Music Practice Commons^™

A Metrical Analysis And Rebarring Of Paul Creston's Sonata For Alto Saxophone And Piano, Op. 19, Christopher Kyle Sweitzer

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

The Sonata For Alto Saxophone and Piano Op. 19 is one of the most popular pieces in the saxophone literature, commonly played by professional saxophonists during their training. It features exciting rhythmic devices like irregular and mixed meter, the notation of which is the main focus of this paper. Although Creston often used irregular and mixed meter in his compositions, he rarely specifically notated them, choosing instead to use accents, beams, slurs, and other phenomenal cues at the musical surface to create the effect of these metric plans. Time signatures often remained constant throughout entire movements. Creston believed this would …

Woodwind Extension Through The Systematic Use Of Microtonality And Electronic Manipulation Of The Instrument, Seán Mac Erlaine

Conference papers

This research questions how the expressive range of the saxophone / bass clarinet can be extended in new ways by employing both a systematic use of microtonality and electronic manipulation of the instrument.

The use of digital signal processing (DSP) is well advanced among certain music practitioners, most notably electric guitarists, extending that instrument’s expressive powers considerably. Woodwind instrumentalists have a huge unexplored potential to engage with new technologies, furthering the range, polyphonic voicings, loops, reverbs and general signal manipulation.

The marraige of these two disciplines with conventional woodwind practice greatly deepens the expressive range of the instrument while offering …