Music Practice Commons^™

Laurie Smukler Guest Masterclass, Andrews University

Concerts and Events 2022-2023

Admired for her vivid musical intensity and the beauty of her sound, Laurie Smukler is an artist who is active as a soloist and recitalist, as well as a much sought-after chamber musician. Growing up in Cleveland, she began her studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music, with pedagogue Margaret Randall. She started performing early, winning local competitions, and playing as a soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra at the age of fourteen. She received a Bachelor of Music degree from the Juilliard School where she studied with Ivan Galamian. Other teachers who had a powerful influence on her development have …

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 …

Stop Not Writing Songs: Using Time And Collaboration To Overcome Self-Doubt, Imposter Syndrome, And Writer's Block, Carley Baer

University Honors Theses

The inner critic is a common foe within creative disciplines, and with it comes a host of internal obstacles such as anxiety, self-doubt, imposter syndrome, writer’s block, and more, that cause stress and conspire to keep artists from realizing their full creative potential. In this paper, I utilize research methods as well as self-reflection to consider how songwriters can implement the external constraints of time and collaboration to get around internal obstacles and introduce more freedom into the creative process. I examine the strategies of quantity over quality, maintaining an improv mindset, and amending expectations to explain how the inner …

Modes Of Listening In The Interpretation Of Electroacoustic Music, Lauren Wilson

The 21st Century Guitar

A cursory look through the literature on modes of listening reveals a wealth of different ways to attend to oneʼs sonic environment. Authors in the literature describe various, nuanced modes to frame oneʼs listening, and yet the terms also have central commonalities. In this essay, I explain that bringing these authors into dialogue with one another in a way that emphasizes these commonalities provides a rich interpretive tool, particularly for electroacoustic music. These different listenings ultimately compose my analysis, and I suggest that consciously engaging with modes of listening can shape listener experiences of electroacoustic music in analytically fruitful ways. …

When Bonfá Meets Villa: Creative Processes In The Elaboration Of A Guitar Arrangement To Manhã De Carnaval By Luiz Bonfá (1922-2001), José Daniel Telles Dos Santos

The 21st Century Guitar

This paper presents part of an artistic research where the focus is on elaboration of guitar arrangements. In the scope of the study here, my aim was to understand the implications of an ecological approach to music making based on the identification and use of guitar affordances. In particular, the elaboration of an arrangement of the song Manhã de Carnaval, by the Brazilian composer Luiz Bonfá (1922-2001). The process was informed by existing perspectives on arrangement (Sadie & Tirell, 2001), affordances (Gibson, 1977), tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1966) and embodied meaning (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). Throughout the arrangement, excerpts of the music of …

Marc Ribot's Exercises In Futility, Francesca Naibo

The 21st Century Guitar

Marc Ribot (*1954), one of the most influential guitarists of the worldwide avant-garde scene, started his musical life taking classical guitar classes with the Haitian teacher Frantz Casseus, turning then to electric guitar. After decades spent mainly on electric instruments, Ribot composed and recorded Exercises in Futility, his own series of etudes for solo guitar. The collection of pieces presents fifteen compositions that are intended to be studies for classical guitarists.Between 2015 and 2020 Ribot and I collaborated to create the scores of this collection of studies, soon to be published. The purpose of this paper is to present the …

Notational Types In Scores For Guitar And Electronics, Belquior Guerrero Santos Marques

The 21st Century Guitar

Notation is one of the factors upon which the longevity of mixed music is dependent. In this paper, I first discuss how academic production has conceived representation in works with electronics and dealt with inherent problems. After, I present the nine representational strategies I have identified in repertoire for guitar and electronics. These notational types aid understanding how composers conceive the interaction between the acoustic and electroacoustic parts in mixed music performance. Their simultaneous use, even if redundant, can help understanding instrumental performance issues and contribute to the preservation of the electronic part. I conclude with some considerations about the …

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 …

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

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.

Noise Peddler: An Exploration Of The 21st Century Pedalboard, Danny Bright, Lee Westwood

The 21st Century Guitar

Noise Peddler is a practice-based research project exploring the 21st century guitar pedalboard as composition and performance interface. Recent growth in the guitar pedal industry has seen a notable increase in popularity of the pedal platform, expansion in the number of manufacturers, the scope of effects available, and solidification of the concept of the pedalboard. The widespread adoption of MIDI/CV control, alongside the packaging of increasingly experimental and complex processing into stompbox formats has expanded the pedalboardʼs potential as a flexible canvas for the creation of unconventional guitar sounds. Performers such as Sarah Lipstate, Nels Cline and Ed OʼBrien have …

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 …

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 …

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.

Proceedings Of The 21st Century Guitar Conference 2019 & 2021

The 21st Century Guitar

This volumeʼs contributions grew from 20 of the 94 scheduled keynotes, lectures and lecture-recitals of the first and second editions of The 21st Guitar Conference. Five items stem from the inaugural edition (2019, 44 contributions) and 15 from the second edition (2021, 50 contributions).1 This conference is unique in that it is centered on contemporary guitar research, performance and pedagogy.2 Previously, guitar research had gained increased visibility thanks to the International Guitar Research Centre, launched in 2014 (Stephen Goss, President), which regularly (co-)organizes conferences on guitar research; and Soundboard Scholar, launched in 2015 (Jonathan Leathwood, Editor) ‒ currently the only …

Give The Drummer Some: A Dive Into Drum Breaks And Drum Break Production, Kyle Kaldhusdal

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper traces the history of hip-hop culture through the evolution of the drum break, the original context of drum breaks in funk and soul music, their influence on DJ culture, and the subsequent impact of drum breaks on music and music production. It follows the development of breakbeat compilations in the 1970s and 1980s, parallel to the development of turntablism and sampling techniques. It also examines in detail how copyright litigation in the 1990s shaped the development of sample-based music genres and created a niche market for originally-recorded drum breaks over the subsequent decades.

New Paradigms In Band Performance: An Analysis Of Three Prototypes, Scott Walker-Parker

Student Research, Creative Activity, and Performance - School of Music

This document seeks to propose new paradigms in band performance through inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinarity. Initial inspirations were drawn from performance innovations shaped by the new music theater which became popular in the 20^th century. Key concepts which were used throughout the creative, planning, logistic, rehearsal, and performance processes are analyzed in three recitals through prototypes of new paradigms in band performance. These concepts include accessibility and community, nonverbal/multimodal performance and instruction versus time, and nonverbal/multimodal communication.

The document has been organized in a manner which highlights successes and breakdowns of each process so future refinement can be made. …

Weber's Clarinet Concertino Opus 26, Cadence A. Graves

ATU Research Symposium

As a professional musician, it is important that one does not simply learn the notes and rhythms in a piece of music, but also the history surrounding it and its composer. There is much to learn about a piece of music and how it may be performed from original scores, performance history, and knowledge of the composer and the time period in which it was written. This lecture recital aims to open eyes to the amount of relevant knowledge one can gain from researching a piece of music’s composer, setting, and the importance of doing this research. This presentation will …

Approaching Fifth To Sixth Grade Flute Pedagogy Considering Vark Learning Styles Model, Julie Vanderlugt

Senior Honors Theses

The benefits of learning an instrument for childhood development intersecting with the positive growth trend in homeschooled families generates increased demand in value for supporting resources. Creating resources that would include learning styles defined by the VARK model (Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, Kinesthetic) designed to engage students during their particular developmental stage enhances at-home music education. The compiled research surrounding VARK learning styles and flute specific pedagogy would provide a foundation for specialized flute exercises and activities for fifth to sixth grade students learning to play the flute in a homeschooled or private lesson setting. The structure of the thesis is …

An Examination Of Relationships Between Ear-Playing Skills And Intonation Skills Of High School And College-Aged Wind Instrumentalists, Ben Michael Herrick

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Playing by ear and the ability to play in tune are components of musicianship that rely heavily on the ability to successfully discriminate musical pitches. Connections between ear-playing and intonation performance have rarely been addressed. The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships between intonation performance and ear-playing skills of high school and college-aged wind instrumentalists. Research questions were: (1) What is the relationship between the ability to play by ear and intonation performance? (2) How does intonation ability differ when the participants sightread notation compared to performing music that was learned by ear? (3) Do differences appear in …