Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Anarchy In The Unity: Compositional And Aesthetic Tensions In Mauricio Kagel's Antithese Für Einen Darsteller Mit Elektronischen Und Öffentlichen Klängen (1962), Makoto Mikawa

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 1962 the Argentine-German composer Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) completed an innovative multimedia/interdisciplinary piece, Antithese für einen Darsteller mit elektronischen und öffentlichen Klängen. The unique compositional style and formal structure consisting of heterogeneous compositional components reflected his profound insights into issues inherent in postwar avant-garde music. Kagel remarked strikingly that “anarchy in the piece was omnipresent.” Indeed, his use of the term ‘anarchy’ is a keystone not only of the structural features of Antithese, but also of Kagel’s aesthetic of music in the piece. The present study seeks to reveal Kagel’s idea of anarchy in musical context and how …

A Modest Proposal: A Chamber Opera In One Act, Kevin Morse

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A Modest Proposal is a chamber opera in one act adapted from the 1729 satirical essay of the same name by Jonathan Swift. The opera’s narrative was developed in close partnership with Toronto-based Governor-General’s Literary Award-nominated playwright Lisa Codrington, whom I commissioned to write the libretto. Set in an unnamed city in the present day, the work explores themes of economic disparity, social class, political power and process, parents and children, love, anger, and revenge. I integrate musical quotations from (or references to) folk lullabies and the works of Mahler, Debussy, and Schoenberg to support and enhance the richness and …

"Rap Is Easy, Career Is The Hard Part:" Analyzing Success, Longevity And Failure Within The Framework Of The Hip-Hop Career, Christopher R. White

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Conceptualizing and analyzing the hip-hop career and the role of success therein allows us to investigate the long-term shifts in the economic and cultural capitals associated with the genre, and can help us better understand how hip-hop has achieved enduring success and respect. As hip-hop musicians continue to prosper financially and achieve unprecedented levels of success and longevity in the industry, understandings of the hip-hop career have shifted. Hip-hop musicians attempt to translate their cultural capital into financial profit by leveraging their respective personas into marketable brands and lifestyles that act as non-musical, career extending strategies. The thesis investigates how …

Narrativity In Postmodern Music: A Study Of Selected Works Of Alfred Schnittke, Karen K. Ching

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The validity of music narratives has engendered much debate and research. This dissertation traces the development of narratology from its pre-structuralist phase to the post-structuralist phase where the discipline went through a narrative turn and blossomed into a broad-spectrum expansion that takes the form of interdisciplinary narratological studies such as music narratology. By adopting the viewpoints of postmodern philosophers and psychologists such as Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Ihab Hassan, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Carl Jung, we develop a cognitive narratological theory for postmodern music that is veracious both epistemologically and philosophically.

We then analyze formally and contextually four concertos by …

Mythologies: Three Tableaux For Flute, Harp, Strings And Percussion, Alice J. Hansen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Mythologies: Three Tableaux for Flute, Harp, Strings and Percussion is a c. 12-minute composition that deals with the nature of ambience in music. Compositional procedures used in each tableau attempt to highlight acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies within the instrumental ensemble. The first tableau is based on two melodic and harmonic motives which are systematically expanded through repetition and variation. The second tableau features a call and response between flute and harp in a dreamy and lyrical interlude. The third tableau develops material through a process of shifting harmonic and rhythmic textures to create a mosaic of ambient colour. Each tableau …

Audio Mastering As Musical Practice, Matt Shelvock

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines audio mastering as musical communication. Tasks including loudness management, harmonic balance, denoising, phase alignment, monitoring, effects application, and administrative responsibilities are of central importance to mastering engineers. With the exception of administrative responsibilities, each of these tasks significantly shapes a record’s aesthetic character and physical makeup. These contributions – the final creative steps before an album’s release – demonstrate the mastering engineer’s role as a collaborative auteur in recorded musical communications.

Dawn: A Symphonic Sketch For Orchestra, Jeff Mcclellan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Dawn was written as a tribute to the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, and, more particularly, its author, Elaine Morgan, who has been a restless proponent of the hypothesis for more than three decades. The evolutionary theory explains the anatomical differences between modern humans and apes by proposing that hominids lived through a semi-aquatic phase at some time in their development, providing reason for many of the aquatic characteristics & impulses that humans have and experience today.

My composition aims to capture the magic of this divergence of the genus homo over several million years. The music is programmatic, meaning an …

Garden Theatre, Patrick F. Arteaga

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Garden Theatre is a fifteen-minute piece for voices and chamber ensemble, which sets to music two poems by William Carlos Williams entitled Daisy and Queen Anne’s Lace. This piece is divided into two scenes (movements), each comprising three distinct sections. Garden Theatre will combine allusions to early music elements such as forms and methods of motivic development with a modern music aesthetic.

In Garden Theatre there are four main pitch collections from which pitch material is derived. Continuity is promoted throughout the work by using many large and small-scale inter-referential elements such as recurring instrumental textures, pitch structures and …

Frontiers, Borders, Boundaries: Cross-Cultural Encounters In The New York City Reception Of La Fanciulla Del West, Kathryn Marie Fenton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation maps the responses to the world premiere of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (10 December 1910, Metropolitan Opera House, New York City). It seeks to arrive at a deeper understanding of the opera’s ambivalent reception in the New York City musical press. From the vantage point of national musical identity, it analyzes the argumentation of the reviews and articles in the New York City newspapers from 1905-1911 and determines the themes and patterns that connect them. It then places the critical commentary into the larger contexts of both the New York City opera field of 1910 and the …

Charles Ives And Musical Borrowing, Allison C. Luff

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2 Concord Mass., 1840–1860 (1921) is considered by many scholars to be a transcendental work as it is dedicated to the four main transcendental scholars—Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott (and his family), and Thoreau—who resided in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet Ives’s writings reveal the Sonata to have been a much more personal narrative in which the transcendental scholars serve the greater purpose of illustrating values, morals, and characteristics Ives found desirable in his own culture. Through an interrogation of the musical borrowings in the Concord Sonata and their multiple layers of extramusical association, I …