Composition Commons^™

2022-2023 New Music Festival, Lisa Leonard, Marti Epstein

New Music Festival

The 17th Annual New Music Festival

• Marti Epstein, Composer-in-Residence
• Lisa Leonard, Director

Friday, April 21, 2023

• Spotlight 1: Emerging Composers

Saturday, April 22, 2023 at 2:00 PM

• Master Class and Workshop with Marti Epstein: Bach's Relevance and Far Reach

Saturday, April 22, 2023 at 4:00 PM

• Read and Record Project

Sunday, April 23, 2023

• Spotlight 2: The Art of Marti Epstein

Interactive Sculpture/Audio Installation - World Tree Melody - World Science Festival (Queensland Museum), Guy A. Cooper

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

World Tree Melody is an interactive sculptural and sonic installation by Guy Cooper, exhibited at the World Science Festival Brisbane (Queensland Museum) in 2023. This work explores the fusion of creative technologies and public art through motion-activated sound, custom Arduino programming, multi-channel audio sampling, and evolving music composition. Visitors become active participants in the work, triggering a generative soundscape through physical interaction with the sculpture.

Constructed from copper pipe, hand-crafted leaves, and an organic tree core, the piece is powered by two Arduino microcontrollers, four motion sensors, and seven-channel 24-bit/48kHz audio samplers. Over 400 lines of custom code manage a …

Emily Somebody: A Chamber Opera In Three Acts, Rodrigo Afonso Salles Camargo

LSU Master's Theses

Emily Somebody is a chamber opera in three acts that tells the story of the friendship between the American poet Emily Dickinson and the man that would become her first editor, Mr. Thomas Higginson. This story, for me, is ultimately about a poet (or an artist) in the process of finding not only her own voice but also discovering what poetry and art mean to her, in the most genuine way, and standing up for these beliefs and values. All the lyrics used in this work are from Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters exchanged between her and Mr. Thomas Higginson.

Music Production And The Creative Process Through The Lens Of Neurodivergence, Blake Fry

University Honors Theses

This thesis explores the creative process behind the composing and production of three pieces of music through the lens of neurodivergence. It covers and synthesizes the material of three relevant books and applies their concepts toward retrospectively analyzing the experiences behind each piece of music. The goal is to make meaningful progress toward better understanding my personal creative process, the challenges that arise, and how best to resolve them. For these reasons this project should prove enlightening to any neurodivergent creatives or anyone struggling with creativity.

Bloom: A 21st Century Mandolin Concerto, Ashley Hoyer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I have created a career performing various types of music on the mandolin. Very little of the concert repertoire, however, includes music originally written for the mandolin with most of it consisting of rearrangements of violin, cello, or piano music. This observation has led me down a path to learn why there is a lack of mandolin concert repertoire as well as to create new music specifically written for the instrument. In this thesis, an original mandolin concerto, Bloom, aims not only to add to the instrument’s repertoire, but bring it into the twenty-first century using contemporary compositional techniques. I …

Unheard Melodies: The Songs And Sorrows Of German Female Composers, 1700-1900, Brittany Weinstock

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

German classical music is known for its prolific composers who changed Western music as we know it, such as J.S. Bach, Felix Mendelssohn, and Robert Schumann. However, music history does not place as great an emphasis on their sisters and wives who were also incredibly gifted musicians. The goal of this study is to create a paper that elaborates on their lives and music while emphasizing their struggles when it comes to gender limitations.

For my research, I chose to focus on Anna Magdalena Bach, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Clara Schumann. I compiled a biography of each woman, with particular emphasis …

Andrews University Composers, Andrews University

Concerts and Event Programs 2022-2023

A group of Music Department Composers, showcasing their compositions at the Sunday Music Series hosted by Max Keller.

Identity And Complexity In Chaya Czernowin’S Ina, Eliav Kohl

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chaya Czernowin’s Ina (1988) for solo bass flute and six pre-recorded flute parts, unfolds the drama of a protagonist battling her conflicting inner voices. Czernowin interrogates the concept of identity and asks the questions—what is an identity? To what extent can a particular identity endure its own complexities? My analysis demonstrates how the growing levels of musical complexity represent the growing independence of Ina’s multiple inner voices, and how musical simplicity enables their unification. I present two oppositional forces: an intertwining force, and a splitting force. The intertwining force acts very much like a gravitational force in the musical domain—it …

Créativité Assistée Par Ordinateur : Composer La Musique D'Un Film En Utilisant Uniquement Sa Courbe De Luminosité Extraite Automatiquement, Felipe Ariani, Marcelo Caetano, Javier Elipe Gimeno, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau

Presidential Fellows Articles and Research

Dès sa conception, l'ordinateur a trouvé des applications pour accompagner la créativité des humains. De nos jours, le débat sur les ordinateurs et la créativité implique plusieurs défis, tels que comprendre la créativité humaine, modéliser le processus créatif, et programmer l'ordinateur pour qu'il présente un comportement qui semble être créatif dans une certaine mesure. Dans cet article, nous nous intéressons à la manière dont l'ordinateur peut être utilisé comme un outil favorisant la créativité dans une composition musicale. Nous avons extrait automatiquement la courbe de luminosité d'un film muet et l'avons ensuite utilisée pour composer une pièce musicale pour accompagner …

Monarch Butterflies, Ralph Mendoza

Theses and Dissertations

This piece is a continuation of capturing my experience from my trip to Paraguay. This first part, of a three part movement, attempts to describe the beginning relationship between Human and Nature. This piece focuses on the feeling of tranquility, anxiousness and destruction.

Ethics In Kakadu (1988): Finding Djilile’S “True Tracks”, Natasia T. Boyko

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Tasmanian-born Peter Sculthorpe (1929 – 2014) was one of Australia’s most iconic modernist classical composers of the twentieth century. Kakadu (1988) seems to have sparked the most controversy of Sculthorpe’s works and has become one of his most well-known pieces. In the program notes provided in the score’s foreword, Sculthorpe asserts that “the melodic material in Kakadu, as in much of my recent music, was suggested by the contours and rhythms of Aboriginal chant.” Sculthorpe attributed this melodic material to the Arnem Land chant, Djilile. Consequently, Sculthorpe has been criticized for extracting Djilile from its authentic context as …

Bibliography, Jack G. Montgomery Jr.

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Bibliography of publications by Jack Montgomery.

Guide To The Robert Leigh Morris Collection, Columbia College Chicago

CBMR Collection Guides / Finding Aids

Robert Leigh Morris (b. 1941) is an American composer and music instructor. The Robert Leigh Morris Collection contains his personal music scores, from published works to drafts, and programs from his performances, as well as scores by other composers. Professional correspondences, documents, and some of Morris’s writings are also included.

Seamus Jennings Solo Transcription Project, Seamus Jennings

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

No abstract provided.

Applications Of Video Game Music Theory For The Highschool/College Theory Curriculum, Daniel L. Thompson

Honors Theses and Capstones

This paper covers the origins of video game audio and the technical limitations that effected what composers could write. Several audio excerpts have been transcribed with roman numeral analysis. The goal of this project was to determine if musical excerpts from video games could supplement an existing highschool/college theory curriculum. Theory techniques ranging from simple cadences to secondary function chords are present throughout the pieces. The pieces are from a variety of games and composers from 1983 - 2014. Overall, many of the compositions contain excellent examples of theory techniques. These excerpts would best be utilized alongside existing theory material. …

Incorporating Activism Into Contemporary Music: An Analysis Of A Composition Portfolio, Mary Walsh

Theses and Dissertations--Music

An original music composition portfolio featuring White Coral, a composition for wind ensemble and tape, Cataclysm, a composition for bass trombone, tuba, and tape, Protest, a composition for chamber ensemble with text by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Mother of Men, a composition for chamber ensemble with text by Ida Couch Hazlett, The Blue Hour a composition for wind quintet, and Jerusalem a composition for a cappella voices.

Butterfly Prayers, David Patterson

Compositions of David Patterson

Butterfly Prayers by David Patterson is a piano solo score that includes three movements:

i: Black Swallowtail

ii: Cabbage White

iii: 88

Butterfly Prayers depend on metaphor, a piano's 88 integrated black and white keys sounding the spectra and fragility of harmony--the pairing of wings.

Cinematic Somnium: Piano Solo, David Patterson

Compositions of David Patterson

Cinematic Somnium: Piano Solo by David Patterson. Dream along with my students of composing for the movies, ominous, melodramatic of the silents.

New Frontiers In Technology: Can Traditional Intellectual Property Rights Laws Be Adapted And Applied To Nfts?, Mariyah S. Wakhariya

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

A decade ago, ‘NFTs’ were rarely heard of or known to anyone, unless they worked in or kept up with the tech world. However, they are not new - they have been around for almost two decades. Their popularity has grown over the past few years. ‘NFT’ stands for ‘non-fungible token’. An NFT is a digital file with a unique identity that is verified on a blockchain and is therefore not interchangeable - i.e., a kind of crypto asset, like an authentication certificate for digital artifacts. In theory, NFTs can represent almost any real or intangible property. These days, it …

From A Humble Cry To A Holy Chaconne: The Background, Analysis, And Performance Guide To Chaconne For Tokkae, Op. 96 By M. W. Johann Kim, Jurang Kim

Theses and Dissertations--Music

The cries of animals have been used as motivic material in classical music literature throughout history. This project considers the Cambodian tocay gecko’s cry as the motif which embodies the harmonic structure in Chaconne for Tokkae for Violin and Piano, Op. 96 by Dr. Myung Whan Johann Kim. It reveals how Dr. Kim adapts unique compositional style and technique such as the bell harmony of Dr. Kurt Anton Hueber, to develop the theme into 39 colorful variations. The essential elements of the chaconne and the composer’s intentions are examined through personal interviews and correspondence with the composer. These elements are …