Composition Commons^™

Blue Mountain: A Chamber Opera For Winds And Voices By Justin Dello Joio: A Unique Contribution For Wind Band Literature, Armando Saldarini

Dissertations

Blue Mountain is an opera in one act scored for four voices, and thirty-three instruments, commissioned by Det Norske Blaseensemble. Under the direction of Kenneth Jean, the premiere took place on October 8, 2007, at Kanonhalen in Oslo, Norway, as part of the Edvard Grieg Centennial celebrations and the 2007 Ultima contemporary Music Festival. The opera takes place in Troldhaugen, Norway, during the last days of Edvard Grieg’s life. Suffering from emphysema, Grieg was being treated by his doctor with morphine that created great anxiety, fear, and mental torment. A visit from his friend, Percy Grainger, gave Grieg great …

Mcdaniel, William Joseph, 1918-2009 (Mss 526), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 526. Unpublished manuscript music written by William J. McDaniel, native of Jellico, Tennessee, and Western Kentucky University alumni. Includes symphonic works, a ballet, songs, two chamber operas, small ensemble works, and choral works. Most have a religious theme. Also contains news clippings about McDaniel’s music and correspondence.

Piano Sonata #4, Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

Sonata for the Midwest was written to express the expansive diversity, energy, and continual renewal of America's heartland.

October In Galicia, Karen J. Siegel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

October in Galicia is a setting of selections from the Czech poet Ewald Murrer’s fantastical book, The Diary of Mr. Pinke, translated into English by Alicie Pi!t’ková. The surreal day-to-day happenings of Mr. Pinke occur in a timeless group of villages revealed by a translator’s note to be modeled on the historical region of Galicia (now part of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia). The tape part (or more accurately the digital audio files), which appears in “October 23rd,” consists of an organ recording that has been manipulated electronically. The electronic manipulations are subtle enough that the original pitches are always …

Todesfuge, Casey Hale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Todesfuge (2008-2010) is a setting, for tenor and chamber orchestra, of Paul Celan's poem of the same name. Celan wrote his landmark work on the Holocaust in the years after he himself was freed from internment in a Romanian forced labor camp in 1944, though its imagery is drawn from accounts of the death camps in Poland. From the outset, I was ambivalent about setting this text to music, but felt compelled, and my response was to frame it with idiomatic references to German music from Wagner to Weill, exploring the discomfort of using aesthetic artifice to represent unspeakable atrocities. …

Syntagma Musicum Ii: De Organographia, Parts Iii – V With Index, Michael Praetorius, Quentin Faulkner Trans. & Ed.

Zea E-Books Collection

Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) achieved distinction as a practicing musician: as organist and Kapellmeister at Wolfenbüttel, Dresden and Magdeburg, and (in his later years) by incessant travel to fulfill commissions at various central German courts. Amid his travels Praetorius found time to publish an impressive series of collections of musical compositions, in all more than a thousand works. Praetorius’s three-volume Syntagma musicum (Musical Encyclopedia) belongs to the last years of his life. Volume I, Musicae artis analecta (1614/15, in Latin), treats principles and practices of religious music, from a decidedly Lutheran perspective. Volume II, De organographia (1619, in German) deals with …

Triads And Text In Ariettes Oubliées, Nathan Fleshner

Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Gesture-Sensing Technology For The Bow: A Relevant And Accessible Digital Interface For String Instruments, Zachary Boyt

Masters Theses

Technological advances in powerful, miniaturized electronics have created a growing potential to continue the evolution of string instruments through an accessible digital interface. Although many new types of instruments and controllers have explored this goal, gesture-sensing technology, when paired with the expressive nature of the bow, has provided the most eligible solution towards bridging technology and tradition. Through a selective showcase of technical development, artistic application, and future possibilities, this thesis traces the evolution of gesturesensing bow technology as an accessible digital interface in string instrument performance.

On This Journey: Suite For Big Band And Five Voices, Kara L. Baxter

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, Student Creative Work, and Performances

On This Journey: Suite for Big Band and Five Voices is a four-movement, programmatic work that explores traditional big band instrumentation with the addition of five voices used as instruments. Violin and cello are added in the last two movements.

This is the story of a journey, with each movement representing a phase of that journey. The first movement, Charmed with Possibilities, is a musical representation of Chicago. During the improvisation solos, the time moves fluidly between a measure of six and five. The meter and key change often, evoking a sense of the ever-changing city.

The second movement, Stop, …

Crotale Sample Library, Ryan Waczek

Music

This report will discuss the process of creating a digital sample based library for musical applications. Topics such as recording, microphone placement, and mixing will be addressed; as well as elements of design in Adobe Photoshop, and computer scripting in the language of the computer program Komplete 5 by Native Instruments. The instrument sampled is the crotales, an orchestral, melodic percussion instrument.

Procedural Music Generation And Adaptation Based On Game State, Timothey Andrew Adam

Master's Theses

Video game developers attempt to convey moods to emphasize their game's narrative. Events that occur within the game usually convey success or failure in some way meaningful to the story's progress. Ideally, when these events occur, the intended change in mood should be perceivable to the player. One way of doing so is to change the music. This requires musical tracks to represent many possible moods, states and game events. This can be very taxing on composers, and encoding the control flow (when to transition) of the tracks can prove to be tricky as well.

This thesis presents AUD.js, a …

A Composed Space, Adam S. Hogan

Graduate School of Art Theses

My practice is invested in expanding our conscious scope—revealing phenomena and observations, and presenting the information to the viewer through auxiliary channels. Using the language of minimalism, cinema, and abstraction I create technologically sophisticated systems to produce spaces of contemplation (a meditative space challenging the ephemeral relationships between our sensorial perceptions, space, and time).

Material, space, and technology become instruments for composition manifesting as silent experimental cinema (created and controlled sonically). My work seeks to illuminate our conscious scope through the succession of frames.

Creating A Potentially Popular Hit Song, Susan Noh

Senior Theses

From as far back as I can remember I have always loved music. Not just listening to it but also creating it. I had my first piano lesson at the age of 4, my first violin at 6 years old, my dad’s guitar in my hand at 13, and apparently I sang since I was able to form sounds. My dream as a child was to be a famous singer, but I never truly pursued it. As I grew older, I acquired new dreams, but deep down, I have never stopped wanting to be a singer. I have fulfilled part …

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.

Воспоминания (Acts Of Remembrance): For Violin, Cello And Piano, Marat E. Sanatullov

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, Student Creative Work, and Performances

The piece has three movements: I. Истоки (Act I. Beginnings); II. Очарование (АCT II. Charm); III. Просветление (ACT III. Lucidity). The title of the piece and the titles of its movements are in Russian.

Adviser: Tyler Goodrich White

Symphony No. 1 Movement 1, Matthew Harms '14

Distinguished Student Work - Visual Arts

Matthew Harms conducting his Symphony No. 1 Movement 1 - performed by the IMSA Orchestra.

Oasis Dreams, Clarisse Tobia, David Vayo, Faculty Advisor

Compositions

Full musical score for violin, viola, cello and piano for large or small ensembles.

The Preservation Of Subjectivity Through Form: The Radical Restructuring Of Disintegrated Material In The Music Of Gerald Barry, Kevin Volans And Raymond Deane., Adrian Smith

Doctoral

This thesis examines Adorno’s concept of ‘disintegrated musical material’ and applies it to the work of the Irish composers Raymond Deane (b. 1953), Gerald Barry (b. 1952) and Kevin Volans (b. 1949). Although all three of these composers have expressed firm commitments to the ideal of creating new and radical works, much of the material in their music is composed of elements abstracted from the tonal past. This feature of their work would seem contrary to the views of Adorno, who is commonly seen as advocating progressive composition using only the most advanced means. This view comes across most strongly …

A Realization And Analysis : The Manifestation Of Franz Schubert Within Manuel Maria Ponce's Sonata Romantica., Parker S. Scinta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Within early twentieth-century guitar repertoire, Manuel María Ponce’s Sonata Romántica distinguishes itself in both quality and historical significance. The manifestation of Franz Schubert’s compositional idioms within this work exhibits Ponce’s intense understanding of Romantic harmonic and formal treatment, in addition to his imitative compositional ability. The main aim of this document is to discover the specific ways in which Ponce emulates Schubert by incorporating comparative and Schenkerian analyses. This investigation examines Ponce’s treatment of harmonic, motivic and formal structures to reveal the unique aesthetic qualities that distinguish the piece as a guitar sonata in the manner of Schubert. In particular, …

Chopin Mazurkas And Its Influence On Polish Nationalsim, Pablo Cintron

Masters Theses

The innovative character of Chopin Mazurkas is forever linked with Polish culture. This thesis examines how the unmistakable sound of the Mazurka captures the Polish sound more than any other work written by the composer and how it contributes to Polish cultural nationalism during the Polish diaspora of the nineteenth-century.

In this study, the author presents a brief examination on Chopin's traditional interpretation of his mazurkas as well as isolating the characteristics of Polish interpretation that sets the Mazurka performance apart from the non-traditional style. A research case is made when contrasting the current concept of the classical execution of …