Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Still Figuring This Out: A Symphony For Orchestra, Latasha Bundy

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

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On Vinyl: Revival & Survival, Thom Leavy

Capstones

As a record collector and journalist, I take stock of what they mean to me while searching to better understand the “Vinyl Revival” of the past decade. I meet and pick at people who’ve worked with the medium at its height, its demise, and today. We talk about what digitization has done and will do to music, and what vinyl means to them.

https://readymag.com/u29439050/onvinyl/

Eighteenth And Nineteenth Century Bassoon Tutors And Their Published Contributions To Bassoon Pedagogy, Gina Michelle Moore

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This research project is a survey of eighteenth and nineteenth century bassoon tutors and their contributions to bassoon pedagogy. Tutors for this project were chosen from the two main schools of bassoon playing and pedagogy during the time centered in France and Germany. Bassoon teachers surveyed will include: Joseph Frölich, Karl Almenräder, Christian Julius Weissenborn, Ludwig Milde, Etienne Ozi, Eugène Jancourt, and Eugène Bourdeau.

Music From The Harpsichord House, Julie Zhu

Theses and Dissertations

Music from the Harpsichord House is an installation and series of concerts that exists in the binary of in and out of performance. During a concert, the harpsichordist is hidden inside the house and his face is live-projected outside. Fifteen new musical compositions were commissioned for the harpsichord house.

Saving Diy Spaces, Katherine Lavacca

Capstones

Saving DIY Spaces explores the importance of DIY spaces– places for artists to express themselves and connect to their communities– as well as the threat they face from the city’s MARCH task force. Integral performance spaces like Shea Stadium, Market Hotel, Palisades and many more have been shuttered by the city’s MARCH taskforce, a collection of city agencies (department of buildings, NYPD, FDNY, liquor authorities, etc.) within the last decade. According to a study conducted by the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, 20% of small venues have closed within the last 15 years putting pressure on spaces that are …

Connection Between Visual Arts And Music: The Painting And Music Of I-Uen Wang Hwang, Yining Jenny Jiang

Dissertations, 2014-2019

This document explores the connection between the visual arts and music, particularly focusing on the similarity between visual and aural artistic expression by analyzing two sets of piano pieces composed by I-Uen Wang Hwang, a contemporary Taiwanese-American composer and artist. The piano pieces are Dream Garden, Series I and II (2000-2004) and Preludes for Piano (2016). Series I of Dream Garden contains two piano solo compositions based on a series of Hwang’s own watercolor works. Each composition has an analogous painting: “The Horn of the Plenty” and “Butterfly Orchid”. Series II includes two compositions written for two pianos: “Red and …

Perfectionism In Collegiate Musicians, Kayla J. Grey

Honors Projects

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the constructs of perfectionism, music-related stress, and music performance anxiety among collegiate music majors. An additional purpose of this study was to investigate collegiate musicians' strategies for coping with each of the three dependent variables. A total of 52 collegiate music students enrolled at a large, mid-western university participated in an online questionnaire in the fall of 2017, and the response rate was approximately 13 percent. The survey instrument was constructed using items from Cohen, Karmarck, and Mermelstein’s Perceived Stress Scale (1993), Hewitt and Flett’s Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (1999), and …

Winds Of Courage A Mallet Concerto For Solo Mallets And Wind Ensemble., Ross Elliott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Winds of Courage is a motivically-driven composition based on a repeating chordal pattern. Although being written out, the solo mallets parts sound somewhat improvisatory, which is a key element to the part. In a way, the concerto illustrates what it is like to have a crush on someone; where the first movement is getting up the courage to talk to them; the second movement, crying from failing to say what you need to say or not getting up the courage to talk to them, or getting rejected; and the final movement, when things work out in a positive manner, or …

Numerical Cognition In Action: Hand Trajectories Reveal Effects Of Early Musical Training On Numerical Processing In Spanish-English Bilingual Musicians, Daniel Arturo Pizaña

Theses and Dissertations

The mouse-tracking study examined whether early musical experience leads to changes of inhibitory control in numerical processing for bilingual speakers, as has not investigated in previous studies. Twenty-eight Spanish-English bilingual students completed two Stroop-like numerical and physical size judgment tasks via a mouse-tracking paradigm. Results showed that response times were slower during both incongruent and neutral trials for bilinguals who had received early musical training (before age 13) when compared to bilinguals who had received late musical training (after age 13) across tasks. Furthermore, hand trajectories revealed that a spatial attraction toward the incorrect response was more pronounced in bilinguals …

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.

Testing The Arousal Hypothesis: The Effect Of Music On Arousal As Measured By Electrodermal Activity During Verbal Processing, Meghan E. Feeman

Masters Theses

The purpose of this thesis project is to assess the arousal hypothesis by implementing an auditory stimulus (music) at various times during a task (Verbal Processing section of the GRE) to analyze changes in arousal, as measured by electrodermal activity (EDA). Testing is administered for one hour with music implemented before testing and twice during testing. EDA levels are used to measure physiological response and are collected over the one hour testing period. For analysis, testing material is broken into different time blocks to assess arousal levels through mean slope, mean skin conductance level (SCL), mean skin conductance response (xSCR), …

Spectral Analysis And Comparison Of Analog And Digital Recordings, Hannah N. Frosch

Honors Theses

The music industry is constantly shifting and changing as new developments emerge. The biggest transition still discussed to this day is the shift from analog to digital. The digital world of media has opened many doors and created a simpler way of making and consuming media. However, the desire for a vintage/analog sound environment has grown increasingly popular over the years. The main research question I will be addressing in this thesis is: How do analog and digital recordings compare at a signal level? I will attempt to answer this research question through analyzing different audio signals. To do so, …

Villa-Lobos's Compositional Techniques And Treatment Of Folk Melodies In Cirandas For Piano, Gustavo Schafaschek

Dissertations

Despite his significance as the most important Latin American composer of the twentieth century, serious analytical studies on the music of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos are still few and far between. Recent scholarship has started to demystify the figure of Villa-Lobos as an intuitive composer with no technique, revealing an artist that strove to develop an idiosyncratic musical language. The present document aims to contribute to this new trend in Villa-Lobos’s scholarship by analyzing pieces from the piano cycle Cirandas, W220, considered one of the most important works from the composer’s mature style. Each of the sixteen pieces …

Developing The Identity Of An Elementary General Music Teacher: Perspectives Of Veteran Music Educators, Shawna Christine Greunke

Theses and Dissertations

Developing a teacher identity is an essential component for the career of an elementary general music educator. This study explored existing literature on teacher identity, elementary music teaching, challenges for beginning music teachers, and experiences of veteran music teachers. Common themes found were the process of constructing an occupational identity, the value of mentorship to support beginning teachers, defining professional roles and expectations, and the master teacher’s focus of keeping students at the center of teaching. For this study, eight experienced elementary general music teachers participated in semi-structured interviews with eighteen questions, where their responses were audio recorded, transcribed, and …

The Utility Of Sonification, Colin St. John

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Sonification is the process of translating data sets into sound or music for artistic, scientific, or practical purposes. As a tool, sonification can facilitate the interpretation and comprehension of information by perceiving it in a traditionally unusual manner - aurally, through expressions and variations in volume, pitch, timbre, and more. However, each of these factors present their own limitations and strengths, due to their nature as well as due to human perception, which must be considered when creating an audio display. Through sonification, the line between artist and scientist is often blurred, as this field attracts a wide interdisciplinary following …

Thesis For Graduate Study In Vocal Performance, Kendra Switzer

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

This thesis is an extension of Ms. Switzer’s graduate vocal recital program notes. Each chapter contains a brief biography of the composers and arranger performed on the program: George Frideric Handel, Samuel Barber, Jules Massenet, Robert Schumann, Stephen Schwartz, and David Downes. The thesis also includes a musical analysis of each single piece, the larger original work (if applicable), and descriptions of rehearsal and performance aspects specific to each piece.

The Effect Of Auditory Stimuli On Test Performance: Testing The Arousal Hypothesis, Ian Thomas Kells

Masters Theses

Since the publication of Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky’s study in 1993 on the “Mozart Effect”, the study of music and its effect on cognition and performance has gained significant attention. Roth and Smith (2008) investigated this “Mozart Effect” and suggested a continuation of research and interpretation through an arousal theory. This study examined the effects of a subject-identified arousing stimulus on performance on the Verbal Reasoning portion of the GRE, analyzed through an arousal theory framework. A sample of 24 non-music Western Michigan University students took part in one 60-minute testing period using subject-preferred music, which was then analyzed across …

Felix Mendelssohn And Sonata Form In The Nineteenth Century, Katharine G. Walshaw

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Mendelssohn’s music is consistently measured by a Beethovenian yardstick and, more often than not, his music is found to be unfit to live up to this aesthetic model. The purpose of this dissertation is to ask: is the model of Beethoven’s music the only appropriate choice for guiding analysis and research of Mendelssohn’s compositional style? I argue that the answer is an emphatic no. This dissertation attempts to open other avenues of research into Mendelssohn’s compositional style by training the focus directly on Mendelssohn’s works themselves. Using an inductive approach, this dissertation summarizes the results of the analysis of a …

A Glance At Astor Piazzolla's Histoire Du Tango: Lecture Recital, Elizabeth Ritter

Honors Projects

This project is a lecture recital including the performance of four musical works from different countries as well as a lecture Astor Piazzolla's Histoire Du Tango. The four pieces performed in this recital were Eldin Burton's Sonatina for flute and piano, the first movement of Astor Piazzolla's Histoire Du Tango, Hirota's Shikararete, and Bela Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances for piccolo and piano. Before performing the Piazzolla, there was a lecture which included the teaching of the musical aspects of the tango within this piece, a short biography of Piazzolla, and a historical look at the four movements of this piece. …

The "Missing Audience": A Query Into The Future Of The Orchestra And The Potential Benefits Of Bringing Live Classical Music To The Community Through Informal Performances, Natalie Wei-Ting Chang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I discuss the traditional organizational model adopted by symphony orchestras in the United States as non-profit arts organizations that are struggling to maintain solvency within the current philanthropic, political, and digital contexts. As part of the discussion, I conduct field research within the local area of the city of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in providing demonstrations of live and informal classical performance in various businesses and institutions while collecting data via surveys from willing adult participants (ages 18 and above) of all demographics, specifically lower income areas. The survey analysis gives important insights into public perception of symphony …

A Performer's Guide To Iosif Andriasov's "Concertino For Trumpet", Andrew K. Gerbitz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Iosif Andriasov’s Concertino for Trumpet is an excellent candidate for study and assimilation into the standard trumpet repertoire. A significant composer of Armenian descent from the former Soviet Union, Andriasov wrote his Concerto for Trumpet in 1960 and dedicated it to Yuri Usov. Timofei Dokshizer performed it on an album released in 1978 under the Melodya label. After immigrating to the United States in 1979, the composer revised the work and retitled it as Concertino for Trumpet in 1995. IMMA Publishing Company in New York made the revised work commercially available in 2001. This paper is presented to increase awareness …

Music And Art: An Aesthetic Experience, Samantha Martin

Honors Projects

This project sought to pair art songs performed at my senior recital with paintings. The paintings chosen had to be within one hundred years of the songs’ composition, from the same country as the composer, and have a similar theme or meaning as the art song. The goal was to create an aesthetic experience, as well as making the meanings of the songs more accessible for the audience, especially if the songs were in a foreign language.

It’S A Strange Place: The Narrative Film Music Of Danny Elfman, Chad Sell

Selected Honors Theses

The role of film music should function as part of the narrative, collaborating with all other filmic aspects such as color editing, scriptwriting, acting, and directing to convey a narrative that engages and affects the audience. Over the course of history, film music has functioned in a variety of ways, from live bands to draw in theatregoers to the contemporary discussion of diegetic and non-diegetic music in film. Composer Danny Elfman emerges from an unusual background in rock n’ roll, but, despite initial criticism and skepticism, has proven to be a seminal film composer whose scores demonstrate an intimate connection …

Northern Music Culture In Antebellum New Orleans, Warren Keith Kimball

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the three decades before the Civil War, immigrants from the Northern United States flooded into New Orleans in search of new economic opportunities. These newcomers brought to the Southern city many elements of Northern life, such as Protestant churches, English-language newspapers, public schools, and distinct political views. They also brought with them musical practices specific to that region: Protestant church music, amateur choral societies, instrumental concerts, music publication, and English-language opera all flourished from the late 1830s until the late 1850s. This dissertation situates the musical practices of New Orleans during the decades preceding the Civil War within the …

Fuzzy Family Ties: Familial Similarity Between Melodic Contours Of Different Cardinalities, Kristen Wallentinsen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

All melodies have shape: a pattern of ascents, descents, and plateaus that occur as music moves through time. This shape—or contour—is one of a melody’s defining characteristics. Music theorists such as Michael Friedmann (1985), Robert Morris (1987), Elizabeth Marvin (1987), and Ian Quinn (1997) have developed models for analyzing contour, but only a few compare contours with different numbers of notes (cardinalities), and fewer still compare entire families of contours. Since these models do not account for familial relations between different-sized contours, they apply only to a limited musical repertoire, and therefore it seems unlikely that they reflect how listeners …

Automatic Music Transcription With Convolutional Neural Networks Using Intuitive Filter Shapes, Jonathan Sleep

Master's Theses

This thesis explores the challenge of automatic music transcription with a combination of digital signal processing and machine learning methods. Automatic music transcription is important for musicians who can't do it themselves or find it tedious. We start with an existing model, designed by Sigtia, Benetos and Dixon, and develop it in a number of original ways. We find that by using convolutional neural networks with filter shapes more tailored for spectrogram data, we see better and faster transcription results when evaluating the new model on a dataset of classical piano music. We also find that employing better practices shows …

From Protest Song To Social Song: Music And Politics In Colombia, 1966-2016, Joshua Katz-Rosene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on archival and ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Bogotá and Medellín, this dissertation documents the development of canción protesta (protest song) in Colombia in the 1960s, and tracks its evolution in subsequent decades. At the turn of the 1970s, songwriters affiliated with a grassroots canción protesta movement in Bogotá used music as a vehicle for disseminating leftist political ideology and extolling the revolutionary guerrilla groups that had formed in the Colombian countryside in the preceding years. However, canción protesta was an urban phenomenon that emerged in tandem with other countercultural currents, and their confluence in the late 1960s …

Worlds Of If: Analyses Of The Composed And Improvised Works Of Robert Dick, Melissa Keeling

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Considered one of the most important publications in twentieth-century flute pedagogy, Robert Dick’s seminal method book, The Other Flute (1975),[1] is an extensive catalogue of multiphonic fingerings, microtonal fingerings, glissandi, circular breathing, and other extended techniques. The Other Flute and a handful of his published solos are widely studied, but these works only represent a fraction of Dick’s creative energies.

Equally comfortable in classical, jazz, rock, electronic, and world music, Dick’s oeuvre demonstrates a sophisticated, musical use of contemporary techniques and his pieces have become standard repertoire. Though Dick was not the first flutist to use or notate these …

Creating An Unbroken Line Of Becoming In Live Music Performance, Bonnie B. Mcalvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation provides an approach to the pedagogy of musical expression in applied music study. Exercises are provided which support a student’s mastery of the mechanics of grouping, and this mastery is put to work in an adaptation of the work of the great Russian acting teacher, Constantine Stanislavski. Mapping of embodiment schema in the manner of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) is asserted as a useful interface between grouped pitch objects and meaning; mappings are utilized by the instrumental music performer in the same manner as Stanislavski taught his acting students to utilize given circumstances. The discourse situates all of …

A New Approach To The Analysis Of Timbre, Megan L. Lavengood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two distinct approaches to timbre analysis exist, each with complementary strengths and limitations. First, music theorists from the 1980s adopt a positivist mindset and look for ways to quantify timbral phenomena, often using spectrograms, while avoiding any cultural dimensions in their work. Second, writings of the past five years focus on the cultural aspects of timbre but make no use of spectrograms. This dissertation builds upon these two approaches by synthesizing them: discussion is grounded in spectrogram analysis, but situated within a broad cultural context, through interactions with listener experience and ethnographic study of music periodicals and other published interviews. …