astonishing scope of creative freedom. The myth created around Don Carlos originated in European consciousness as early as 1568. Various theories recorded in political reports and in historical works insinuated that the prince had been murdered while incarcerated by orders of his father, King Philip II. Simultaneously, hatred of Spain, intensified by Philip’s violent suppression of the revolt in the Netherlands, determined exiled Flemish nobles to launch an anti-Philip propaganda. The mystery of Don …

Baroque Pianism: Perspectives On Playing Baroque Keyboard Music On The Piano, With Emphasis On Bach’S Fugues In The Well-Tempered Clavier, Chih-Tung Cheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a famous quote, Schumann described the fugues in Bach's Well-tempered Clavier as pianists’ “daily bread.” This dissertation explains how these fugues can be pianists’ practical daily bread by encouraging them to explore a virtuosity of subtlety. I assert that the compositional complexity in these fugues increases pianistic challenges in both interpretive and technical aspects; these challenges can lead pianists to explore a multi-faced pianistic awareness in a way that they may not encounter when performing other styles of music.

Poems To Open Palms: Praise Performance And The State In The Sultanate Of Oman, Bradford J. Garvey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the musical constitution of moral, economic, material, and social relations between rural communities and the state in the Sultanate of Oman. I argue that communities embedded within the authoritarian state hegemony of the Sultanate form and affirm social relations with the state through its embodied proxy, Sultan Qābūs bin Ṣa‘īd Āl Bū Ṣa‘īd, via the reciprocal exchange of state-directed giving and praise poetry responses. The circuit of exchange catalyzes the social production of political legitimacy and ensures continued generous distribution by mythopoetically presenting such cyclicity as resulting from elite and non-elite mutuality. This praise poetry is rendered …

The Incorporated Hornist: Instruments, Embodiment, And The Performance Of Music, M. Elizabeth Fleming

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Roland Barthes famously described the “grain” as “the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.” Stated simply, this project asks What is the body in the horn as it sounds? Instrumentality is typically understood as extension and expression beyond the boundaries of the body; brass instrument musicking, however, begins not where the sound emerges from the bell, but at the very least at the meeting point of the player’s breath, the surfaces of the body, and the tube of the instrument. This project of instrumental incorporation understands music as a …

Analyzing Harmonic Polarities: A Tonal Narrative Approach, Stephen J. Whale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to develop an approach to analyzing common-practice repertoire based on the dynamic interplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces. It aims at interpreting various kinds of chromaticism and modulation in terms of the interaction of forces moving away from the tonic or principal key (centrifugal) and those returning to it (centripetal). Centripetal forces also correspond to the force of cadential substantiation of keys, not only the principal key, which I call temporal-centripetal force; temporal-centrifugal forces correspond to the phenomena of tonal instability, of motion through multiple regions.

The dynamic interplay and counterbalancing of these forces is a core …

Leonora Duarte (1610–1678): Converso Composer In Antwerp, Elizabeth A. Weinfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Leonora Duarte (1610–1678), a converso of Jewish descent living in Antwerp, is the author of seven five-part Sinfonias for viol consort — the only known seventeenth-century viol music written by a woman. This music is testament to a formidable talent for composition, yet very little is known about the life and times in which Duarte produced her work. Her family were merchants and art collectors of Jewish descent who immigrated from Portugal in the early sixteenth century to escape the Inquisition; in exile in Antwerp, they achieved enormous success and provided the means with which to educate their children and …

Music And Jewish Practice In Contemporary Istanbul: Preserving Heritage, Bending Tradition, Joseph M. Alpar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of ongoing transformations in the sacred musical repertoires practiced by ḥazzanim (synagogue cantors) and their synagogue congregations in Istanbul’s contemporary Jewish community. I argue that clergy and laypeople alike negotiate their religious identities as Turkish Jews in the musical choices they make. While many try to maintain the community’s local music tradition, rooted in makam—the Ottoman Turkish melodic system—others attempt to broaden their repertoire with musics from Israel, the United States, and Ḥabad Hasidic Judaism. I examine adjustments made to the musical components of ritual as responses to decades of Jewish religious life as …

Cyber-Narrative In Opera: Three Case Studies, Naomi Barrettara

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at three newly composed operas that feature what I call cyber-narratives: a work in which the story itself is inextricably linked with digital technologies, such that the characters utilize, interact with, or are affected by digital technologies to such a pervasive extent that the impact of said technologies is thematized within the work. Through an analysis of chat rooms and real-time text communication in Nico Muhly’s Two Boys (2011), artificial intelligence in Søren Nils Eichberg’s Glare (2014), and mind uploading and digital immortality in Tod Machover’s Death and the Powers (2010), a nexus of ideologies surrounding voice, …

Johann Nauwach's Teütscher Villanellen: A Critical Performance Edition With Performance Practice Commentary, Christopher Pfund

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Johann Nauwach (1595–1630) was an early seventeenth-century German lutenist who was sent to Florence to study with Medici court lutenist, Lorenzo Allegri (1567–1648). Nauwach returned to Dresden around 1618 and published two volumes of songs. His first, Libro primo di arie passegiate a una voce per cantar (1623), contains monodic settings of popular Italian eclogues into which he composed extensive diminutions similar in style to Caccini. In 1627, Nauwach published Teütscher Villanellen dedicated to the nuptial celebrations of Sophie Eleonore of Saxony and Landgrave Georg II of Hesse-Darmstadt –– the same celebration for which Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672) and Martin Opitz …

Afro-Cuba Transnational: Recordings And The Mediation Of Afro-Cuban Traditional Music, Johnny Frias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the way audio and video recordings and the internet have impacted, shaped, and helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene. My focus will be on the most popular and widely-recorded genres of Afro-Cuban music—rumba and the religious repertoire of Santería, particularly batá drumming—both of which I also perform regularly with other Cuban musicians in Miami. Incorporating interviews, online ethnographic research, and participant-observation as a musician, my research has three main arguments.

First, recordings of Afro-Cuban music helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene by increasing the popularity of these traditions outside of Cuba, including their amateur performance …

Exploring Political Action And Socialization Through Group Improvisation Within The Music Of Frederic Rzewski And Cornelius Cardew, Marcel Rominger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the late 1960s, socialist composers, Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, each established ensembles with the purpose of performing works consisting of experimental forms of improvisation. By employing group improvisation, and including untrained, non-musicians within their performances, they strove to use these ensembles as a model for society itself; this model includes a dissolution of the hierarchy among performers and the barrier between performer and audience. Improvisation helped music resist commodification by the culture industry or appropriation by authoritarian regimes for the purpose of propaganda. This dissertation aims to explore how Cardew and Rzewski constituted effective socialization and political action …

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …

Reimagining The Flute Masterclass: Case Studies Exploring Artistry, Authority, And Embodiment, Sarah Carrier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work explores the flute masterclass as an aesthetic, ritualized, and historically reimagined cultural practice. Based on fieldwork that took place between 2017 and 2019 in the United States, in Italy, and on the social media platforms Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, I argue that the masterclass—an extension of the master/apprentice system that dominates learning in the classical music tradition—is characterized by embodied qualities of artistry and authority. These qualities are not inherent, but are perceived through subjective, social, familied, and affective bodies.

Chapter One outlines the main themes and the research design. Chapter Two is a case study that analyzes …

Performing Rhythmic Dissonance In Ligeti’S Études, Book 1: A Perception-Driven Approach And Re-Notation, Imri Talgam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Interpretive approaches to the Études have been limited by Ligeti’s choice of notation, which creates several layers of difficulty in the presentation of complex rhythms. In order to resolve some of these difficulties, this dissertation includes a complete re-notation of four Etudes, using a methodology based on research in cognition and perception of rhythm.

Based on this new score, the notion of rhythmic dissonance is developed as an analytical tool to investigate in-time perception of rhythmic complexity, drawing on existing work on metric entrainment and metric dissonance. Different compositional strategies for the production of rhythmic dissonance are shown to have …

Support Vs. Steady Airflow: The Effect Of Two Different Instructions On Subglottal Pressure, Sound Pressure Level, And Airflow Rate During Singing And Speaking, Sunyoung Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This empirical study investigated the possibility of finding an alternative to a conventional directive in vocal pedagogy. There is a debate among voice pedagogues and voice scientists with regard to how to teach breath management, particularly about the concept of support. W. Stephen Smith has strongly objected to the use of the term “support.” He suggests that the word promotes the use of increased air pressure. The purpose of the present investigation was to test that hypothesis by examining differences in a variety of physiological parameters, comparing a conventional singing instruction that uses the word “support” with an alternative instruction …

Women's Contributions To Viola Repertoire And Pedagogy In The Twentieth Century: Rebecca Clarke, Lillian Fuchs, And Rosemary Glyde, Eva R. Gerard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the life and work of Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979), Lillian Fuchs (1901–1995), and Rosemary Glyde (1949–1994), whose concept of the viola’s sound was fundamentally different from their male counterparts Lionel Tertis (1875–1975) and William Primrose (1904–1982). These women’s work has mostly been ignored, due to their gender and use of small forms in their compositions. This dissertation will explore the journeys of these three women through a discussion of their performances, pedagogy, and compositions; simultaneously it will chart the viola’s journey from obscurity to recognition as well as its evolution from lowly harmonic filler to expressive, melodic voice.

Six Vignettes For Solo Violin, Deshawn A. Withers

Theses and Dissertations

Six Vignettes for Solo Violin

• Adagio Misterioso
• Allegro con fuoco
• Adagio
• Allegro
• Interlude- Presto
• Finale- Allegro con moto

Deshawn Withers (b. 1982)

Six Vignettes for Solo Violin written for the illustrious Pala Garcia blends different moods and techniques into short segments. These vignettes each contain their own character ranging from reserved to furious, pensive to sassy, traditional to defiant. Each movement explores range and timbre uniquely as to bring out some of the infinite colors of the Violin.

Illuminations, Emerson Sudbury

Theses and Dissertations

Illuminations is a vocal piece for mezzo-soprano and electronics. It incorporates elements of ambient and noise music. Relying on texts by Arthur Rimbaud and drawing inspiration from composers such as Debussy and Arvo Pärt, it is an attempt to blend tradition with contemporary practices and aesthetics.

Isaac Hayes’S Soul Concept: Reexamining Hot Buttered Soul As A Pioneering Concept Album, Bryan Terry

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Isaac Hayes's 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul, an early exemplar of the concept album genre. Historical, theoretical, and musical context is analyzed in order to show the groundbreaking nature of Hot Buttered Soul in the trajectory of African American popular music.

Intrusive Thoughts - Guitar, Voice, & String Quintet, Joseph M. Young

Theses and Dissertations

This four-movement song addresses mental health, specifically that of Obsession Compulsive Disorder and the symptom of intrusive thoughts that are often associated. From the point of view of an individual suffering from OCD, each movement describes the disorder and portrays different stages of dealing with and managing emotions and relationships.

Reclaiming The Musical Burlesque: A Reconstruction Of The 1855 Musical Score To John Brougham’S Po-Ca-Hon-Tas: Or, The Gentle Savage, Christopher Drobny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most historians begin their musical theatre chronologies with the 1866 premiere of The Black Crook. However, a few respected scholars cite Po-Ca-Hon-Tas: or, The Gentle Savage, John Brougham’s 1855 musical burlesque, as an important development in the art form’s earlier evolution. The neglect of Brougham’s work is often justified for two reasons. First, his practice of creating lyrics to pre-existing melodies reduces his work to second-tier status. Second, because none of Brougham’s musical scores are extant, it is impossible to recreate a performance of his work and access its qualities. I offer two responses. First, as our contemporary musical …

Dance Of Exile: The Sakharoffs’ Visual Performances In Montevideo (1935–1948), Pablo Munoz Ponzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life-work chronology of the dancers and choreographers Clotilde von Derp (whose surname then was Sakharoff) and Alexander Sakharoff, who were exiled in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1941 and 1948. During their stay in the Rio de la Plata region, the Sakharoffs stirred up the art scene by performing extremely detailed dances with great attention to costume design. This thesis begins with a review of the reception of the dancers’ performances by the artistic and cultural circles in Montevideo, arguing that the Sakharoffs’ “queer” trajectory resonated with the Uruguayan artistic community, influencing the creation …

Mechanical Kingdoms: Sound Technologies And The Avant-Garde, 1928–1933, Lauren Rosati

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Against accepted histories of the historical avant-garde, which have elevated artistic production in traditional media while suppressing sonic practices, this dissertation argues that artist-engineers working across Europe and the United States independently, if simultaneously, turned their attention to emerging sound technologies as new media for creative experimentation by the early 1930s. This spectrum of activity demonstrates the significance of sound in avant-garde practice, and indicates a wide-ranging artistic engagement with technological devices intended for mass audiences. While the common understanding of the relation between art and technology in this period amounts to one of mere enthusiasm for the novel formal …

The Musical World Of Joseph Rumshinsky’S Mamele, D. A. Geller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The Musical World of Joseph Rumshinsky’s Mamele” consists of a set of three cases studies that demonstrate the enormous need and potential for further Yiddish theater music scholarship. There exists little Yiddish theater scholarship that addresses music in any meaningful way: scholars like David Lifson, Nahma Sandrow, and Joel Berkowitz tend to view Yiddish theater’s rich musical traditions as a footnote in the larger history of Yiddish theater’s dramatic development. Yet Yiddish theater music developed independently from Yiddish drama, and therefore needs to be studied from a primarily musical perspective. I connect scholarship across the fields of Jewish studies …

Early Twentieth Century Vocal Performance Practice And The French School: An Exploration Of The Lectures And Selected Songs By Reynaldo Hahn, Mary P. Hubbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Composer, conductor, singer, and critic Reynaldo Hahn (1874–1947) was a highly influential figure in Paris’s artistic circles during the first half of the twentieth century. Today he is primarily remembered as a composer of art song. However, during his lifetime he was also admired as a sophisticated composer of operetta and chamber music, and his keen intellect and attention to detail also made him a discerning music critic and arbiter of taste. In 1913, he was invited to present a series of five lectures on the art of singing to the “Université des Annales.” This organization produced presentations by prominent …

Piano At The Conservatoire De Paris During The Interwar Period: A Study In Pedagogy And Performance Practice, Audrey Abela

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the specificities of the French piano school between 1920 and 1940, a defining time in the history of French pianism. This research focuses on the musical and technical traditions established at the Conservatoire de Paris and provides a comparative analysis of the pedagogy and musical aesthetics of three influential French artist-teachers of the twentieth century: Marguerite Long, Isidor Philipp, and Lazare-Lévy.