Music Theory Commons^™

La Fiesta Del Espiritu Santo: An Original Work For Choir, Soloists, And Small Ensemble Influenced By The Santeria Music Of The African-Dominican Community In The Dominican Republic, Rafael Scarfullery

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This study examines the role of Santería music as practiced by African Dominicans in Villa Mella, a neighborhood of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. This musical tradition comes from the culture and religion of the Yoruba people who were brought as slaves from Africa, and features complex drum rhythms and call-and-response chants. This paper deals with the historical and social context of Santería music within the Dominican Republic, but its principal objective is to adopt the musical language of this tradition and use it to create a new contemporary work for mixed choir and small ensemble.

One of the most …

Andrés Segovia And Federico Moreno Torroba’S Danza Castellana, Julio Gimeno

Soundboard Scholar

The guitar’s early twentieth-century repertoire is of unique importance, containing as it does the first guitar pieces by non-guitarist composers known for their symphonic, operatic and chamber music. Many of these composers wrote for the pioneering Andalusian guitarist Andrés Segovia, and among the most prolific of them was Federico Moreno Torroba. In various memoirs and interviews, Segovia identified Torroba’s miniature Danza castellana as not only the first piece written for him by a non-guitarist composer but even the first such piece by anyone, predating, in Segovia’s telling, Falla’s 1920 Homenaje. This article challenges Segovia’s claim by recounting the details …

Joaquín Rodrigo And Julian Bream: Aspects Of A Relationship, Javier Suárez-Pajares

Soundboard Scholar

In light of the complex diplomatic relations between Spain and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the deteriorating relationship between the Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo and the English guitarist Julian Bream describes a telling arc—from 1951, when Bream gave the British premiere of the Concierto de Aranjuez, to 1959, when he emphatically rejected the Sonata giocosa that Rodrigo had written for him. To explore Bream's negative reaction, this study considers both Rodrigo’s relation to England and Bream’s ambivalent attitude toward the Spanish guitar tradition. An epilogue examines the recordings that the guitarist subsequently made of the Concierto de Aranjuez …

Music Of The Divine: Interweaving Threads Connecting Contemporary Chant-Based Piano Repertoire, Jeremy D. Duck

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

The purpose of this document is to prove chant remains an important source of inspiration among living composers, and, despite the number of piano works already incorporating chant, composers today are still finding unique ways to include chant in their music. To achieve this objective, representative works have been selected for research and analysis for four of the major chant traditions. Connor Chee’s The Navajo Piano, Victoria Bond’s Illuminations on Byzantine Chant, and Hayes Biggs’ E.M. am Flügel: Poem-Étude for Piano Solo, though the chants from which they are inspired are diverse in concept and style, they …

Character Development And Revolution: Use Of Leitmotif In The First Acts Of Les Misérables And Hamilton: An American Musical, Mary Katherine Pezzillo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Leitmotif, a recurring musical theme that represents a character, idea, or situation, is a device used in operas, film scores, and musical theater. Accredited to Richard Wagner, leitmotifs enhance storytelling and provide a sense of cohesion to a production. The popular musicals Les Misérables and Hamilton bear many similarities, including the use of leitmotif as a storytelling device. This thesis explores how the two musicals use leitmotif differently, through the lens of the protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters. Though the leitmotifs in Les Misérables generally represent ideas and the leitmotifs in Hamilton are mostly character-based, this tool aids the overall …

Larson's Musical Forces In Schlenker's Music Semantics, Mick De Neeve

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Larson’s musical forces of gravity, magnetism and inertia link music to metaphors of physical motion. Schlenker’s music semantics is based on similar physical world associations. Because Larson’s forces are about note movements towards harmonic stability, his framework implies note groupings at stable boundaries, given common cadential harmony. These groupings with forces assignments can then be viewed as musical events in Schlenker’s approach, and mapped to structure-preserving external (world) events as required for this author’s semantics. To this end, Schlenker’s truth definition, specifying when an event is ‘true of’ a musical expression, will be adapted. The synthesis amounts to what Schlenker …

Aum314.1 Music For Non-Linear Narrative Example 2, Sae Institute

Exemplars

HD / Exceeds Specification exemplar for AUM314.1 - Music for Non-Linear Narrative

Aum314.1 Music For Non-Linear Narrative Example 1, Sae Institute

Exemplars

Exceeds Specification exemplar for AUM314.1 - Music for Non-Linear Narrative

The “Rebuff Chorus” In 1960–2000 Pop Music, David Heetderks

Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

In some verse–prechorus–chorus (VPC) songs from 1960–1990, the prechorus sets up an expectation for tonic arrival, only to have the subsequent chorus reject this tonal implication and either withhold tonic resolution, abruptly change to a new key, or contain a passage whose relation to the previous one is tonally ambiguous. I call this event a “rebuff” chorus. Formal analysis and intertextual comparison show how rebuff choruses use absent-tonic passages or modulatory “breakout” passages in order to swerve away from the implications of the previous section. The formal device often transforms the expressive effect of the chorus from arrival and sincerity …

William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes: "Why The Hell . . . Should Anyone Listen To This?!", R. Douglas Reed

Music & Musical Performance

William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes: "Why the hell...should anyone listen to this?!"

By Douglas Reed--2022

The article explores William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes (1989) through historical context, musical analysis, performance practice, and the composer's essay on the relationship between his composition and Whistler's paintings. Commentary by composer Sydney Hodkinson gives information about the 1960s new music scene in Ann Arbor (the ONCE Group, The Grate Society) composition study with Ross Lee Finney.

A View From Within: Timbre As An Analytical Tool In Contemporary Viola Music, Ash Mach

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Timbre is an elusive musical parameter that musicians, physicists, and cognitive scientists have been grappling with for centuries. While timbre can roughly be defined as an auditory attribute that distinguishes one tone color from another, this definition does not capture the complexities of sound and our perceptions thereof. Research on timbre has flourished since the 20th century, however, timbre studies has largely gone unnoticed within the viola community. This study, “A View from Within,” helps close the gap between timbre studies and viola repertoire scholarship by presenting analyses of three pieces from the 20th and 21st centuries through a timbre …

Componiendo El Núcleo: Una Exploración De La Bomba Y La Identidad Afroecuatoriana En El Valle De Chota, Ethan Guok

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Este proyecto se centra en la bomba, una tradición musical y de danza afroecuatoriana que se practica en el valle del Chota, situado entre las provincias de Imbabura y Carchi, pero también más ampliamente en el Territorio Ancestral que comprende el valle del Chota, La Concepción, Salinas y Guallupe. Históricamente y en la actualidad, la bomba ha desempeñado un papel importante en la creación de comunidad y la preservación de la identidad cultural afrochoteña, y el conocimiento de cómo tocar la bomba se ha transmitido intergeneracionalmente a través de la tradición oral. Sin embargo, como tradición negra y oral, la …

Fundamentals, Function, And Form: Student Workbook, Ivette Herryman Rodríguez, Andre Mount, Jerod Sommerfeldt

Milne Open Textbooks

Students of tonal Western art music will find in this workbook a full set of exercises and activities to deepen and reinforce their understanding of music theory and analysis. The book begins with such rudimentary topics as rhythm, meter, and pitch and progresses through polyphony, chromatic harmony, and musical form. In addition to exercises tailored to each topic, the book features recurrent activities focused on four-voice part-writing (figured-bass/Roman numeral realization and melody harmonization) as well as score analysis, which become progressively more advanced as new concepts and skills are covered.

Included for analysis are over 500 excerpts drawn from the …

André Mocquereau's Theory Of Rhythm, Charles Weaver

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the theory of rhythm developed by Dom André Mocquereau (1849–1930), a French Benedictine monk. Mocquereau’s theory was originally conceived as a method for performing Gregorian chant and has been the source for numerous publications and recordings since the beginning of the twentieth century. This dissertation places Mocquereau’s theory in the context of both the evolving performance practice of medieval monophony and the history of music theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 1 surveys the history of the notation of Gregorian chant, introducing the problem of constructing a rhythmic practice from historical sources. Chapter 2 examines …

Form In Hip-Hop Music: Sections, Songs, And History, Stephen M. Gomez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores musical form in recorded hip-hop music from 1979–present. Form, defined as the large-scale organization of songs, is a parameter that artists consider in the creative process and fans experience while listening. Hip-hop’s historical foundation as a live, improvised, party-oriented genre influenced formal functions and patterning from the earliest days of its popular recorded life, beginning with the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. While many of the section and song form labels used by scholars of pop-rock music are transferable to the analysis of hip-hop, the latter genre conveys a unique sense of time rooted in …

Sonorous Movement: Cellistic Corporealities In Works By Helmut Lachenmann, Simon Steen-Andersen, And Johan Svensson, John Popham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Sonorous Movement: Cellistic Corporealities in Works by Lachenmann, Steen-Andersen, and Svensson, I analyze three compositions that foreground the cellist-body, its physical gestures, and instrumental interactions: Helmut Lachemann’s Pression für einen Cellisten (1969/2010), Simon Steen-Andersen’s Study for String Instrument #3 (2011), and Johan Svensson’s marionette for string instrument, electro-mechanical devices and lights (2018). These works center sound production and the performing body as sites of ontological and creative exploration. Their physical gestures serve multiple sensorial functions, heightening the visual and kinesthetic dimensions of a traditionally aurally oriented practice. For each work, I develop a corresponding analytical method based on …

Ways Of Silence And Other Absences In The Music Of George Crumb, Jean-Patrick Besingrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The music of American composer George Crumb (1929-2022) is undeniably singular in the musical landscape. His aesthetic is often characterized by his exploration of timbre, his graphic scores, his use of quotation, his theatricality, and his interest in unusual instruments. This study proposes to take a different approach to Crumb’s aesthetic through the spectrum of silences and other absences. The concept of silence will be broken down and reconstructed through the Japanese concept of ma (間) and of empty spaces. Multiple types of silences and absences will be considered throughout this dissertation, expanding thus the concept of silence not only …

Introduction To Music, Mus 10100, Daniel Beliavsky

Open Educational Resources

This course examines musical works, composers, and aesthetics from antiquity to the present. Central to our curriculum are the questions, “what are music’s meanings?” and “how can music communicate meaning?” Through the process of discovering the varied answers to these questions, we will learn about music history, music philosophy, composer biographies, and how aesthetic concerns change across time and place. As a result of our work, you will develop the critical skills needed to understand the socio-historical events that inspire musical compositions and styles.

Conference Report: Reassessing Haydn’S Sacred Music, 12–14 June 2023, Eisenstadt, Austria, Robert B. Wrigley

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

A conference entitled "Reassessing Haydn's Sacred Music" took place in Eisenstadt 12-14 June, 2023. Historical, political, and religious contexts, reception, compositional and religous influences upon Haydn, and stylistic characteristics of specific works were all discussed.

Form In The Preludes Of J.S. Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, Daniel E. Prindle

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the forms of the preludes in J.S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. The prelude originated as an improvised genre in the mid-fifteenth century. Treatises of the period gave instruction on how to improvise and eventually compose preludes and that tradition informed Bach’s compositional practice. However, an additional genre, the invention, played a similarly important role in influencing the composition of the preludes in the Well Tempered Clavier, particularly in Book II. I analyze the forms of the preludes by proposing a new method: dimensional interplay. This method examines the form of each prelude in three musical dimensions: melody, …