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Music Theory Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Music Theory

Negative Harmony: Experiments With The Polarity In Music, Michael Brister May 2019

Negative Harmony: Experiments With The Polarity In Music, Michael Brister

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I set out to experiment and justify the use of a new theory called Negative Harmony in 21st century music. Negative Harmony is a musical avenue from which composers can glean new tones within traditional music theory rules. I took inspiration from the current leading authority on the topic, Jacob Collier, as well as older scholars from the 20th century, such as Ernst Levy and George Rochberg. I conducted research on the theory by finding its relation to major and minor chords, and how these mirrored chords worked from a theory standpoint. I then composed two original works, …


Songs From The Willow Tree: Staging Collective Inspiration For Creative Songwriting, Aubrey W. Carpenter Dec 2016

Songs From The Willow Tree: Staging Collective Inspiration For Creative Songwriting, Aubrey W. Carpenter

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The songwriting process, inspiration to song, can take many forms. This project explores a highly structured approach, using themes derived from reported individual experience to direct the creation of musical ends addressing common experience.


Twelve-Tone Serialism: Exploring The Works Of Anton Webern, James P. Kinney May 2015

Twelve-Tone Serialism: Exploring The Works Of Anton Webern, James P. Kinney

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Mathematics and Music are related and intertwined, and the invention of serialism in the 20th century highlights this fact. Serialism is a technique of music composition that uses mathematics to structure different elements of music, such as pitch and rhythm. For hundreds of years, music all over the Western world was tonal, which means there is a hierarchy of some pitches being more important than others. Serialism is a form of atonality, which is the composition of music that attempts to use all twelve pitch-classes equally. I examine twelve-tone serialism, which was created by Arnold Schoenberg and developed by his …


Mirrors, Zachary R. Ross May 2014

Mirrors, Zachary R. Ross

Undergraduate Honors Theses

MIRRORS is a cycle of songs composed for soprano voice and piano using five poems by Sylvia Plath. The work features the creation of a protagonist and tells a chronological story through the arrangement of the five poems colored and unified by the manipulation of a thematic twelve-tone row.