Musicology Commons^™

The Music Of Sylvano Bussotti And Its Interpretation: Biopolitics, Intersubjectivity, And Modernist Canon Formation, Charles A. Rudig

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The music of Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti (1931–2021) presents intentional challenges to interpretation and canonization. These particular challenges and Bussotti’s reasoning for implementing them are interrogated in this dissertation by reading the score to Bussotti’s La Passion selon Sade (1966) through contemporaneous European social theory, philosophy, and political developments. La Passion selon Sade is a theatre piece for a chamber ensemble, with a primary vocal and dramatic role written for mezzo-soprano Catherine Berberian, with whom Bussotti frequently collaborated. Like much of Bussotti’s music from the 1950s and 1960s, the discourse surrounding the piece and its reception largely relates to its …

Negative Dialectics In Elliott Carter: Toward An Adornian Aesthetics Of Carter's Music, Gregory J. Menillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an attempt to lay the groundwork for an Adornian aesthetics of Elliott Carter’s music. The first chapter suggests that Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectics is the most appropriate paradigm for understanding the material antagonisms that characterize Carter’s music over a quasi-Hegelian “unity of opposites” as suggested in the Carter scholarship. Chapter Two demonstrates this through an Adornian reading of key aspects of the first movement of Carter’s 1948 Sonata for Cello and Piano, the watershed work for Carter’s mature style. The third chapter addresses the issue of musical time in Carter from a philosophical perspective; it discusses …

A Festival Of Form: Score, Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

"A Festival of Form" was both an event at Bridwell and Perkins School of Theology and a conceptual piece of music that lasted several days. In this rendering, the "piece of music" was articulated in a fluid combination of activities that included works by other composers, including John Cage. The activities involved--from lectures, conversations, and meals to actual performances of both short works and especially the world-record breaking rendition of "Organ2/ASLSP" played by Christopher Anderson--comprise the entirety of "A Festival of Form" as performance piece. The challenge of this work is that unlike nearly any other music, it is purposely …

X Marks Nothing: Chiasmus And Kenosis In Kaija Saariaho's La Passion De Simone, Desiree Scarambone

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Composer Kaija Saariaho’s 2006 work La Passion de Simone often leaves audiences and critics at a loss to understand what they have witnessed. The title, subject, and sparse libretto only complicate this confusion. The genre of the work is ambiguous to many; some critics call it an opera, some an oratorio. Because the subject of the work, French philosopher Simone Weil, is widely unknown to the public, her placement within the framework of a Passion is often met with confusion if not criticism.

By fusing Weil’s life and philosophical ideas in this work, Saariaho explores how the awareness of the …