Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Methods Of Storytelling In Music: An Analysis Of Tchaikovsky's 'The Tempest', Katherine Cornell

Senior Honors Theses

Throughout history, music has been employed in storytelling. By presenting a story in musical terms, composers can bring stories to life, creating auditory atmospheres which connect the listener to the story in a deeper way. One medium composers have done this through is program music, a musical genre which seeks to tell a story through music in association with a descriptive title or short program, relying on the imagination of the listener instead of spoken word or visible action. One example is Tchaikovsky’s The Tempest, Op. 18, TH 44, an orchestral fantasia meant to convey Shakespeare’s The Tempest …

Creative Technologies: A Conversation With Roy Magnuson, Roy Magnuson, Maureen Russell

Faculty Publications - Music

[In lieu of an abstract, the introduction is provided.] Today I am speaking with Roy Magnuson, Associate Professor Creative Technologies in the School of Music at Illinois State University (ISU). (see Figure 1) His music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe at venues such as the World Saxophone Congress, WASBE, CBDNA, the RED NOTE New Music Festival, and the Robb Composers’ Symposium. Magnuson is also the creator of the virtual reality composition software solsticeVR and the conducting software RibbonsVR. He is a member of ASCAP, and his music is recorded on Albany Records and NAXOS.

Collection Container Inventory, Lynn A. Brock

Winteregg Collection Documents

No abstract provided.

The Bleached Bones Of A Story, Coral Douglas

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Creative Work, and Performance

All ideas stored in our heads are simplistic in nature, or relational to others, which allows for the production of more complex ideas. As is such, small memories supplement beautifully full, yet inherently relational concepts. Small scale ideas are useful to performers (and to audiences), as it is difficult to handle brain capacity overload; it's impossible to multi-task, let alone keep multiple ideas going at once to their fullest, especially when presented with dense new materials. In composing with mental participation for audience members and performers in mind, I propose that composers should create clear formal devices, intend their materials …

Songs Of Myself: An Exploration Of Identity Through Composition, Megan Howell

Honors College

Songs of Myself is an Extended Play (EP) of original music that I recorded entirely on my own, depicting my personal exploration of identity. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, a poem that describes the importance of all beings and explores the idea of identity and self-worth, the EP is comprised of seven songs: “Sunrise”; “Dawn”; “Autumn”; “Overcast”; “Storm”; “Dusk”; and “Sunset”, each of which describes a different aspect of my life and identity. “Sunrise” begins the EP, establishing the main theme that returns throughout the rest of the tracks. “Dawn” depicts the important of my family and my …

Metamorphosis, Microtones And Modes: Composition Portfolio With Commentary, Daragh Black Hynes

Research Theses

This research project consists of a portfolio of eight works accompanied by a thesis, which offers analytical commentaries on all of the works and the composition processes therein. The title of the thesis, ‘Metamorphosis, Microtones and Modes’, alludes to the primary factors involved in the composition processes, from a research perspective, across the course of the project. The concept of metamorphosis was approached in the context of attempting to musically interpret the visual ideas of M.C. Escher, and was subsequently explored extensively throughout the portfolio works in the parameters of pitch material, rhythm, form and structure, texture, timbre, and also …

Children's Creative Processes In Music Composition Through The Orff-Schulwerk Approach, Ashley Viera Espinal

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this descriptive qualitative study was to explore the creative processes of elementary school students in music composition through the Orff-Schulwerk approach. Twenty-two 5th grade students and a music teacher with all three levels of the Orff-Schulwerk certification participated in the study. There were three main focal points that were investigated within a span of five-weeks: 1) children’s creativity in an Orff-based composition task, 2) children’s perceptions of their creative processes employed during the composition task, and 3) the teacher’s perceptions of teaching/learning music composition through the Orff-Schulwerk approach. Data were generated through observations, field notes, interviews with …

Music And Infrasound In Horror Movies - How They Can Be Used To Enhance Horror Films, Isabella Sills

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The purpose of this project is to research and investigate the effect music and sound effects have on horror films, specifically, the natural phenomena known as infrasound will be explored in depth. Just outside our range of hearing at 20 Hz, infrasound may not be audible, but can still cause physical reactions such as anxiety, uneasiness, and extreme sorrow (Morrow, 2017). I am looking to create a horror comic in the form of a video that heavily relies on musical cues and the incorporation of infrasound to build up parts of the story told in the form of a comic. …

Exploring Trauma, Healing, And Accountability Through Music, Mieke Johanna Doezema

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

My composition recital and honors project involved compositional works that I wrote to explore trauma, healing, and accountability in cases of sexual violence through music with guest speakers Tracey Pyscher and DVSAS.

21 Modes, Adam Bodine

Senior Thesis Compositions in Music

21 Modes
by Adam Bodine

In three movements.

Performed by Quartet Nouveau
April 19, 2018
French Parlor, Founders Hall
University of San Diego

Batya MacAdam-Somer and Missy Lukin, violins
Annabelle Terbetski, viola
Elizabeth Brown, cello

21 Modes was inspired by curiosity. I wanted to know how many scales would result from reordering the half and whole steps of the major scale. As it turns out there are 21. I composed each of the three movements to explore the sonorities of each scale. The first movement is inspired by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The aggressive eighth note string texture became …

On Myth & Music, Legend & Landscape, Science, Stars, & Story; A Portfolio Of Compositions: An Animist Aesthetic Argument On Symbolist Sound-Synergies, With Musings On Messiaen And The Taoism Of Takemitzu, In The Work Of Mulvany., Eoin Mulvany

Doctoral

The accompanying portfolio contains eight major works for disparate forces: Brú na Sídhe is a work for Large Orchestra; Bog Bodies is a work commissioned for a heterogenous Quintet; Gáeth Ard Úar is a work written for a Solo Bass/Contrabass Clarinet in B-flat; a Piano Trio, SzyzygyS, follows; a work entitled Blackwater is written for Solo Guitar; a diptych, named Sigil, written for a Dectet of Harp and Vibraphone with double String Quartet, follows; then, O Unworn World for a ten part Choral ensemble is presented as a meditation on a poem by Patrick Kavanagh; and, the last of the …

Mucp 183-983: Applied Music Composition--A Course Benchmark Portfolio, Gregory Simon

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

MUCP 183-983, Applied Music Composition, is the core of the music composition course curriculum for students at all levels, from freshman to doctoral candidate. Like all applied lesson environments, it is a one-on-one, individualized study that principally involves the instructor giving students feedback on their musical works-in-progress. This time-honored paradigm for teaching composition has produced brilliant artists, but is rife with pitfalls and traps that can tarnish a student’s growth: composition pedagogues can coerce students into writing music like their teachers, or can prescribe a curriculum that makes composition accessible only to students who have already played classical music for …

Autism: A Song Of Understanding, Hannah Babcock

Honors College

Autism: A Song of Understanding is a musical composition inspired by Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) which summarizes the entire spectrum through three common categories of symptoms: language, social, and behavior. The piece consists of three movements from the perspective of the child and the fourth movement takes the parent/guardian/outsider’s perspective. Language starts in the early morning when a beeping alarm clock is silenced with a groan. The parent walks in and tries to rouse the child (Alex) out of bed. Alex responds, attempting to repeat the parent’s good-morning greeting. After failing to resolve the misunderstanding, Alex uses their self-stimulatory behavior …

A Portfolio Of Compositions, Anne-Marie O'Farrell

Research Theses

The works in the attached portfolio address a number of compositional focal points: to bring together diverse strands of musical influence into sustained musical argument, across various large-scale media; to enlarge and explore the musical language of the harp, including the lever harp; and to integrate received materials into new music so as to create a different context while acknowledging musical inheritance. These combine with the exploration of inherent instrumental colour within my approaches to rhythm, harmony, melodic transformation, structure and the use of text to demonstrate the development of my compositional style during my PhD study. The commentary opens …

Breakdown: Vol 1: Text And Music, A Survey Of Methodology And Process, Vol 2: In Full Score., Andrew Synnott

Doctoral

The work presented here is in two parts. The first part is an opera composed to a libretto by the Irish playwright, John Breen. This opera is in three acts and concerns the performance of four famous performance art pieces; Rhythm 0 by Marina Abramović, Breakdown by Michael Landy, Velocity Piece by Barry La Va and How To Explain Pictures To a Dead Hare by Joseph Beuys. These art works are presented as the action of the opera and happen concurrently on the stage during the first two acts. The third act reflects on the action of acts one and …

Composing/Arranging Familiar Songs In Choir With Garageband, Brent C. Talbot

Sunderman Conservatory of Music Faculty Publications

This practical multi-stage project description demonstrates to teachers how they can engage students in arranging and composing music related to the choral curriculum by using Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) like GarageBand.

Movement I. "Lo" From Four Moons For Brass Quartet, Gregory V. Goeden

Compositions

"lo" is the introductory movement of a four-part suite, entitled Four Moons for Brass Quartet. As suggested by the title, the four movements of the work were modeled after a specific set of astronomical entities, the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. These celestial satellites provided inspiration for this work in a number of different ways. Scientific observations and measurements for each moon, such as diameter, mass, density and composition, provided melodic and harmonic ideas through a 20th century musical process that is commonly referred to as "pitch set theory." The visual and physical qualities of each moon, and their relationships …

Oasis Dreams, Clarisse Tobia, David Vayo, Faculty Advisor

Compositions

Full musical score for violin, viola, cello and piano for large or small ensembles.

Flow, Tommy Bravos

Compositions

Flow was composed in the Spring of 2014 and premiered in it’s entirety during the April Student Composition Concert here at Illinois Wesleyan University. I composed the piece during an emotionally tumultuous time, and it represents many events that were occurring cyclically in my life at the time. The emotional events that directly inspired Flow were like opposite sides of a coin: one being relationships attempting to grow and the other being relationships gradually turning sour, needing to be left behind. These ideas are represented by the piece revolving around the recurring motive, showing how these events constantly wove in …

Dolce Stil Novo, Timothy W. Mcdunn

Compositions

Dolce Stil Novo is a slightly unconventional kind of tone poem. As the title suggests, the main inspiration for the piece is the poetry of Dante Alighieri, especially that subset of it which belongs to his so-called "Sweet New Style." While the three successive intermezzi are tied only obliquely to this subject, the first and final movements make direct reference to Dante's Sweet New Style as found in the Vita Nuova, an autobiographical compilation of prose and verse. In this way, the piece is a reflection on Dante's writings from two perspectives: that of the author (in the first and …

Dialogue As Performance. Performance As Dialogue, Laura Lynn

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation is an arts-based qualitative study in Leadership and Change that describes the qualities of dialogue revealed through the felt experience of Native and non-Native American music composers engaged in a dialogue through music composition. The fifteen co-collaborators who participated in the study range in age from three-years-old to elders. The study is theoretically embedded within Performance Studies, Dr. Carolyn Kenny’s music therapy model Field of Play, and aesthetic philosophy. Methodologically, this work is expressed through performance ethnography and autoethnography and privileges textual and non-textual modes of account including photographs, video excerpts, poetry, and music manuscript. The text is …

Composition And Analysis Of Music Using Mathematica, Marianella P. Machado, Christopher W. Kulp, Dirk Schlingman

Languages, Cultures, and Humanities Faculty and Staff Research

In this paper we demonstrate how to create and analyze musical compositions using Mathematica. In §1, we begin by demonstrating how to create a musical composition for an orchestra based on the butterfly curve using traditional means. In §2, we then show how a computer generated piece based on any curve can be composed using Mathematica. Finally, in §3, we show how Mathematica can be used to analyze musical compositions using the methods from nonlinear time series analysis.

Convergence And Divergence In Peter Mennin's Canzona, Gene H. Anderson

Music Faculty Publications

In a brief but perspicacious study of Mennin' s music in 1954, Walter Hendl describes the composer as "a consummate craftsman who devotes great attention to the organization of materials." Although Hendl may not have known Canzona, which had been premiered in 1951 but not published until the year of his essay, the author's statement could well have been written with Mennin's sole piece for band specifically in mind. Not only is every aspect of Canzona integrally related to every other, but the relationships are deployed with a remarkable economy of means.

The Triumph Of Timelessness Over Time In Hindemith's "Turandot Scherzo" From The Symphonic Metamorphosis Of Themes By Carl Maria Von Weber, Gene H. Anderson

Music Faculty Publications

Hindemith's title of his four-movement von Weber suite of 1943 poses a problem. The composer's characteristic reticence about his sources delayed their documentation for some twenty years, whereupon it was found that the Symphonic Metamorphosis was based, not only on themes, but on complete pieces. Rather than "thematic transformation," the "metamorphosis" of the title would thus be more accurately regarded as "recomposition," in which changes of tone system, timbre, harmony, rhythm, and form, in addition to the melody itself, transform every level and component of the original composition's structure. This study attempts to demonstrate how Hindemith achieves such a metamorphosis …

Musical Metamorphoses In Hindemith's "March" From The Symphonic Metamorphosis Of Themes By Carl Maria Von Weber, Gene H. Anderson

Music Faculty Publications

From the composer we learn nothing about his approaches to the construction of this piece or about specific methods of musical metamorphosis. Hindemith, in fact, considered such knowledge useless, as he trenchantly observed in an early autobiographical note: " ... for people with ears my things are perfectly easy to understand, so an analysis is superfluous. For people without ears such cribs can't help." Indeed, one is struck, not by the differences, but by the similarities between the March and its prototype, von Weber's Marcia from Huit pièces for piano duet, Op. 60, No. 7, composed in 1819. But while …