Music Theory Commons^™

Constructing A Contemporary Chinese Piano Language: An Analytical Study Of Zhang Zhao’S Chinese Dream, Ziwei Zhou, Ziwei Zhou

Dissertations, 2020-current

The piano arrived in China in the early 1900s. Over the past century, Chinese piano music has moved from early imitation to the sophisticated and diverse styles we see today. For Chinese composers, the main challenge has always been how to balance Western techniques with Chinese traditions and their own unique voices. To address these challenges, Zhang Zhao (b.1964) stands out for his ability to turn traditional heritage into a modern piano language. After a summary of the history of Chinese piano literature, this study examines his Chinese Dream (2014) through his “Three Transformations” philosophy: (1) Western techniques for Chinese …

The Message Of Resilience And Harmony: From War Camps To Modern Calls For Peace, Linlin Uta

Dissertations, 2020-current

Music has a unique power to either foster harmony and peace or contribute to discord and suffering, depending on how it is used. The role of music in three different wartime camps—the Bando Prisoner-of-War Camp in Japan during World War I, Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and Japanese American internment camps during World War II—illustrates both the dangers and the transformative potential of music. While these examples highlight the misuse of music as a warning, they also reveal how music, when used in a positive way, can offer valuable lessons for promoting global peace.

Moreover, in an environment …

The Piano Music Of Orlando Fagnani And Its Connections To The Choro Tradition, Norman J. Charette

Dissertations, 2020-current

This study explores the life, piano works, and compositional style of Orlando Fagnani (1922–1977) as it fits into the choro tradition. By situating his compositions within their historical context, providing biographical insights, investigating stylistic features, and analyzing one of his piano works, Mini Prelúdio No. 1, this document highlights Fagnani’s contribution to Brazilian music and places him not only among significant composers of choro, but also among the leading Brazilian composers of the twentieth century. The fortunate timing of his birth in the same year as the Week of Modern Art contributed to a deeper connection with Brazil’s …

The Eight Types Of Love, According To Ancient Greece: A Musical Album, Alex Aether

Honors College Theses

This thesis examines the eight styles of love as defined by the ancient Greeks, presented as a musical album with each song dedicated to a specific category.

By exploring new ideas and approaches to the typical “love song” while incorporating my personal experiences, I hope to break through a long-standing cliche in the music industry in a way that’s personal to me and inspire others to fill this topical rift. At a broader scale, I hope to create nuance in people’s minds about what love means to them in the moments they feel it, so they can deeply understand and …

Investigating Creative Possibility Using Automated Composition, Kian Drees

Undergraduate Honors Theses

As a constructive method, Johann Joseph Fux’s theory of counterpoint defines a space of musical possibility for contrapuntal composition. I developed a computational method for generating melodies to systematically investigate selected properties of this space. My program recursively generates a tree of all possible cantus firmus melodies of a specified length or all possible first species counterpoints on a given cantus firmus, starting with an empty root node and adding child nodes representing possible musical notes at each step until the specified length is reached. I then investigated several properties of the generated melodies, such as the approximate relationship between …

Caladrius: Creating A Playable Game Via A Multimedia Experience, Isabelle Morgan Brookshire

Whittier Scholars Program

Caladrius: Creating a Playable Game via a Multimedia Experience hones in on making an experience through different forms of media to represent a game. If this project was fully funded and done, it would be a video game on Steam with an art exhibition, small poetry book, and novel accompanied with it. It would even have a show, a soundtrack, and merch. But at this level, it was to make an experience for my audience that they could experience whether or not they enjoyed video games as a concept. I wanted them to enjoy 'playing' within a physical exhibition and …

Fugues, Their History, And Their Status In The Twenty-First Century, William Sulliban

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines fugues from its first inception in the Renaissance to the twentieth century in order to contextualize fugal writing seen in the twenty-first century. The evolution of fugue through the twentieth century is the primary focus for the first chapter. For this, various music scores and academic scholarship are consulted to provide a foundational understanding of fugue. The second chapter examines contemporary fugue writing and explores how composers are approaching this very old compositional technique after several hundred years. Multiple twenty-first century compositions are discussed, as well as an interview I conducted with a composer to gain firsthand …

Sentential Structures In Alexander Scriabin's Op. 8 Etudes, John Paul West

Theses and Dissertations

Historically, the sentence has proven to be one of the most versatile and pervasive forms in music, appearing since the mid-sixteenth century with occurrences too frequent to quantify. Sentential musical phrases emerged from music and poetry during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries with the same short-short-long rhythmic impulse, originating from poetic and sing-song texts. Although the sentence is most often tied to the Classical period, it is not associated with any single era. Patterns of sentential phrases were already apparent and plentiful before the late eighteenth century, and composers used it as a device to expand musical form throughout the …

Controlling Death: Analyzing Formal Structures In The Music Of Chuck Schuldiner, Cory Cogley

Theses and Dissertations

From 1987 to 1999, the metal bands Death and Control Denied released eight total albums, with music primarily composed by guitarist and vocalist Chuck Schuldiner. This corpus study analyzes the form of these records to demonstrate Schuldiner's compositional idiolect adhering to recognizable formal structures, specifically AABA and ABA.

Reimagining The Cadenza: Bluegrass And Mozart, Linna Zheng

Honors Theses

The bluegrass-inspired cadenza for the first movement of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 is a parallel with the “Turkish” episode of Mozart’s composition. While introducing the bluegrass idiom into a Classical concerto may not be idiosyncratic, it can be understood and seen as an extension of Mozart’s own practice and approach to stylistic disruption. This approach can be understood through the concepts of Sonata Theory, revealing the cadenza as a site of productive deformation within a normative formal framework. Along with this, Robert S. Hatten’s concept of troping further supports the idea that the interaction between Classical and bluegrass idioms …

The Influence Mariachi Music On Regional Mexican Music, Alexis Suastegui

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

How has Mariachi music influenced other regional music in mexico?

Japanese Music Theory, Elias N. Nichols

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

This research project explores Japanese music theories. By analyzing the basic components of Japanese music, including historical and modern approaches, this presentation demonstrates the similarities and differences in the formation of music in western thought when compared to the methodology of Japan. This research dives deep into tones, scales, melodic approaches, historical development and the effect on modern compositions today. This project informs the audience on the nuances of Japanese music theories in the hope to dispel stereotypes about music theories from different cultures, apart from western thought.

The Paradox Of Musical Vernaculars, By Marina Ritzarev, Jacob Gran

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Contributors To Issue 7

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

On Music Theory And Making Music More Welcoming For Everyone, By Philip Ewell. Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2023 [Review]., George Adams

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Remembering John Rothgeb (1940–2020), Jürgen Thym

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Bach And Mozart And Space And Time, Robert L. Marshall

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Karol Berger’s influential study, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, argues that

“what matters to Bach . . . is not the linear flow of time from past to future . . . Rather, time is made to follow a circular route or neutralized. . . . Mozart and his contemporaries “straighten[ed] the temporal cycle into an arrow.”

The present essay suggests that, in considering the music of Bach and Mozart we are not dealing with two different concepts of time but rather with two different analogies: one with space, the other with time. It argues that, for Bach, the spatial metaphor …

Thoughts Upon Richard Taruskin’S Yahrzeit, Scott Gleason

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Teaching portions of Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music to non-music majors at Columbia University (in the early 2000s) offered special opportunities and challenges. Taruskin’s musical ethics, central to that book, are clearly embodied in his writings about John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer. The Princeton School of composer-theorists is a litmus test of Taruskin’s thinking: in particular, Taruskin’s emphasis on music criticism can aid in an analysis of Roger Sessions’s 1958 String Quintet. David Lewin’s unpublished 1959 analysis of that same piece (by his teacher) shows a very different approach; Lewin’s analysis is a vivid but rarely …

Orthography, Jeremy Gill

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The myth of Pope Gregory I taking melodic dictation from a magical singing bird is the imaginative starting point of Western musicʼs love-hate relationship with the music notation systems it later developed. This essay traces that development through Thomas Tallis and J. S. Bach to the dichotomous modern examples of Brian Ferneyhough and Arvo Pärt. In it, I suggest that Western musicʼs eventual development hinged upon that earliest desire to document and codify melodies, answering Gregoryʼs contemporary Isidore of Seville, who lamented that “unless sounds are held by the memory of man, they perish, because they cannot be written down.”

In Praise Of Simplicity: Marie Hinrichs’S Op. 1, Neun Gesänge, Stephen Rodgers

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

In a chapter from German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century (1996), Jürgen Thym describes the historiography of the German Lied as “a hike through the high-peak area of a mountain landscape where the trail along the ridge leads from one glorious peak to the next.” Beneath the high peaks of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf, he notes, are smaller peaks not reachable by trail. Thym clears paths through this unexplored landscape by surveying the Lieder of Carl Loewe, Fanny Hensel, Franz Liszt, Robert Franz, Clara Schumann, and Peter Cornelius. My essay extends one of these paths, exploring the songs of …