Musicology Commons^™

Closing The Gap: An Analysis Of The Musical Elements Contributing To Hip-Hop’S Emergence Into Popular Culture, Grant Knox

Scholars Week

This paper explores the musical evolution of hip-hop and the techniques that have influenced such growth. Hip-hop music’s pioneers established a genre that would not only prove to be self-sustaining, but allow for a diverse array of influences to contribute to its growth. An art form that was once preserved for minorities and often considered a lower form of intellectual art is growing closer to mainstream music. Topics such as the orchestration and production of music, influence of other genres, harmonic analysis, and the diversity within the genre itself are discussed with an emphasis on hip-hop artists of the previous …

About This Issue, Michael E. Ruhling

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

No abstract provided.

Towards The Recovery Of Authentic Organ Continuo Practice In Haydn's Concerted Sacred Music, Tom Mueller

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

During the classical era, full-size church organs were used in the performance of concerted sacred music. Historical evidence such as treatises and surviving organs offer useful information that can be used to reconstruct organ continuo performance practices. In spite of this evidence, modern performances and recordings of this repertoire often make use of small positive organs that cannot match the capabilities, timbre, and dynamics of larger instrument. Furthermore, the continuo realizations published in modern performance editions rarely reflect the style and techniques of historic practice.

This article explores issues in the performance practice of continuo playing on large church organs …

A Model For Patron-Driven Acquisition Of Print Music Scores: From Conception To Reality, Alan Asher, Trey Shelton, Jason Heckathorn, Aimee Barrett

Charleston Library Conference

This paper and presentation will explore the process of developing a unique patron-driven acquisition program for print music scores and monographs from concept to reality at an American Association of Research Libraries institution. Areas to be discussed include collection development considerations, information technology infrastructure needs, acquisitions workflows, and plan evaluation. The paper and the presentation will examine how partnering with a vendor to implement an innovative collection development plan can support the needs of the library users and the goals of library collection development officers and increase access to music scores and monographs in a fiscally responsible way. Readers can …

Northern Music Culture In Antebellum New Orleans, Warren Keith Kimball

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the three decades before the Civil War, immigrants from the Northern United States flooded into New Orleans in search of new economic opportunities. These newcomers brought to the Southern city many elements of Northern life, such as Protestant churches, English-language newspapers, public schools, and distinct political views. They also brought with them musical practices specific to that region: Protestant church music, amateur choral societies, instrumental concerts, music publication, and English-language opera all flourished from the late 1830s until the late 1850s. This dissertation situates the musical practices of New Orleans during the decades preceding the Civil War within the …

Mood And Mode: The Impressionistic Commonalities Of Claude Debussy And John Coltrane, Simon B. Needle, Edward Eanes

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

There are marked parallels in scale use, the use of modality and harmonic construction and movement in the music of John Coltrane as compared to impressionist composers like Claude Debussy. The modal harmonic exploration employed in the works of Coltrane is often attributed to the Indian raga and other music, but it can also be likened to Impressionist works by Debussy. A fascination with exoticism and a search for new veins in music to draw from propelled both of these artists forward musically. While Debussy learned medieval modality from the Russians, Coltrane looked further East to the Arab world and …

The Acoustics Of Justice: Music And Myth In Afro-Brazilian Congado, Genevieve E. Dempsey

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

For the Afro-Brazilian musicians of popular Catholicism, or Congadeiros, who live precariously on the urban and rural margins of Brazil, ritual undergirds their struggles for subsistence, spiritual fulfillment, and racial equality. When Congadeiros create ritual, they enter into a tradition begun in the seventeenth century in Brazil by their enslaved African and Afro-descendant ancestors who intoned songs of redemption. In keeping with their ancestors’ evocations of dignity during slavery, worshipers in the present day embed multiple kinds of vested interests within ritual festivity to achieve racial equality. This article explores Congado, the ceremonies of these disenfranchised musicians, to …

Worlds Of If: Analyses Of The Composed And Improvised Works Of Robert Dick, Melissa Keeling

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Considered one of the most important publications in twentieth-century flute pedagogy, Robert Dick’s seminal method book, The Other Flute (1975),[1] is an extensive catalogue of multiphonic fingerings, microtonal fingerings, glissandi, circular breathing, and other extended techniques. The Other Flute and a handful of his published solos are widely studied, but these works only represent a fraction of Dick’s creative energies.

Equally comfortable in classical, jazz, rock, electronic, and world music, Dick’s oeuvre demonstrates a sophisticated, musical use of contemporary techniques and his pieces have become standard repertoire. Though Dick was not the first flutist to use or notate these …

A New Approach To The Analysis Of Timbre, Megan L. Lavengood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two distinct approaches to timbre analysis exist, each with complementary strengths and limitations. First, music theorists from the 1980s adopt a positivist mindset and look for ways to quantify timbral phenomena, often using spectrograms, while avoiding any cultural dimensions in their work. Second, writings of the past five years focus on the cultural aspects of timbre but make no use of spectrograms. This dissertation builds upon these two approaches by synthesizing them: discussion is grounded in spectrogram analysis, but situated within a broad cultural context, through interactions with listener experience and ethnographic study of music periodicals and other published interviews. …

The Musicality Of The Water Lilies/La Musicalité Des Nymphéas (Library Resources), Holy Cross Libraries

Library Resources for Campus Events

A bibliography of resources available through the Holy Cross Libraries which provide additional information related to the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery exhibition “Gabrielle Thierry: The Musicality of the Water Lilies/La Musicalité des Nymphéas” from Aug. 30 through Oct. 7.

Thierry’s series of eight large-scale paintings were inspired by her rediscovery of the “Water Lilies” landscapes by Claude Monet on view at the the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. With special permission from the museum, Thierry painted in front of Monet’s originals over a period of 18 months from 2010 to 2012, where she explored the inner musical …

Constructing Music Of Rebellion In The Triumphant Empire: Punk Rock In The 1990s United States, David Pearson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the late 1980s, the punk scene in the United States was plagued by Nazi skinheads, the macho violence of “straight-edge hardcore,” and musical stagnation. Moreover, Ronald Reagan, the symbol of all that punks detested, was no longer president, the Cold War was coming to an end, and the United States was fast becoming the world’s sole superpower. These dilemmas put punk rock’s viability as a music of rebellion against the dominant order in a state of crisis.

Emerging out of this late 1980s malaise was a new wave of (leftist) political bands that took lyrical aim at the New …

The Varieties Of Tone Presence: On The Meanings Of Musical Tone In Twentieth-Century Music, Aaron Harcus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about tone presence, or how musical tone shows up for experience in twentieth-century music. In exploring the subject of tone presence, I rethink notions of “pitch structure” in post-tonal theory and offer an alternative that focuses on the question of what it is to be a musical interval for experience, drawing on a wide range of research from social theory, semiotics, theories of emotion, African American studies, literary theory, usage-based linguistics, post-colonial theory, and phenomenology. I begin by offering a critique of three basic assumptions that constrain understandings of what we mean by pitch structure in post-tonal …

Inculturation Of Liturgical Music In The Roman Catholic Church Of Igbo Land: A Compositional Study, Benedict Nwabugwu Agbo

Journal of Global Catholicism

A study of inculturation, composition and music among Catholics in Igboland, Nigeria. The article insects with contemporary discussions of inculturation/enculturation after Vatican II and the recommendation of St. John Paul II in his Ecclesia in Africa.

“Ever To The Right”?: The Political Life Of 1776 In The Nixon Era, Elissa Harbert

Music Faculty publications

No abstract provided.

Key Inference From Irish Traditional Music Scores And Recordings, Pierre Beauguitte, Bryan Duggan, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

The aim of this paper is to present techniques and results for identifying the key of Irish traditional music melodies, or tunes. Several corpora are used, consisting of both symbolic and audio representations. Monophonic and heterophonic recordings are present in the audio datasets. Some particularities of Irish traditional music are discussed, notably its modal nature. New key-profiles are defined, that are better suited to Irish music.

Paper Disc Record: A Consumption-Based Account Of Musical Identity, David Prescott-Steed

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Since 1991, I have been keeping a pen and paper list of my CD's, added to with each new purchase. With the increasing availability of digital media, not everything that I now listen to comes from a disc. Nevertheless, I have never bought digital music downloads, and so every new album purchase is a physical product with the band name and release title still added to the list. I keep it rolled up in a desk draw (the first composition-pages of which are yellowing nicely). The list comprises approximately 280 entries. Each entry until March 5, 2006 is numbered, by …

Britten’S Slippery Semitone And Motivic Intertextuality In The Poet’S Echo, Op. 76, And Serenade, Op. 31, Clare Sher Ling Eng

Faculty Scholarship

Britten wrote a number of vocal works that compose bouquets of poems around a central theme.  In these themed song cycles, he often uses motives to forge connections between different poems, suggesting intertextual relationships that transcend the original meaning of the poems, but render the song cycle more cohesive by underscoring its thematic unity.  This chapter focuses on the motif of the semitone, which I nickname Britten’s Slippery Semitone.  This motif is not unique to Britten, but he masterfully manipulates it in his music.  I show that the Slippery Semitone underlies some of the most characteristic features of Britten’s music, …

Empirical Aesthetics And The Philosophy Of John Cage: A Literature Review And Experimental Study, Braden J. Gillispie

Honors Projects

This paper examines the musical philosophy of composer John Cage in terms of psychological theories and experimental design. A literature review was first conducted to extract testable hypotheses from Cage’s musical works, writings, and interviews relevant to theories and research in empirical aesthetics. A study was then devised to examine the relationships between cognitive appraisals of the interestingness, enjoyableness, orderliness, and musicality of general sound events, as well as to determine the influence of openness to experience and the effect of two intentional-listening strategies, inspired by Cage’s ideas, on these relationships. Participants (n = 21) completed an openness to …

Gustave Vogt's Musical Album Of Autographs: A Scholarly Edition, Kristin Leitterman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gustave Vogt (1781–1870) was the most famous oboist in Europe during the mid-nineteenth century. Throughout his career he played with the best orchestras in Paris, toured Europe widely, and also taught the next generation of oboists at the Paris Conservatoire from 1802–1853. Although many of the details of his life have been lost to history, he did leave behind a record of the esteem in which he was held. This is preserved physically in the form of an album of short musical compositions honoring Vogt, collected between 1831 and 1859. The album has never been published, and is in the …

Reimagining The Collective: Black Popular Music And Recording Studio Innovation, 1970-1990, Will Fulton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines developments in the production practices of black popular music in the recording studio from 1970 to 1990. The year 1970 marked a transition in the recording practice of popular music that had a distinct impact on styles marketed as R&B, soul, and funk. Multitracking in the 1950s and 1960s had paved the way for a transformed production process, one initiated by Les Paul’s and Sidney Bechet’s overdubbing experiments in the 1940s. The collective sound of instrumentalists and vocalists heard on records no longer resulted from live-to-tape recordings of group performances, but was increasingly the product of constructed …