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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Sounds Of Home: A Composition Portfolio, Paul Gabriel L. Cosme Apr 2022

The Sounds Of Home: A Composition Portfolio, Paul Gabriel L. Cosme

Music Honors Projects

What does home sound like? I have spent most of my recent life outside my homeland, the Philippines, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, and this question of what home is has become a persistent thought, if not, a necessary inquiry. This composition portfolio attempts to answer that question in three varying pieces. The first, The Sounds of Home, is a string quartet in three movements where each one tells a personal story by invoking Filipino folk and indigenous themes. The second, Commuting in Manila, is a wind septet that sonically emulates the commuting experience in Manila from the …


King Behind Colonial Curtains: Kasilag And The Making Of Filipino National Culture, Paul Gabriel L. Cosme Apr 2022

King Behind Colonial Curtains: Kasilag And The Making Of Filipino National Culture, Paul Gabriel L. Cosme

International Studies Honors Projects

Filipino National Artist Lucrecia “King” Kasilag sought to preserve folk cultures and melded these with her Western training to produce works—scholarly, pedagogical, and compositional—that shaped national music and culture. This thesis is a critical biography that combines perspectives from postcolonial studies, political economy, and musicology to highlight forces that shaped Kasilag’s life while illustrating her successes and shortcomings on national culture. Through this biography, I argue, Filipino national culture must originate from intersectional struggles and negotiation among elites and masses; that this culture is about both resistance and acceptance—a national culture that is syncretic and quintessentially dynamic.


“It Was Real To Me Too”: Emotional Storytelling And Character Development Through Motivic Relationships In The Black Widow Soundtrack, Gwyneth John Apr 2022

“It Was Real To Me Too”: Emotional Storytelling And Character Development Through Motivic Relationships In The Black Widow Soundtrack, Gwyneth John

Music Honors Projects

Since her introduction into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the 2010 film Iron Man 2, Natasha Romanoff has not had a strong musical identity. The 2021 film Black Widow changes this trend as Natasha assumes the role of the titular character rather than that of a supporting character. Black Widow’s soundtrack allows the absurd superhero film to tell a personal story of familial bonds, struggles with individual identity, and childhood trauma through motivic relationships and the changes in various iterations of themes and motifs as they appear in the film.


Schumann, Barthes And Deleuze: Three Strangers, Jonah Esty Jan 2022

Schumann, Barthes And Deleuze: Three Strangers, Jonah Esty

Music Honors Projects

No abstract provided.


Bodies In The Margins: Refiguring The Rebetika As Literature, Sophia Schlesinger Apr 2020

Bodies In The Margins: Refiguring The Rebetika As Literature, Sophia Schlesinger

English Honors Projects

This thesis engages a literary analysis of a corpus of songs and recordings known as the rebetika (sing. rebetiko), which prospered in the port districts of major cities throughout the Aegean in the early 20th century. Engaging the rebetika as literary texts, I argue, helps us understand how they have functioned as a kind of pressure point on the borders between nation and Other. Without making unproveable biographical claims about the motives of the music progenitors, I examine why so many have reached for the rebetika as texts with which to articulate various political and cultural desires. Using a …


The Riot Continues: The Problematic Westernization Of Pussy Riot, Adam Clark Jan 2020

The Riot Continues: The Problematic Westernization Of Pussy Riot, Adam Clark

Gateway Prize for Excellent Writing

Although they share feminist ideals, the Russian art collective Pussy Riot distinguishes themselves from the U.S.-based Riot Grrrl Movement, as exemplified by the band Bikini Kill, because of their location-specific protest work in Moscow. Understanding how Pussy Riot is both similar to and different from Riot Grrrl is important for contextualizing the way we think about diverse, transnational feminisms so that we may develop more inclusive and nuanced ways in conceptualizing these feminisms in the future. While Pussy Riot shares similar ideals championed by Bikini Kill in the Riot Grrrl movement, they have temporal and location-specific activisms and each group …


Mozart’S Concerto For Piano And Orchestra In B-Flat Major, K. 450: A Performance And Formal Analysis, Yihao Zhou Apr 2016

Mozart’S Concerto For Piano And Orchestra In B-Flat Major, K. 450: A Performance And Formal Analysis, Yihao Zhou

Music Honors Projects

An examination of the formal designs of the three movements that comprise Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in B-Flat Major, K. 450, this thesis, along with a performance of the work (April 16, 2016), completes my Honors Project in the Macalester College Music Department. Drawing connections with standard musical forms that had been developed by the late eighteenth century, the formal analysis of K. 450, through a hermeneutic approach, offers a way of understanding the formal aspects of the three concerto movements. Particularly, it reveals that this concerto simultaneously presents the distinction of an individual in the …


Earthless - A Sonic Exploration Of The Space Between Death And Life, Composed In Five Movements For Chamber Ensemble., Samuel P. Tygiel Apr 2013

Earthless - A Sonic Exploration Of The Space Between Death And Life, Composed In Five Movements For Chamber Ensemble., Samuel P. Tygiel

Music Honors Projects

“Earthless” is a composition in 5 movements for a mixed chamber ensemble. The piece is loosely programatic and draws its “narrative” from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Tibetan Buddhist Text that gives instructions on how to traverse the space between death and rebirth. Rather than telling a direct narrative, each movement is designed to give a broad impression of the different aspects of the experience between death and life through the combination of text and music. The text is taken from poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sir Walter Scott and Sara Teasdale and compiled in an original “libretto” …


Orchestral Conducting: Study And Performance Of Orchestral Works By Haydn, Wagner, Strauss And Martinů, Jan Honza Cervenka Mar 2013

Orchestral Conducting: Study And Performance Of Orchestral Works By Haydn, Wagner, Strauss And Martinů, Jan Honza Cervenka

Music Honors Projects

This project served as an immersive experience in orchestral conducting, which encompassed score study, ensemble organization, rehearsal and performance. The project was split into two distinct parts: First, in the fall semester of 2012, I rehearsed the Macalester Orchestra in Bohuslav Martinů's Memorial to Lidice and conducted the work in December of 2012. The second part occurred in the spring semester of 2013, when I assembled a chamber orchestra of Macalester students and community members to rehearse and perform a concert of three works: Franz Joseph Haydn's Notturno in C Major, Hob. II:25, Richard Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and Richard …


Johanna Kvan's Honors Recital, Johanna Kvam Jan 2013

Johanna Kvan's Honors Recital, Johanna Kvam

Music Honors Projects

No abstract provided.


Agencies At War: Marshaling Places, Objects, And Sonorities In The Alta California Missions, Naomi R. Sussman Apr 2012

Agencies At War: Marshaling Places, Objects, And Sonorities In The Alta California Missions, Naomi R. Sussman

History Honors Projects

1769, Spanish Franciscan Junípero Serra initiated the missionization of Alta California. To transform California into a Spanish territory, Franciscan missions evangelized indigenous peoples. While traditional Alta California mission histories emphasize either Franciscan abuses or saintliness, reifying Native American subordination, most contemporary scholarship accentuates mutual hybridization but minimizes colonial power dynamics. Through archival and secondary research, this thesis argues that spatial interplay expressed neither syncretization nor unadulterated domination, but instead competing agencies within a physical and social “contact zone.” In this Alta Californian “contact zone,” material and sonic culture reinforced the continuous struggle for authority in the missions.


Illuminating The Infelice: Defiance And Transcendence In The 19th Century Operatic Madwoman, Claire Biringer Apr 2012

Illuminating The Infelice: Defiance And Transcendence In The 19th Century Operatic Madwoman, Claire Biringer

Music Honors Projects

The female protagonist’s mad scene, since coming into true vogue in the early nineteenth-century Italian opera tradition, has been prized for its dramatic and poignant emotive qualities. This project explores four nineteenth-century mad scenes; Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), Bellini’s I Puritani (1835), Meyerbeer’s Dinorah (1859), and Verdi’s Macbeth (1847), surveying the literature of each scene and providing formal analysis of musical attributes such as harmony, melodic structure, and formal design, all in comparison to generic operatic conventions. Musical elements generally associated with the operatic madwoman include the orchestral recollection of significant past themes, virtuosic coloratura lines, and the presence …


Illuminating The Infelice: Defiance And Transcendence In The 19th Century Operatic Madwoman, Claire Biringer Apr 2012

Illuminating The Infelice: Defiance And Transcendence In The 19th Century Operatic Madwoman, Claire Biringer

Music Honors Projects

The female protagonist’s mad scene, since coming into true vogue in the early nineteenth-century Italian opera tradition, has been prized for its dramatic and poignant emotive qualities. This project explores four nineteenth-century mad scenes; Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), Bellini’s I Puritani (1835), Meyerbeer’s Dinorah (1859), and Verdi’s Macbeth (1847), surveying the literature of each scene and providing formal analysis of musical attributes such as harmony, melodic structure, and formal design, all in comparison to generic operatic conventions. Musical elements generally associated with the operatic madwoman include the orchestral recollection of significant past themes, virtuosic coloratura lines, and the presence …


Fifth Wheel For Jazz Band, Ian C. Boswell Apr 2009

Fifth Wheel For Jazz Band, Ian C. Boswell

Music Honors Projects

Fifth Wheel is a composition written for Macalester's jazz band that uses form and extended tonality to create an emotional narrative. It contains elements of both classical and jazz traditions: its form and unusual meter (5/4) from the former and improvisation and jazz harmony from the latter. Writing harmonies in an extended tonal language was of particular importance in this piece's creation.


Re-Envisioning Tragedy: A Comparative Analysis Of Gender And Madness In Three Twentieth-Century Operas, Caolfionn Bhreidé Yenney Jan 2009

Re-Envisioning Tragedy: A Comparative Analysis Of Gender And Madness In Three Twentieth-Century Operas, Caolfionn Bhreidé Yenney

Music Honors Projects

This comparative analysis of three twentieth-century operas - Berg's Wozzeck, Britten's Peter Grimes, and Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District - traces their respective discourses of gender and madness, specifically within the dramatization (musical and otherwise) of their title characters. Of the three, Wozzeck, because it adheres to strict gender roles, has been received most uniformly as a tragedy; by contrast Lady Macbeth is traditionally viewed in terms of satire. I argue that feminist musicological analysis allows for a re-envisioning of all three operas, in which the characters are received as tragic regardless of subverting societally …


Colonizing Voices In Maurice Ravel's "Chansons Madécasses", Anna M. Sutheim May 2008

Colonizing Voices In Maurice Ravel's "Chansons Madécasses", Anna M. Sutheim

Music Honors Projects

The composer Maurice Ravel described his three-song cycle Chansons madécasses as containing "a new element, dramatic -- indeed erotic, resulting from the subject matter of [Evariste] Parny's poems." This paper explores the disparate and sometimes conflicting 'voices' -- of cultures, of instruments, of ideologies – arising from the depictions of exoticism, racial violence, gender and sexuality within both music and text. These 'voices' and the conflicts of which they speak are also examined in the context of Ravel's overall oeuvre, with an emphasis on his career-long preoccupation with the exotic in art.


Mysticism, Whimsy And Obscurity In Benjamin Britten's Sacred And Profane: Eight Medieval Lyrics (Op. 91), Daniel Pickens-Jones May 2008

Mysticism, Whimsy And Obscurity In Benjamin Britten's Sacred And Profane: Eight Medieval Lyrics (Op. 91), Daniel Pickens-Jones

Music Honors Projects

No abstract provided.


On Musical Cosmopolitanism, Martin Stokes Sep 2007

On Musical Cosmopolitanism, Martin Stokes

The Macalester International Roundtable 2007

No abstract provided.