Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Dilemma Of Empty Halls, Joanna Lauer

Musical Offerings

Today, live classical concert attendance is low, a fact which threatens the careers of professional musicians. This paper examines recent statistics of classical concert attendance, theories as to why attendance rates are low, marketing methods for target audiences, and finally, recommendations to solve the dilemma of empty concert halls. To encourage concert attendance, classical music must be tastefully marketed to present-day audiences through the experience of technically excellent, musical, and interesting live performances. Ultimately, the relationship between art and its audience (the consumer) reveals that the key to the dilemma is the audience.

How Wagner Landed In A Far Away Galaxy: Examining Film From A Musical Perspective, Elise J. Camillone

Musical Offerings

What does music add to drama, or more specifically, movies? Without music, movies today would not be the same. When it comes to creating a film, the soundtrack is arguably just as important as videography or acting. Exploring the roots that soundtracks have in opera and investigating Wagner’s leitmotif will help discover how it influenced modern-day movie scoring. Furthermore, a deeper understanding of filmmaking can be obtained by examining the role music has to play in modern movies. The soundtracks from the original Star Wars trilogy films can be used to demonstrate the application of these things by looking deeply …

A Herderian Perspective On Finland, Sibelius, And The Kalevala, Philip R. Cataldo

Musical Offerings

Situated amidst the revolutionary spirits of 19^th-century Europe, Finnish nationalists sought to bring an end to roughly half a millennium of foreign rule for their land and their people. According to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, a community must have a common language and a common history in order to constitute a nation. At this time, Finland had neither. Although Herder’s political philosophy is considered crucial to understanding the nationalist movements that took place in Europe during this period, Finland’s peculiar success in attaining and sustaining independence has until this point remained unexplained relative to a Herderian …

Singing Planets Don't Sing; They Speak, Joanna R. Lauer

Musical Offerings

Ancient Greek philosophers conceived a theory called Music of the Spheres. This ancient theory progressed for almost one thousand years before finally proving itself untrustworthy. However, this examination uncovers an overlooked fact: the large amount of natural order in sound and music existing before the creation of man. Scripture reveals that God is a God of order, and an extensive amount of natural order is found in the universe. Evidence points to God being the creator of the universe. Specific examples of such evidence are the inherent order of sound laid out in pitches, interval ratios, the overtone series, the …

The Four Pillars Of Choral Music Education, Joanna J. Setness

Musical Offerings

This paper investigates how the philosophy of several key choral music educators influenced their working methods and the principles that they emphasized in their teaching.

Lowell Mason, named the “Father of Music Education”, and the first public school music teacher in Boston, spearheaded the school singing movement in the mid 1800’s. F. Melius Christiansen, teaching at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN left a legacy of the “ideal” choral sound and elevated the choir to a prestigious position in schools. John Finley Williamson, with the Westminster Choir, blended “sung-speech” and the quality of individual sound to produce an entirely different …