Composition Commons^™

Christ Our Passover (Pascha Nostrum), Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

Work was originally written for the Congregation of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer (Irving, TX) in 2021, but not completed till 2023. Given in honor of Canon Victoria Heard's Distinguished Service and Retirement in Spring 2023. (9 pages). [Based off of texts from 1 Corinthians and Romans].

Florence Price: Forgotten No More, Kathryn E. Amdahl

2023 Symposium

Florence Price was a composer and musician who lived from 1887 to 1953. She composed music in every genre except for opera. The music of Florence Price traveled practically everywhere; from the radio to the concert halls to the church. Throughout her life, she became well-known as the first African American female composer who was featured by a major symphony. Florence Price was tenacious, brave, and courageous during her era which contributed to the level of acceptance that society now holds for African American composers. Despite the challenges she faced during her lifetime, she never gave up or collapsed due …

Functional And Non-Functional Harmonic Devices In The Music Of Wayne Shorter From The 1960'S: Analysis And Application, Max Reynolds

University Honors Theses

During the 1960's, composers within the jazz genre began to expand their harmonic palette, diverging aesthetically from the compositional tendencies of music from the Great American Songbook and the Bebop repertoire. Of the people making these developments, Wayne Shorter was among the pioneers and is one of the most widely influential composers in jazz from the mid 20th century. My project has identified a selection of techniques that he used to explore new harmonic territory and applied them within an original body of work.

Understanding The Beauty Of Mathematics By Composing Claude Debussy's Syrinx Into Mathematical Equations, Mackenzi Mehlberg

Honors Projects

Mesmerizing melodies and narrative storytelling are exemplified in Claude Debussy's Syrinx. As a well-known piece of solo flute literature, it is considered beautiful. Conversely, mathematics is seen as logical, and by implication not beautiful. Using Fourier Analysis, Syrinx can be represented in a different context: a series of mathematical equations. These mathematical equations can then be played as a different interpretation of Syrinx. With this interpretation, we see that mathematics is beautiful.

Play Makes Perfect: An Exploration Of Game And Play Elements In Composition And Performance, Gabrielle Chou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to explore the intersection of play and games in Western classical music and define a new category of pieces, “ludic pieces,” which contain play structures and game mechanics within their composition. Starting with surveying perspectives in ludology and ludomusicology, including those by Roger Caillois, Johan Huizinga, Jesper Juul, Katie Salen, and Eric Zimmerman, I will examine various definitions of a “game” and what its qualifying aspects are. I will then turn to music and consider pieces that interact with play and games without containing game structures, including examples of musical humor and pieces which evoke the imagery …

Rearranging: Songwriting With Multi-Genre Influence, Ryan Elliott

University Honors Theses

This craft essay examines the inspiration and creation of the song "Rearranging," which was written, recorded, and produced by Ryan Elliott in his home studio over the course of four months. The project's goal was to create a piece of music that challenged the songwriting conventions in modern popular music, while also exploring the fluidity of genre in modern music. The final piece of music is over 22 minutes in length, and explores a variety of styles within the spectrum of rock, pop, and jazz music. With lyrics attuned to the simultaneous anxiety, responsibility, and power of being a young …

Talking Heads, Fear Of Music, And The "Different Thinking" Of David Byrne, John Bruni

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

This article proposes that the 2006 post on the website of David Byrne, the vocalist/guitarist of Talking Heads, announcing his self-diagnosis as an autistic person, invites a reappraisal of the band’s discography, especially Fear of Music (1979), which foregrounds his lyrical approach. Fear of Music, I suggest, relies on “autistic misdirections” that illustrate Byrne’s “different thinking” about his body, mind, communicative (in)ability, and relationship to physical spaces – all prominent and productive areas of exploration within critical autism studies.

“Different thinking” is taken from the 2020 memoir of Chris Frantz, the drummer of Talking Heads, in describing, retroactively, how …

Jeff Scott’S "Startin’ Sumthin’, Composed For The Monmouth Winds," Transcribed For Full Wind Band, Trevor Butts

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this project is to create a wind band transcription of a work for a chamber music ensemble by Jeff Scott. Jeff Scott creates works that he considers “Urban Classical Music”. These works are rooted in European traditions and informed by his African American culture. His music is unapologetically influenced by the cultural experiences of his diverse, urban environment upbringing.

This project is intended to contribute to the overall body of wind band literature, specifically the body of wind band literature composed by underrepresented composers. There has been a lack of representation of African American composers throughout the …

Experimenting With Colors In Music: Making And Breaking Rules In The Butterfly Effect, Chloe King

Honors Theses

The following thesis is a culmination of four years of academic and musical development as a percussionist at the University of Mississippi. It offers a discussion and analysis of my original composition, The Butterfly Effect (2021-2023), exploring the compositional process from preliminary sketches to the finalized score. It also discusses the inspiration for composing an original work, the use of different music theory techniques relevant to an analysis of the work, and comparisons to relevant compositions throughout the history of Western music. The Butterfly Effect experiments with compositional techniques that often depart from established rules of harmony and counterpoint, a …

The Morphological And Audiative Interconnectedness Of Sound: Equivalence In A Multidimensional Soundscape, Martin Vishnick

The 21st Century Guitar

This paper draws on the authorʼs recent theoretical and practical research into the morphology of sound and audiation. In particular, it explores the notion of equivalence in a multidimensional soundscape. Correlations between the interconnectedness of sound-based morphologies emanating from extended guitar techniques and comprehending internal auditory imagination when sound is not physically present will be assessed. To express an all-encompassing mental and visual image of apprehending the value of sound from a morphological and audiative perspective, three-dimensional topological diagrams will be evaluated ‒ a development of previous two-dimensional visualisations. In regard to morphologies, topics of interest are spectromorphology, spatiomorphology, spectral …

Composing Idiomatic Music For Guitar Using Distant Reading Strategies, Giovanni Albini, Matilde Oppizzi

The 21st Century Guitar

The composition of new music for guitar can involve two issues: 1) composers that have no experience with the instrument might not be able to compose a score that is idiomatic, accommodating and highlighting the unique characteristics and features of the conventional guitar techniques; and 2) composer-guitarists might repeat clichés that can origin from their performance habits. In this respect, the aim of this paper is to answer the following questions: can distant reading methods help in defining strategies for composing new idiomatic music for guitar? If so, how they can be defined and implemented? Distant reading methods allow to …

I Felt Unfettered And Alive: A Musical Narrative Inquiry Into Identity Through Commissioning And Performing New Music For Solo Classical Guitar, Libby Myers

The 21st Century Guitar

This paper discusses how commissioning new music served as a means of musical narrative inquiry into the performance of the authorʼs identity. Traditionally, musicology has centred on the identities of composers; their lives, working practices and philosophies. Meanwhile, the identities of performers have remained inaudible. Challenging this conventional narrative, the commission project foregrounds experiences of identity and subjectivity of the author as performer-researcher. This paper introduces the innovative methodology of musical narrative inquiry used in this project, in which lived narratives of identity are told and re-told in collaboration with the composer to explore what it means to be, or …

New Sounds On The Guitar, Agustín Castilla-Ávila

The 21st Century Guitar

The guitar is like an orchestra, claimed Andrés Segovia many times. I completely agree with this statement. I only must add that since Segovia mentioned it last time, the orchestra has quite changed. And so has the guitar. I would like to present my different approaches as a composer to this versatile instrument. I would like to demonstrate some of the new technical resources to obtain new sounds, which I have been exploring and using on the guitar in the last few years. Due to the adaptability of the instrument, I strongly believe that the guitar will take more and …

Jorge Peixinho ‒ In Memoriam For Solo Guitar: A Compositional And Interpretative Tribute, Pedro Baptista, Pedro Rodrigues, Evgueni Zoudilkine

The 21st Century Guitar

This paper focuses on a compositional and interpretative tribute, consisting of a work for solo guitar composed by Pedro Baptista in 2021 and titled Jorge Peixinho ‒ In Memoriam. The piece is intended to crystallize, focus and amplify recurrent and characteristic elements of Jorge Peixinhoʼs (1940-1995) guitar writing, During the second half of the 20th century, shaping the avant-garde musical movement in Portugal, this composer developed and used a range of techniques, effects, gestures and structures, which Baptista now explores in a systematic way. These elements were identified through analysis and hands-on exploration with the guitar of Peixinhoʼs manuscripts, as …

Microtunings, Complexity, Variability: A New Sound Map For The Guitar, Pascale Criton, Caroline Delume

The 21st Century Guitar

How do microtunings help broaden the guitar's sound map and bring new musical possibilities? In this contribution, we present a set of works in which the guitar is tuned in the 72 or 96 equal temperament. They are representative of Pascale Critonʼs writing and were composed between 1996 and 2019. Each type of tuning favors its own map of harmonic relations and the generation of specific acoustic behaviors. We examine their structural, technical and expressive peculiarities and highlight how the writing and the instrumental gesture are renewed by these tunings.

Overlapping Gestural Zones And Modulation On The Fifteen-Tone Guitar, William R. Ayers

The 21st Century Guitar

With its unconventional tuning, notation, and performance requirements, Easley Blackwoodʼs Suite for Guitar in 15- Note Equal Tuning serves as a reappraisal of both tonality (through its application of a microtonal equal temperament) and guitar performance practice (with a modified fretboard and note layout). Using concepts from the fields of transformational theory and gestural music theory, this study considers modulatory and sequential passages in two movements from Blackwoodʼs Suite. This paper demonstrates how the fifteen-tone tuning and fretboard provide a unique opportunity to recontextualize the diatonic scale and its generative interval cycles in a consistent transformational space that allows the …

Composing For Guitar Orchestra: Challenges And Advantages Of Homogeneous Orchestration, Jason Noble, Steve Cowan

The 21st Century Guitar

The term orchestration tends to invoke heterogeneous combinations of instruments, especially those of the symphony orchestra. But homogeneous ensembles, comprised of combinations of the same kind of instrument, also make up an important part of the musical and music-pedagogical landscapes. As we argue in this paper, orchestrating for homogeneous ensembles is grounded in the same perceptual principles as orchestrating for heterogeneous ensembles, and may be analyzed using the same taxonomy of orchestral effects. In general, effects based on perceptual similarity between sounds are facilitated in homogeneous orchestration, while effects based on perceptual difference require greater attention to detail on the …

Scordator: A Digital Map Of All Scordature, Paulo Vaz De Carvalho, Rui Penha

The 21st Century Guitar

Scordatura is often used in stringed instruments to overcome constraints posed by their tuning. Finding the right scordatura for a particular situation may be a time-consuming task, especially for non-guitarist composers. In this contribution, we present a web application designed to show a tuning chart for any chordophone equipped with a maximum of eight strings, each tunable to a pitch in the range of a full keyboard. The application also provides visualization of the available positions for live MIDI notes within a given scordatura.

Largo Teso: The Seven Studies For Guitar By Maurizio Pisati, Maurizio Pisati, Elena Càsoli

The 21st Century Guitar

In this contribution, composer and interpreter talk about the Seven Studies from their respective points of view. Maurizio Pisati explains how he developed a new guitar, departing from a single study and arriving at the overall formal conception through timbres, techniques and articulations; and how the soloistic studies led him to a guitarled ensemble piece. Elena Càsoli deals with issues such as the score's indications and the instrumental techniques.

Guitars With Ambisonic Spatial Performance (Gasp): An Immersive Guitar System, Duncan Werner, Emma Fitzmaurice, Bruce Wiggins, Matthew Hart

The 21st Century Guitar

The GASP project investigates the design and realisation of an Immersive Guitar System. It brings together a range of sound processing and spatialising technologies and applies them to a specific musical instrument ‒ the Electric Guitar. GASP is an ongoing innovative audio project, fusing the musical with the technical, combining the processing of each stringʼs output (which we called timbralisation) with spatial sound. It is also an artistic musical project, where space becomes a performance parameter, providing new experimental immersive sound production techniques for the guitarist and music producer. Several ways of reimagining the electric guitar as an immersive sounding …