Music Theory Commons^™

Rhizomatic Approaches To Screen-Based Music Notation, Lindsay R. Vickery

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The rhizome concept explored by Deleuze and Guatarri has had an important influence on formal thinking in music and new media. This paper explores the development of rhizomatic musical scores that are arranged cartographically with nodal points allowing for alternate pathways to be traversed. The challenges of pre-digital exemplars of rhizomatic structure are discussed. It follows the development of concepts and technology used in the creation of five works by the author Ubahn c. 1985: the Rosenberg Variations [2012], The Last Years [2012], Sacrificial Zones [2014], detritus [2015] and trash vortex [2015]. this paper discusses the potential for the evolution …

Return With Us Now... Featured Facsimile: Henry Worrall’S Spanish Retreat, Robert Ferguson

Soundboard Scholar

Ferguson examines Henry Worrall's Spanish Retreat. Its origins go back to London, specifically to two guitar prints published there in the mid-1820s. Though the earliest of these (c.1826) states that the piece was "arranged for guitar" by Alexander Sosson, this does not necessarily indicate that it was originally written for a different instrument, such as piano. "Arranged" could mean the piece was already in circulation among guitarists, or another guitarist created or popularized it, and Sosson merely reworked it (and wrote it down). Moreover, imitating other instruments, at which the guitar proved particularly adroit, constituted the essence and charm of …

Giuliani’S Naples: A Walking Tour, Nicoletta Confalone, Grégory Leclair

Soundboard Scholar

With 430,000 inhabitants in 1800, Naples had become the third most populous European city after London and Paris. The excavation of the site of Pompeii in the eighteenth century gave a special prestige to the city. Its newly unearthed antiquities and frescoes led to a vogue of neoclassicism across the arts. Images of ancient Greek and Roman lyres inspired the creation of the lyre-guitar, an instrument on which Mauro Giuliani performed on various occasions in Naples--probably more for its visual effect than for audibility's sake.

The Guitar In Tudor England: A Social And Musical History, By Christopher Page, Richard Long

Soundboard Scholar

Long reviews The Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History by Christopher Page.

German Romantic Guitar Duets (Schneiderman, Yamaya), Richard Long

Soundboard Scholar

Long reviews Darr's German Romantic Guitar Duets by John Schneiderman and Hideki Yamaya.

Soundboard Scholar No. 1 (Complete)

Soundboard Scholar

No abstract provided.

Music Theatre Directing For The Vocal Performance Student: A Practical Application Of Knowledge And Skills, Samuel Martin Snyder

Honors College

As an application of skills acquired in the course of a four-year Bachelor of Music program, this thesis constitutes the physical documentation of the creative process for Jeanine Tesori’s Violet, the musical production selected for this project. Encompassing in a linear format license contracts, casting, creative development, rehearsal planning and conducting, administrative duties, musical analysis, and artistic instruction, the contents of this document represent in part the steps and components required to realize a full musical production – each one accomplished by the student director. In addition to the physical elements, a full recording of the final performance is available, …

The Production Of Sticky Notes And Bible Quotes: Godly Answers For Sticky Situations A Children’S Musical As Directed By Julie Brinkman, Julie Elizabeth Brinkman

Honors College

This thesis reflects upon a director’s experience while directing her first production: Sticky Notes and Bible Quotes: Godly Answers for Sticky Situations by Dennis and Nan Allen. This children’s musical was produced in cooperation with Wylie United Methodist Church of Abilene, TX. Over forty children, with the help of ten adult volunteers, shared the importance of memorizing scripture and looking to God’s Word in times of trouble through song, skits, and the recitation of scripture. While reflecting upon the production process after each rehearsal, the director makes connections between her experiences as director, the content of her music education undergraduate …

Dual-Interval Spaces: Interrelations Between Interval Classes 1 And 5, Local Pitch Centers And Form In Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 12, Tae Young Hong

Master's Theses

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Sonata No. 1, written in 1926, is one of his most complex and lengthy works for piano. In contrast to the conservative style used in his critically-acclaimed Symphony No. 1, Op. 10, composed a year earlier, the sonata employs a highly modernistic idiom which predominated the composer’s output in the late 1920’s. The musical surface of the sonata was crafted by an extensive use of interval classes 1 and 5 which serve as the primary means of structuring pitch material.

This paper examines the surface combinations of two interval classes as well as their interaction with …

String Quartet, Brut, Bernie Walasavage

Masters Theses

l’Art Brut , also commonly referred to as “outsider art,” is comprised of a variety of visual media by untrained or mentally ill artists. The string quartet is subtitled this because it takes inspiration from the work of these artists; with its jagged edges, vibrant colors, and horrid scenes, there is an organic beauty inherent in such eclectic and divergent art. Another factor which drew me to the artwork of the mentally ill was the commonality of Kenophobia: an abnormal fear of empty spaces. Schizophrenic, Swiss artists, Adolf Wölfli (18641930) and Aloïse Corbaz (18861964) were noted for suffering this phobia …

Pitch Circles – From Music Theory To Computer-Based Learning Tool, Matt Smith

The ITB Journal

This paper describes how a music theory with explanatory power for expression of relationships between pitch classes, chords and tonal regions can be exploited as the foundations for a computer-based tool, called ‘Pitch Circles’, to support musical novices learn about and manipulate such musical concepts and relationships . The paper introduces this research with a brief review of the ‘direct manipulation’ principles for computer interaction design on which the computer-based learning tool has been based, and of the features of tonal theories which led to our choice of a particular theory, ‘Pitch Spaces’, as the basis for this work.

About This Issue, Michael E. Ruhling

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

No abstract provided.

A Comparative Analysis On The Skill Acquisition Of Music And Language, Dominique Lopiccolo

The Kabod

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate some of the shared cognitive processes, which seem to underlie both the acquisition of music and language. Since linguists have separated language acquisition studies into one of two major categories, that is, child versus second language acquisition, the following comparative study will predominantly focus on the similarities found between second language acquisition and music acquisition. This is due in large part to the fact that our current understanding of how child language acquisition works is still in its primitive stages, and it most likely follows a more intuitivist paradigm. Second language acquisition, …

Aribo, De Musica And Sententiae, T. J. H. Mccarthy

TEAMS Varia

Music was central to the medieval church's public worship: it was the essential medium of the Mass and the Divine Office. In this new critical edition, T. J. H. McCarthy presents the Latin text and the first English translation of Aribo's musical treatise, De musica and Sententiae. Written between 1070 and 1078, it is concerned with the workings of the liturgical music that Aribo and his contemporaries called Gregorian chant, and builds off of and responds to several contemporary treatises by Abbot Bern of Reichenau and his pupil Herman, Abbot William of Hirsau, Frutolf of Michelsberg, and Theoger of Metz. …

Who Can Afford To Improvise? James Baldwin And Black Music, The Lyric And The Listeners [Table Of Contents], Ed Pavlic

Literature

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin’s work and life.

The route …

Understanding Music: Past And Present, N. Alan Clark, Thomas Heflin, Jeffrey Kluball, Elizabeth Kramer

Fine Arts Open Textbooks

Understanding Music: Past and Present is an open Music Appreciation textbook co-authored by music faculty across Georgia. The text covers the fundamentals of music and the physics of sound, an exploration of music from the Middle Ages to the present day, and a final chapter on popular music in the United States.

Accessible files with optical character recognition (OCR) and auto-tagging provided by the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation.

Jazz And Puerto Rican Traditional Music: A New Generation Of Musical Exploration, Pedro Lavezzari

Masters Theses

Many musical styles around the world have been born from struggle and search for cultural identity. The same idea applies to Jazz and the Afro-Caribbean music created within the African diaspora and influenced by Latin and European styles in the United States. More recently, the meaning of diaspora has been used to refer to a group of people and some aspects of their culture (Rivera 2010, 104). For older and newer generations of Puerto Rican musicians two traditions have intersected to create a modern form of expression that reaffirms Puerto Rico’s musical creativity and contemporary tendency. In 1989 Warren Pinckney …

A Musical Homiletic: Drawing On The Sonic Dimensions Of The Word And Spirit, Thomas H. Troeger

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The article begins by addressing two primary areas of concern: 1. Can music communicate meaning, and if so, how? 2. Can theological realities be expressed through music and other artistic forms whose primary medium is not language? The author then lays out a schema featuring four different aspects of developing a musical homiletic, starting with the simplest and moving to the most complex. (1) Preachers can speak in a way that captures the musicality of human conversation: its sonically engaging use of inflection, volume, pace, and timbre. (2) Preachers can interpret the theological and poetic meaning of the texts that …

A Jamaican Voice: The Choral Music Of Noel Dexter, Desmond A. Moulton

Dissertations

As we approach the twenty-first century, the world generally is moving away from the dominance of the European aesthetic towards a world music that owes much to the musical resources of the African-American tradition. Jamaica’s social and philosophical music belong mainly to that tradition, which includes the use of rhythms, and timbral and melodic resources that exist independently of harmony. Already in this century, Jamaicans have created two totally new music - Nyabinghi, which performs a philosophical function and Reggae, which performs a social function. The choral music of Noel Dexter is important because it is uniquely Jamaican/Caribbean in its …

Twelve-Tone Serialism: Exploring The Works Of Anton Webern, James P. Kinney

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Mathematics and Music are related and intertwined, and the invention of serialism in the 20th century highlights this fact. Serialism is a technique of music composition that uses mathematics to structure different elements of music, such as pitch and rhythm. For hundreds of years, music all over the Western world was tonal, which means there is a hierarchy of some pitches being more important than others. Serialism is a form of atonality, which is the composition of music that attempts to use all twelve pitch-classes equally. I examine twelve-tone serialism, which was created by Arnold Schoenberg and developed by his …