Musicology Commons^™

Ludwig Van Beethoven: Leonore. Harmonia Mundi 902414, 2019 [Review], Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance

No abstract provided.

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Msc 3032 (Electronic Music), Ted Gordon

Open Educational Resources

This class surveys the musical practices, technological instruments, and scientific concepts associated with electronic music from the 19th century to the present in institutional, amateur, and commercial environments, drawing from a wide range of musical traditions and styles from around the world. It develops practical skills of recording, editing, listening to, analyzing, and writing about music with electronic instruments and media.

Texts, Drugs, And Rock 'N' Roll: Easy Rider And The Compilation Soundtrack, Jonathan R. Lee

Creative Collaborations

Of all the New Hollywood films, Easy Rider (1969) perhaps most effectively demonstrates the potential complexity of the rock compilation soundtrack. Drawing on concepts from film studies, film musicology, and literary theory, this article discusses how Easy Rider demonstrates the compilation soundtrack’s potential to generate meanings both inter- and intratextually. The intertextual method of interpreting pop compilation soundtracks looks deeply into the intersection of image, sound, and narrative on a vertical axis, considering the relationship between dialogue/image/plot point and song lyrics/musical style, the ways that the songs on these soundtracks communicate to audiences the thematic or diegetic significance of a …

Brian Boydell: Mosaics And Sketches, Cliona Doris, Denise Kelly, Ciaran O'Connell, David O'Doherty, Andreaa Banciu, Margaret Doris

Music recordings

Brian Boydell (1917-2000) Mosaics & Sketches: Chamber Music for Harp

Mosaics and Sketches explores the Irish composer Brian Boydell’s chamber music for harp written over two decades, 1960-1980. In this recording, Cliona Doris performs Boydell’s solo work for pedal harp, A Pack of Fancies for a Travelling Harper and is joined by TU Dublin Conservatoire colleagues in three chamber works: Four Sketches for Two Irish Harps, Five Mosaics for Violin and Harp, and Quintet for Flute, Harp and String Trio.

The recording was funded through a research grant from Technological University Dublin.

The support of RTÉ lyric fm and the …

A “Free Artist Of Color” In Late-Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue: The Life And Times Of Minette, Bernard Camier

Music & Musical Performance

This article sets forth, for the first time in detail, the life and career of Minette, who was the main female opera singer in Port-au-Prince at the end of the eighteenth century. The city was the capital of the thriving and wealthy French colony of Saint-Domingue (which, upon gaining independence in 1804, took the name Haïti). Theatrical activity in Port-au-Prince was comparable to what one could find in any large provincial city, and the success that Minette gained was all the more remarkable for her being categorized as colored (mestive). The details of Minette’s origins, life, and career …

Hearing Tolkien In Vaughan Williams?, Keri Hui

Journal of Tolkien Research

In recent years, musicians and Tolkien readers alike have associated Ralph Vaughan Williams’ music, particularly Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), The Lark Ascending (1914), and Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934), with Tolkien’s fantasies. This article explores this tendency to hear Tolkien’s Middle-earth in Vaughan Williams’ musical fantasies, calling attention to the similarities in their shared devotion to the idea of English consciousness, interest in combining ecclesiastical and folk materials, and pastoral vision. A juxtaposition of their approach and philosophies not only helps explain the musical echoes, however, but also confirms an appealing mark of Tolkien’s craft is its …

The Music Of Sylvano Bussotti And Its Interpretation: Biopolitics, Intersubjectivity, And Modernist Canon Formation, Charles A. Rudig

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The music of Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti (1931–2021) presents intentional challenges to interpretation and canonization. These particular challenges and Bussotti’s reasoning for implementing them are interrogated in this dissertation by reading the score to Bussotti’s La Passion selon Sade (1966) through contemporaneous European social theory, philosophy, and political developments. La Passion selon Sade is a theatre piece for a chamber ensemble, with a primary vocal and dramatic role written for mezzo-soprano Catherine Berberian, with whom Bussotti frequently collaborated. Like much of Bussotti’s music from the 1950s and 1960s, the discourse surrounding the piece and its reception largely relates to its …

"Cerulean Skies" By Maria Schneider: A Formal And Semiotic Analysis, Jonathan Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Expressivity, imagery, and narrativity have long been touted as hallmarks of big band composer Maria Schneider’s style. This perception is widely accepted by critics and casual commentators, but are these attributions merely metaphorical or do they speak to observable dimensions of Schneider’s compositional style? This dissertation aims to address the narrative and expressive dimensions of Schneider’s music by combining aspects of formal analysis with concepts from music semiotics. The centerpiece is an analysis of “Cerulean Skies” (2006), the longest work to date in Schneider’s oeuvre with a duration of approximately twenty-two minutes. “Cerulean Skies” is distinct in its expansiveness and …

An Analysis Of György Kurtág’S Officium Breve In Memoriam Andræ Szervánszky For String Quartet Op. 28, Matthew S. Sandahl

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides a movement-by-movement analysis of György Kurtág’s third string quartet, Officium breve in memoriam Andræ Szervánszky op. 28. While the work is widely celebrated for its wealth of extra-musical associations and allusions, this analysis is primarily oriented towards the music’s internal relationships, with the contention being that such an approach can help clarify and refine the role that reference and allusion plays in the piece. A close reading is given for each of the work’s fifteen movements.

Freedom And Control: Musicians’ Autonomy And Record Labels’ Influence In Producing The Sound Of Contemporary Jazz, Jiwon Kwon

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is easy to find news articles and jazz albums titles that describe jazz musicians as geniuses. The notion that jazz musicians are geniuses gives the misleading impression that a jazz record is the pure outcome of a musician’s artistry, without any aesthetic intervention by record labels in the process of making albums. However, my interviews with jazz musicians and record label executives reveal that many jazz records released by labels are the result of collaborative effort between musicians and labels. Labels involve themselves in the album-making process and give artistic input by deciding the concept of an album, the …

Haydn’S Schemata And Hexachords: Two Analytical Case Studies, Gilad Rabinovitch

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

Two analytical case studies, from Haydn’s minuet al roverso (from the Symphony Hob. I: 47) and the opening movement of the String Quartet Op. 50, no. 6, show the interaction of galant schemata (Gjerdingen 2007) and the hexachordal solmization of the solfeggio tradition (Baragwanath 2020). Haydn plays upon conventional galant schemata—presumably elements of style shared by listeners who are closely familiar with the idiom (even if they do not have explicit schema labels); he also plays upon a more esoteric element of his own training and that of many other musicians in the period: hexachordal solmization. By considering both schemata …

"A Gesture Of Solidarity Through Music": Local And International Community In Canadian Benefit Concerts For Ukraine, Charlotte M. Lilley

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

In the months following Russia's February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Canadian music community responded by hosting a number of benefit concerts. In contrast to the precedents set by well-known, large-scale benefit concerts such as 1985's "Live Aid", these concerts were strongly rooted in the local context of the events' hosts and centred the voices and experiences of members of their beneficiary community. Combined with the potential of these events to allow individuals and groups to combat feelings of helplessness and to serve as forms of resistance against the Russian regime, this has allowed these concerts to create and …

Listen To The River: Dolores, Ophelia, And Female Resistance In Opera, Daniel Aaron Barnidge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The music of female characters in the great masterpieces of opera often demonstrates resistance to and undermines the abuse they have historically received in opera plots. The Mexican folktale that my opera, The Tragedy of La Llorona, draws inspiration from plays on many of the same tropes historically found in female characters in opera including madness, sexuality, and lack of agency. This led to research into the portrayal of women in opera as part of my pre-compositional process and my desire to access this tale free from the traditional 'marianismo' and 'machismo' narratives it is associated with and which …

Playing With The Music: Ecologies Of Attention And Understanding In The Classical Music Education Project Of Sesame Street Or The Bird, The Worm, And The Mushroom: Three Stories Of Listening, Eden Attar

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a paper about the ecologies of attention and understanding evident in and emergent from the presentation of classical music on the classic children’s television program Sesame Street. The paper is written in two chapters. The first is an analysis of context, attention, and education on the program, framed through the analogy of bird-watching. I argue that the classical music education which is presented on the program deviates from the humanitarian norm of “uplift” and absolute aesthetics—the bird’s-eye view— and instead presents an understanding of music which resonates with ideas of “listening with”—the view of the bird watcher, …

Relocating Community To The Virtual: Sound Knowledge, Affective Listening, And The (Dis)Embodying Of Sound And Space, Zachery D. Coffey

Masters Theses

Music within Protestant church communities frequently reduces the distinction between performers and audience, emphasizing the collective, participatory role of all congregation members, in manners of music making similar to those discussed by Thomas Turino. This dynamic helps establish individual and communal identities. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, church communities saw changes in their services, music, and ways of life. Meeting in a physical building proved impossible due to the dangers of COVID-19 and many churches mitigated these dangers by streaming, recording, and posting services online. Between 2020 and 2022, I observed and participated in changes to technological production …

The Great Generalization: Organizational Adaptation Strategies As Entrepreneurship In Higher Music Education, Jacob Bruce Hertzog

Music Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study sought to measure how higher music education has evolved in response to the music industry’s digital revolution. I utilized a framework of organizational adaptation theory to synthesize five distinct organizational adaptation strategies: decentralization, generalization, specialization, formalization, and inaction. Music leaders were surveyed (n = 100) to assess adaptations across ten common domains in higher education. Higher music education was found to have undergone a great generalization through the expansion of activities in nearly every domain. Consistent with elements of organizational adaptation theory, and like individual musicians, higher music education has been entrepreneurial in response to the digital revolution.

'Space Is The Place:' Afrofuturism In Black Popular Music, Tamyka Jordon-Conlin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on developing a theory of Afrofuturist music. Afrofuturism is an umbrella term used to describe Black cultural productions that reflect on the African diasporic culture of the past while imagining potential futures, often while appropriating imagery of technology and science-fiction tropes. With the intent of redefining notions of blackness, Afrofuturist artists create alternative historical narratives and speculative future projections. These productions create space that allows the Afrofuturist to discorporately negotiate the limits of Black subjectivity. Poet, activist, and avant-garde musician Sun Ra is credited as the progenitor of Afrofuturism, and his model has since been adapted by …

“800 Years We Have Been Down”: Rebel Songs And The Retrospective Reach Of The Irish Republican Narrative, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

From the glamorous, cross-dressing “Rebel, Rebel” of David Bowie, to the righteous Trenchtown “Soul Rebel” of Bob Marley and The Wailers, both varied and various musical articulations of cultural and socio-political rebellion have long enjoyed a ubiquitous presence across multiple soundscapes. As a musicological delineator in Ireland, however, ‘rebel’ conveys a specifically political dynamic due to its consistent deployment as an all-encompassing descriptor for songs detailing events and personalities from the Irish national struggle. This paper sets out to examine the specific musical delineator of “rebel song” from both musicological and politico-ideological perspectives with a view to interrogating its appropriateness …

Gustav Mahler's Symphonies And The Search For Identity, Brian Hailes

Masters Theses

Throughout his life Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was aware of his role as an outsider and had a deeply conflicted view of his identity. The challenges he faced as a Jew in an overwhelmingly Christian and increasingly anti-Semitic Central Europe, as a German speaker in predominantly Czech speaking Bohemia and Moravia, as a Czech in the Austrian empire, and as an Austrian in a highly militarized but rapidly declining empire in the face of increasing pan-German nationalism, all contributed to this status. At the same time, his diverse early background provided a rich variety of musical experience, leading to an openness …

Applications Of Tao Of Bass, Vol. I, In Orchestral And Solo Double Bass Repertoire, Santiago Zorrilla De San Martin

Dissertations

This dissertation is not only an exploration of left-hand techniques found in Tao of Bass, Vol. 1, but also an inside of the performance and didactic approach of Dr. Marcos Machado to organize and create its content. That said, one of the objectives of this dissertation is to focus on developing an awareness of the didactic strategies in Tao of Bass created to develop the utmost proficiency in double bass performance. I expect to prove this objective in my dissertation by acknowledging how Tao of Bass encompasses a didactic approach that is universal and academically relevant to prepare for …