Composition Commons^™

Master's Recital In Jazz Pedagogy: A Performance-Demonstration Of Rhythm Section Instruments, Compositions And Arrangements By Nicholas Leo, Nicholas Leo

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The recital is presented to demonstrate skills and facility on the rhythm section instruments as well as to provide opportunity for the recitalist to present original compositions and arrangements. Proficiency on rhythm section instruments is necessary in that it offers, among other things, an understanding of the technical components and how they relate to the application of musical concepts of performance and education.

The curation of the recital program also functions as a representation of the recitalist’s artistic aesthetic, specifically in how it relates to pedagogy. The influential jazz educator and pianist Ran Blake asserts that an artist’s primary arsenal …

Compositional Craft And Theory Across Tonal Languages, Liam Butchart

Honors Theses

This paper accompanies Liam Butchart's senior honors voice recital and his composition for the Colby Symphony Orchestra, Genevan Overture. The essay examines how form and cadence, two integral components of compositional craft, have been utilized by composers who either were included in the voice recital or were major influences on the composition. Specifically, the paper analyzes how different composers end their musical sentences similarly and differently through the lens of structurally-relevant cadences.

Examining The Irish Art Song: Original Song Settings Of Irish Texts By Irish Composers, 1900-1930., David Scott

Masters

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, arrangements of Irish airs were popularly performed in Victorian drawing rooms and concert venues in both London and Dublin, the most notable publications being Thomas Moore’s collections of Irish Melodies with harmonisations by John Stephenson. Performances of Irish ballads remained popular with English audiences but the publication of Stanford’s song collection An Irish Idyll in Six Miniatures in 1901 by Boosey and Hawkes in London marks a shift to a different type of Irish song. This was a move away from the typical ‘Irish ballad,’ towards original art song settings of Irish …

Overgrown, Tori C. Ovel

Graduate Thesis Collection

OVERGROWN discusses the music elements found in the thesis composition of the same name.

OVERGROWN was written for soprano solo, flute, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone, baritone saxophone, trumpet, trombone, vibraphone, percussion, cello and double bass. The text was written by Matthew Raymond Smith.

On The Presence Of Christ, William A. Peacock

Graduate Thesis Collection

On the Presence of Christ is a musical work for septet (three strings, three winds, percussion) exploring Christ’s presence throughout all time as described in Scripture, wherein the individual movements are thematically grounded and arranged from ancient past to coming future. “In the Beginning” is based on Genesis 1:1-2 and John 1:1-5; “At the Throne” is based on Revelation 4:2-11; and “With His Saints Forever” is based in Revelation 21:1-5a and 22-23. I use these chosen Scriptures to guide my musical exploration, allowing my reflections and perspectives on them to give this music its substance and form My hope is …

An Analysis And Performance Guide Of Steve Reich’S Mallet Quartet, Francisco S. Perez

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Steve Reich’s music has had a profound effect on the contemporary percussionist’s repertoire. More recently, his Mallet Quartet (2009) has been one of the most performed works in the rising genre of mallet-keyboard quartets, which was featured in Third Coast Percussion’s 2017 Grammy-winning album Third Coast Percussion | Steve Reich. With Mallet Quartet, Reich codified this type of ensemble into the contemporary repertoire of percussion as evidenced through current commissions in progress by groups such as Sō Percussion and Third Coast Percussion.

The purpose of this document is to delineate the trajectory (past and present) of the mallet-keyboard …

My Eyes Due See, Johannes J. Barfield

Theses and Dissertations

My Eyes Due See is a multidimensional examination of the “black experience” in America. The installation is composed of a single-channel video, a music composition that utilizes music samples and live instrumentation, and sculptures made up of car parts and broomsedge grass. Each of these elements arranged in space share a nuanced and complicated view of blackness through the lens of a black man decoding personal history and American history simultaneously. Autonomy is the overarching theme throughout the work as it pertains to race, identity, urban and rural environments, and the relationship between generational trauma and nostalgia.

Mucp 183-983: Applied Music Composition--A Course Benchmark Portfolio, Gregory Simon

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

MUCP 183-983, Applied Music Composition, is the core of the music composition course curriculum for students at all levels, from freshman to doctoral candidate. Like all applied lesson environments, it is a one-on-one, individualized study that principally involves the instructor giving students feedback on their musical works-in-progress. This time-honored paradigm for teaching composition has produced brilliant artists, but is rife with pitfalls and traps that can tarnish a student’s growth: composition pedagogues can coerce students into writing music like their teachers, or can prescribe a curriculum that makes composition accessible only to students who have already played classical music for …

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

Red Note New Music Festival Program, 2018, School Of Music,

Red Note New Music Festival

The RED NOTE New Music Festival at Illinois State University is a week-long event which features outstanding performances of contemporary concert music.

John Williams: An Evaluation Of His Impact Upon The Culture Of The Classical Guitar, Michael O'Toole

Doctoral

This thesis examines the career of the Australian guitarist John Williams and his impact upon the culture of the classical guitar. Williams has been a celebrated guitarist for more than six decades and has performed and recorded extensively during that period. He has made a remarkably varied contribution to guitar culture, performing in a wide variety of different styles, highlighting the guitar’s unique strength as a versatile and adaptable instrument. Williams’ career is in marked contrast to that of many of his contemporaries, including his mentor Andrés Segovia. Segovia believed the classical guitar must assert its individuality in order to …

On Myth & Music, Legend & Landscape, Science, Stars, & Story; A Portfolio Of Compositions: An Animist Aesthetic Argument On Symbolist Sound-Synergies, With Musings On Messiaen And The Taoism Of Takemitzu, In The Work Of Mulvany., Eoin Mulvany

Doctoral

The accompanying portfolio contains eight major works for disparate forces: Brú na Sídhe is a work for Large Orchestra; Bog Bodies is a work commissioned for a heterogenous Quintet; Gáeth Ard Úar is a work written for a Solo Bass/Contrabass Clarinet in B-flat; a Piano Trio, SzyzygyS, follows; a work entitled Blackwater is written for Solo Guitar; a diptych, named Sigil, written for a Dectet of Harp and Vibraphone with double String Quartet, follows; then, O Unworn World for a ten part Choral ensemble is presented as a meditation on a poem by Patrick Kavanagh; and, the last of the …

Still Figuring This Out: A Symphony For Orchestra, Latasha Bundy

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

N/A

Connection Between Visual Arts And Music: The Painting And Music Of I-Uen Wang Hwang, Yining Jenny Jiang

Dissertations, 2014-2019

This document explores the connection between the visual arts and music, particularly focusing on the similarity between visual and aural artistic expression by analyzing two sets of piano pieces composed by I-Uen Wang Hwang, a contemporary Taiwanese-American composer and artist. The piano pieces are Dream Garden, Series I and II (2000-2004) and Preludes for Piano (2016). Series I of Dream Garden contains two piano solo compositions based on a series of Hwang’s own watercolor works. Each composition has an analogous painting: “The Horn of the Plenty” and “Butterfly Orchid”. Series II includes two compositions written for two pianos: “Red and …

Music From The Harpsichord House, Julie Zhu

Theses and Dissertations

Music from the Harpsichord House is an installation and series of concerts that exists in the binary of in and out of performance. During a concert, the harpsichordist is hidden inside the house and his face is live-projected outside. Fifteen new musical compositions were commissioned for the harpsichord house.

A Generalized Intervallic Approach To Metric Conflict In Liszt, Robert L. Wells

Music

The music of Franz Liszt has become widely recognized by music theorists for its harmonic and formal innovations. However, little attention has been given to adventurous rhythmic/metric aspects of Liszt’s compositional style: specifically, he frequently incorporates rich metric structures in which the notated metric layer, indicated by time signatures and bars, and heard metric layer, given by cues in the sounding music, are locked in an evolving conflict. To model such interactions, this article develops a new analytical system based on Lewin’s generalized interval system (GIS) concept, constructing a new three-component metric direct product GIS called Met. The article …

On Improvised Music, Computational Creativity And Human-Becoming, Arto Artinian, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

Music improvisation is an act of human-becoming: of self-expression—an articulation of histories and memories that have molded its participants—and of exploration—a search for unimagined structures that break with the stale norms of majoritarian culture. Given that the former objective may inhibit the latter, we propose an integration of human musical improvisers and deliberately flawed creative software agents that are designed to catalyze the development of human-ratified minoritarian musical structures.

Villa-Lobos's Compositional Techniques And Treatment Of Folk Melodies In Cirandas For Piano, Gustavo Schafaschek

Dissertations

Despite his significance as the most important Latin American composer of the twentieth century, serious analytical studies on the music of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos are still few and far between. Recent scholarship has started to demystify the figure of Villa-Lobos as an intuitive composer with no technique, revealing an artist that strove to develop an idiosyncratic musical language. The present document aims to contribute to this new trend in Villa-Lobos’s scholarship by analyzing pieces from the piano cycle Cirandas, W220, considered one of the most important works from the composer’s mature style. Each of the sixteen pieces …

Winds Of Courage A Mallet Concerto For Solo Mallets And Wind Ensemble., Ross Elliott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Winds of Courage is a motivically-driven composition based on a repeating chordal pattern. Although being written out, the solo mallets parts sound somewhat improvisatory, which is a key element to the part. In a way, the concerto illustrates what it is like to have a crush on someone; where the first movement is getting up the courage to talk to them; the second movement, crying from failing to say what you need to say or not getting up the courage to talk to them, or getting rejected; and the final movement, when things work out in a positive manner, or …

Symposium Of Contemporary Music, 2017, School Of Music

Programs

The program for November 16-17, 2017 featured guest composer Judith Shatlin, he William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor at the University of Virginia. Ms. Shatin also founded the Virginia Center for Computer Music. Her music has been commissioned by organizations including Carnegie Hall and the National Endowment for the Arts.