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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 …

Esther's Rise, John David Cope

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

Two of the most important parts of my life are my faith and my love of writing music. To conclude my time in Nebraska, I wanted to combine these two facets of my life to create something inspiring and beautiful. To that end, I composed “Esther’s Rise,” a six-movement work that programmatically retells the book of Esther from the Old Testament. To further enhance the story, I commissioned Vera Eva, an international freelance artist, to create a collection of eighteen digital illustrations that help audiences imagine the story unfold. Furthermore, I also paraphrased the biblical text to accompany the illustrations …

From Improvisation To Artistry: A Study Of The Piano’S 12 Sides By Carter Pann, Louis Claussen

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

Intended as a resource for pianists who may analyze or perform Carter Pann’s The Piano’s 12 Sides, this study provides biographical information on the composer and explores his professional relationship with the pianist for whom it was composed, Joel Hastings. Each piece from The Piano’s 12 Sides is discussed in terms of form, melody, harmony, texture and Pann’s approach to the pianistic compositional idiom. The composition is also examined with regard to extra-musical details and programmatic elements as well as inspiration and dedications that influenced Pann’s compositional process.

Correspondence and interviews with the composer reveal the motivation and inspiration behind …

Art Lande And The Music Of Funko Moderno, Mitchell Dunham

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

Art Lande is an accomplished performing musician based out of Boulder, Colorado. He is well-known as a jazz pianist and free improviser and made a name for himself as one of the first recording artists with ECM Records. He has toured all over Europe and the United States as both a band leader and a solo artist. Aside from his superb musicianship, he is also known as a creative and effective pedagogue.

Funko Moderno is Art Lande’s most recent musical venture and was created with the intention of forming an entirely new way of playing and writing music. The freedom …

The War Never Ends A Composition For Large Jazz Ensemble In Three Movements, Derek James Molacek

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

“The War Never Ends” is a three-movement programmatic suite for large jazz ensemble plus additional instruments, dedicated to the military service personnel who suffer from Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder. The piece is comprised of three movements:I.“The Call to Serve”; II. “The Call to War”; and III. “The Call for Peace.” Each movement tells a different part of a story of a person who has signed up for military service.

“The Call to Serve” serves as the beginning to our service member’s journey; from recruitment, to training, to assignment. “The Call to War” illustrates deployment: Specifically, deployment to the Middle-East. This …

Requiem, Jacob K. Lee

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

Traditionally, the requiem form began as a Catholic mass to honor the dead. Today, the requiem is generally composed conveying messages of solace to troubled hearts. Many composers, such as Britten and Rutter, choose to abandon some of the orthodox text of the mass to provide an added measure of connection for the audience. The result of these later requiems is often a baring of the composer’s soul – something profoundly personal shared in the hope of inspiring others. This latter process is my aim in creating my Requiem. I approach this end in several ways, compositionally: There is a …

Hungarian Suite For Jazz Chamber Ensemble, Christopher Paul Varga

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

Hungarian Suite for Jazz Chamber Ensemble is an original composition in three parts, each part using a separate Hungarian folk melody as its source. Written for a maximum instrumentation of 13 players, the suite employs a four-piece rhythm section paired with three reeds, three brass, and three strings. The folk melodies are from a collection of studio recordings made under the supervision of Bela Bartok in the 1930s, notable for not being field recordings and as such exhibiting a higher quality of sound. Although crude copies of Bartok’s highly detailed transcriptions of selected melodies are included in the liner notes …

Symphony No. 1 For Double Wind Orchestra, Amanda Mccullough

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

This piece represents the splitting of the mind as well as the irrational and often violent thoughts that compete against each other in order to blur the line between the real and the imaginary. The piece culminates in the third movement into a sort of psychotic break and ends in the disquieting limbo between life and death represented by the solo piano.

This symphony also explores the sonic possibilities of creating a stereo effect by splitting the wind ensemble into two separate ensembles. This includes the resolution of dissonances on one side by the opposite side, the continuation of melodic …

Violin Concerto #1, Matthew J. Holman

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

This piece is a violin concerto modeled after, but not explicitly quoting melodic material of, several pieces of music by composers Bear McCreary, and Martin O’Donnell. The first and third movements of my piece were each modeled after two of Bear McCreary’s pieces from the soundtrack to Battlestar Galactica Season 2 – Allegro, and Prelude to War, respectively. The second movement of my piece was modeled after Martin O’Donnell’s piece Ashes, from the soundtrack to Halo: Reach.

Although I model my piece on the formal structures and, occasionally, the chord progressions of McCreary’s and O’Donnell’s pieces, …

Symphony In Three Marches, Nels D. Daily

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

This symphony is in three movements and lasts about 25 minutes. The form of the music for each movement has been influenced by the marches of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Edward Elgar, John Philip Sousa, and Dimtri Shostakovich.

The first movement is in a march form related to the music of John Philip Sousa: 1st strain, 2nd strain, trio, dogfight, trio dogfight, trio. This form has been adapted to merge with sonata form. Broad fanfares play a central role in the formal outline. They introduce formal sections similar to Beethoven's slow introduction in the first movement of the "Pathetique" sonata acting …

Helen: An Opera In One Act, Garrett Hope

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

Helen is a one-act opera that tells the story of a woman whose husband would later betray her trust and love. It begins with her debut as an eligible young woman and ends with the husband’s demise. Through the course of the story it becomes apparent that her husband is both verbally and physically abusive as well as unfaithful to her. In the end her situation is redeemed through his death because his bacchanalian behavior resulted in his fatal sickness.

The opera is a retelling of a portion of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë, which was adapted …