Music Theory Commons^™

"That's The Way I Am, Heaven Help Me": The Role Of Pronunciation In Billy Bragg's Music, Mary Blake Bonn

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

British singers do not always sound British. Indeed, it is common—and sometimes expected—for singers in a variety of styles and genres to sing with accents that do not match their speech. The specific phenomenon of British (or more precisely, English) popular musicians singing with Americanized pronunciation is so common that it was the point of departure for an entire subfield of sociolinguistics that is focused on the ‘singing accent’ in popular music: the pronunciation patterns that singers use in their singing and how these differ from the pronunciation patterns these singers use in speech (e.g., Trudgill 1983). Nevertheless, some English …

Gesture In Steve Reich's Music And Its Signification: A Referential Approach To His Process, Stylistic, And Postminimalist Works, Martin Ross

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

When listening to minimalist music, one will more than likely notice the scarcity of materials. Small motifs and repetition pervade the surface, and one might be inclined to interpret such scarcity as mere redundancy of materials with seemingly few meaningful layers underneath the surface. When analyzing minimalist music, one will notice a similar pattern of scarcity. Music-theoretical scholarship on minimalist music, especially formalist analyses, primarily investigates the rhythmic and melodic connections spanning the entire work. The analytical uncovering of such scarcity through formal means has resulted in few novel analytical approaches and, consequently, an attitude that minimalist music itself is …

Musical Signification In Biber's Rosary Sonatas, Frangel Lopez Cesena

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This monograph examines musical signification in Heinrich Biber’s Rosary Sonatas (ca. 1678), a set of sixteen pieces for violin and continuo. The sonatas are mostly known for their striking use of scordatura (altered tuning) and the copper-engraved illustrations in the original manuscript that reference the Mysteries of the Rosary, a meditative Marian practice that originated in the Middle Ages. Musical signification and meaning in the Rosary Sonatas have been widely discussed in recent years. The sonatas have been studied in terms of programmaticism and rhetoric, and scholars have proposed the application of broader analytical views that encompass aspects of …

Speaking Songs: Music-Analytical Approaches To Spoken Word, Chantal D. Lemire

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

If we can conceive of music as performance—indeed, if we tend to agree with director and drama theorist Richard Schechner that nearly anything can be studied ‘as’ performance—then it follows that nearly any mode of performance might also be studied for its musicality. Of course, some modes of performance are more conducive to musical study than others. The present work concerns a particularly responsive mode of performance through which the categorical divisions between language and music begin to dissolve: spoken word.

Spoken word, in its diversity of forms, traditions, and styles, exists not simply on the fringes of any single …

Motivic Metamorphosis: Modelling Intervallic Transformations In Schoenberg’S Early Works, Adam Roy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Composers can manipulate a basic musical idea in theoretically infinite ways. This concept of manipulating musical material was a central compositional philosophy of Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951). As Schoenberg states, “whatever happens in a piece of music is nothing but the endless reshaping of a basic shape” (Schoenberg, [1935] 1975). It is the variety of ways in which these basic ideas, commonly termed motives, are manipulated that contributes to a work’s unique identity. According to Schoenberg, these varied basic shapes work dialogically to unify a musical piece. But how are these basic shapes varied?

Utilizing ordered intervals of pitch …

The Integration Of The Style Hongrois Into Brahms’S Musical Language In His Chamber Works, Raymond D. Truong

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The style hongrois is a musical language that Western European composers used to evoke the style of the Hungarian music performed by Romani musicians. This monograph explores the use of the style hongrois in the chamber works of Johannes Brahms. He uses this style often, to the point where it is integrated into his musical language. To understand where this language came from, this monograph provides a historical context of Hungary (the country of origin), the Roma who resided there and migrated westwards, and their musicians.

The second part of this monograph explores the integration of the style hongrois into …

The Alia Musica And The Carolingian Conception Of Mode, Matthew R J Nace

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Alia musica is perhaps the most idiosyncratic of the early treatises on the ecclesiastical modes. It is a composite made up of at least three independent treatises and additional commentary, and the majority of the scholarly attention that it has thus far received has been devoted to questions of dating and authorship, as well as to the place of the Alia musica in the development of the octave species paradigm of modality. However, the majority of the treatise is dedicated to the explanation of a complex harmonic numerology that applies the fundamental relation 12:9:8:6 (which generate the intervals of …

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 …

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 …

Teleology In César Franck's Prélude, Choral Et Fugue, Stephanie Gouin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

César Franck’s Prélude, Choral et Fugue is a fine example of the composer’s mature style and contribution to musical form and language at the end of the nineteenth century. The use of a Baroque structure, such as the fugue, has a significant impact on the overall unfolding of this Romantic work. A teleological perspective will inform the analysis of the Fugue, which will constitute the core of the study. It will use concepts of design and purpose in order to explain the development of the piece as a whole, and the transformation of the musical language within the Fugue in …

Musical Forces In Claude Vivier’S Wo Bist Du Licht! And Trois Airs Pour Un Opéra Imaginaire, Emilie L. Marshall

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Claude Vivier’s (1947–1983) idiosyncratic and moving composition style often evades traditional, pitch-centred approaches to music-theoretical analysis; however, the somatic and sensual qualities of his style encourage a metaphorical appreciation of his music. This study analyses Wo bist du Licht! (1981) and the first two airs from Trois airs pour un opéra imaginaire (1982), which both feature his technique sinusoïdale, from the perspective of conceptual metaphor and musical forces. At the centre of this study are the dominant conceptual metaphors that linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson identify as being integral to our understanding of time, and which music …

J. S. Bach's Modal Compositional Practice In The Chorale Preludes For Solo Organ: A Schenkerian Perspective, Michael Fitzpatrick

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation proposes a Schenkerian perspective of J. S. Bach’s modal compositional practice in his chorale preludes for solo organ. It develops two major themes: first, a viable framework for reconciling Schenker’s theory of tonality with the kind of composition that Bach’s modal music exemplifies (chapter 3); and second, a definition of Bach’s modal compositional practice in the chorale preludes as revealed through analysis of the repertoire (chapter 4). Additionally, the dissertation explores the pertinence of traditional modal theory to Bach’s modal music (chapter 1), confronts Schenker’s evaluation of modal composition (chapter 1), and responds to other scholarly work in …

A Study Of Form And Structure In Pierre Boulez's Pli Selon Pli, Emily J. Adamowicz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In his 1963 treatise, Penser la musique aujourd’hui, Pierre Boulez proposes that there should be no distinction between serial materials and large-scale form. After his self-professed failure with Structures 1a and Polyphonie X due to the incapacity of the twelve-tone series to provide form in and of itself, Boulez reassessed and expanded his compositional approach to include what he refers to as “indiscipline,” which permitted him a new freedom to modify his materials as he saw fit through a plethora of new techniques, and to link these materials to large-scale forms that take their inspiration largely from literary influences. …

Aspects Of Newtonianism In Rameau’S Génération Harmonique, Abigail Shupe

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation studies the influence of Newtonianism as a cultural phenomenon on the theoretical writings of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764). Rameau’s Génération harmonique (1737) shows a change in his thinking from his earlier work that bears witness to the debates around Newtonian science in the scientific community. Scholars have discussed possible connections between Génération harmonique and Newton’s Opticks (1704) but none has studied this issue in detail. I argue that Rameau was influenced by Newtonianism rather than by Newton’s works, and that Rameau was not always aware of this influence. In order to situate Rameau’s work within the larger body of …

Functional Transformations And Octatonality In Selected Works By George Crumb, Peter Lea

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The music of George Crumb has been analyzed using a variety of analytic methods including pitch-class set theory, transformational theory, intertextual analyses, and various tonal and Schenkerian approaches. The results of these types of analyses invariably identify certain consistencies in Crumb’s compositional style within a single work or volume of similar works, but often are unable to relate or compare procedures between different works.

In the present study, I propose a transformational model that accounts for characteristic gestures in numerous works by Crumb. Unlike many transformational models of twentieth-century music, the proposed model does not require significant alterations for each …

Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006): Analytical Approach To The Pitch Content Of Selected Compositions, Lindsay S. Murrell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Galina Ustvolskaya was overshadowed throughout her lifetime, both personally and professionally, by her compositional colleague, Dmitri Shostakovich. This dissertation seeks to establish Ustvolskaya’s separate identity, making her idiosyncratic compositional design the forefront of the research. A contextual transformational approach suits her compositional design built upon the element of repetition. Employing Joseph Straus’s analytical approach to the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, this dissertation will explore a selection of Ustvolskaya’s work, demonstrating the evolution of her compositional design.

The melodic foundations of Ustvolskaya’s compositional approach are based upon compact motives established at the onset of each work. The motives are then …

Anarchy In The Unity: Compositional And Aesthetic Tensions In Mauricio Kagel's Antithese Für Einen Darsteller Mit Elektronischen Und Öffentlichen Klängen (1962), Makoto Mikawa

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 1962 the Argentine-German composer Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) completed an innovative multimedia/interdisciplinary piece, Antithese für einen Darsteller mit elektronischen und öffentlichen Klängen. The unique compositional style and formal structure consisting of heterogeneous compositional components reflected his profound insights into issues inherent in postwar avant-garde music. Kagel remarked strikingly that “anarchy in the piece was omnipresent.” Indeed, his use of the term ‘anarchy’ is a keystone not only of the structural features of Antithese, but also of Kagel’s aesthetic of music in the piece. The present study seeks to reveal Kagel’s idea of anarchy in musical context and how …

Narrativity In Postmodern Music: A Study Of Selected Works Of Alfred Schnittke, Karen K. Ching

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The validity of music narratives has engendered much debate and research. This dissertation traces the development of narratology from its pre-structuralist phase to the post-structuralist phase where the discipline went through a narrative turn and blossomed into a broad-spectrum expansion that takes the form of interdisciplinary narratological studies such as music narratology. By adopting the viewpoints of postmodern philosophers and psychologists such as Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Ihab Hassan, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Carl Jung, we develop a cognitive narratological theory for postmodern music that is veracious both epistemologically and philosophically.

We then analyze formally and contextually four concertos by …