Other Music Commons^™

Establishment Of The Classical Saxophone: The Evolution Of Instrumental Design And Performance Into The 20th Century, Emily Nicol, Art Bouton

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

The instrumental design of the saxophone has evolved dramatically from its original patent in 1846. Referencing instruments from the St. Cecilia’s Hall Music Museum at the University of Edinburgh, this article explores the historical origins of the saxophone and traces the evolution of its design into the 20th century. Original research was completed through analysis of unique antique saxophones at St. Cecilia’s Hall and historical source materials in order to determine how, despite its intention to be used as a classical instrument, many factors such as politics, instrument structure, finances, and musician attitude at the time of the saxophone’s invention …

Instrument Construction: An Examination Of The Effect Of Lead Pipe Design Variability On Tuba Response, Larry James Heard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The document begins with a brief description of the main parts of the tuba: the mouthpiece, the valves, the body and the bell; in addition to a short explanation of the different types of material used to construct brass instruments. This study will function as the first installment of a bigger series exploring the variations in tuba sound when the different main parts are physically altered or swapped for other designs of the same part. This first installment of the series seeks to examine the section of the tuba known as the lead pipe in relation to the implications of …

The Great Transformation: A Recent History Of The Carolina Band, Kylie F. Dolbier

Senior Theses

The marching band of South Carolina’s flagship university was not always the emblem of school spirit and pride that it is today. Only ten years ago, the Carolina Band was seen by some as unsuitable alongside one of the most successful football teams in Gamecock history. Between the 2010 and 2011 seasons, this band seemed to miraculously transform into a true SEC marching band, one that was steeped in school tradition and characterized by engaging and high-caliber performance standards. However, this was no miracle. With the generous financial investment of the university, the legendary leadership of then-Director of Athletic Bands …

The Supply Chain Of Digital Music: Empowering Independent Artists Through Availability And Accessibility, Justin Reed

Senior Theses

The process of creating and sharing digital music can be viewed from the “supply chain” perspective: identifying the resources and value-adding tools that ultimately result in a final audio product. By researching and documenting the steps involved in this process, I identify this supply chain as a series of steps, an itinerary, or process model of digital music creation. Moreover, I found that each step in the process can be assess for its accessibility and usability by independent artists. I conclude by exploring how this democratizes the music industry by affording independent artists the necessary tools and empowerment to create …

The Unique Demands Of Playing Posture On Youth Violinists And Violists, Liam Carroll

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The high prevalence of performing arts injuries is an acknowledged challenge facing the performing arts medicine community. The injuries seem to affect string players the most among orchestral musicians, specifically violinists and violists. The asymmetrical posture, head and neck displacement, and spinal displacement required by the posture to play violin and viola can lead to discomfort or injury in the performer. Performance related musculoskeletal disorders (PRMDs) can have an adverse impact on the life of a musician, preventing them from performing or making it uncomfortable. While there is a large body of research on PRMDs relating to adult musicians, there …

James Kallembach's Antigone: A Conductor's Guide, Dominique Petite

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

James Kallembach’s music has been premiered by acclaimed choral groups such as Seraphic Fire and Lorelei Ensemble. It is a commission by the latter that this dissertation explores. In 2015 Lorelei Ensemble commissioned Kallembach to write a piece for Lorelei Ensemble’s “Witness” program, on the subject of martyrdom as it was conceptualized in ancient and modern times. Kallembach set the Sophocles play, Antigone,with interpolated texts from Sophie Scholl and pamphlets from the White Rose, a group dedicated to resisting the Nazis in Germany during the Second World War. The composition is a forty-minute oratorio for SSSSAAAA choir and …

A Conductor's Guide To Amass By Jocelyn Hagen, Matthew J. Myers

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Contemporary American composer Jocelyn Hagen grew up in Valley City, North Dakota, where she found an early love for singing, playing instruments, and composing. After completing degrees at St. Olaf College and the University of Minnesota, Hagen began a career as a full-time composer. Her appointment as Composer-in-Residence for The Singers led to her first major multimovement work, amass (2011).

Though Hagen planned to write a traditional setting of the Catholic Mass, she struggled to accept the text of the “Credo” as the only path to salvation. Thus, she substituted spiritual poems from a variety of faith traditions to create …

Lamin Fofana: Blues, Alaina Claire Feldman, Dino Dincer Sirin, Lamin Fofana

Publications and Research

Catalogue for the exhibition "Lamin Fofana: Blues" presented at Baruch College's Mishkin Gallery in 2020.

Using Music As A Teaching Tool To Teach Social Emotional Learning (Sel), Patrick Mcmanus, Christina Jensen

National Youth Advocacy & Resilience Conference

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is the foundation for academic achievement. Using music to teach makes it easier for students to gain knowledge on topics such as empathy, self-management, self-awareness, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making.

Finding Music In Chaos: Designing And Composing With Virtual Instruments Inspired By Chaotic Equations, Landon P. Viator

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Using chaos theory to design novel audio synthesis engines has been explored little in computer music. This could be because of the difficulty of obtaining harmonic tones or the likelihood of chaos-based synthesis engines to explode, which then requires re-instantiating of the engine to proceed with sound production. This process is not desirable when composing because of the time wasted fixing the synthesis engine instead of the composer being able to focus completely on the creative aspects of composition. One way to remedy these issues is to connect chaotic equations to individual parts of the synthesis engine instead of relying …

Dynamic Procedural Music Generation From Npc Attributes, Megan E. Washburn

Master's Theses

Procedural content generation for video games (PCGG) has seen a steep increase in the past decade, aiming to foster emergent gameplay as well as to address the challenge of producing large amounts of engaging content quickly. Most work in PCGG has been focused on generating art and assets such as levels, textures, and models, or on narrative design to generate storylines and progression paths. Given the difficulty of generating harmonically pleasing and interesting music, procedural music generation for games (PMGG) has not seen as much attention during this time.

Music in video games is essential for establishing developers' intended mood …

Recording Studios Since 1970, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Like many other specialty, purpose-built spaces, we tend to think of recording studios in instrumental terms, meaning that the space is defined in relation to the nominal type of work that the space is instrumental towards. While audio recordings have been made in spaces since 1877, not all of these spaces tend to be regarded as recording studios, partly since so many recordings were made in environments designed for other types of work; indeed, much of the first seventy years of US and UK recorded music history transpired at radio stations, concert halls and lightly treated mixed-use commercial spaces (e.g. …

Opera And Children’S Literature: 1895-Present, John P. Delooper

Publications and Research

This presentation discusses the findings resulting from the creation of a comprehensive bibliography of English Language children’s opera books published from 1895 to present. Historically opera was often assumed to be an elitist art in the United States and was thus seldom discussed in library collection development literature, and equally rarely highlighted in children’s literature periodicals. Recently, two librarians, supported by a Carnegie Whitney grant from the American Library Association, investigated the impact of opera themed children’s books by compiling a bibliography which documented instances of opera in published English Language children’s literature over the last 125 years. By analyzing …

Performing Near Field Acoustic Holography Scans For The Purpose Of Finding The Acoustic Impedance Of A Violin, Zamara Tomko

Student Research, Papers, and Creative Works

This project aimed to measure the acoustic impedance of the violin so that the violin can be better understood from an acoustic standpoint. Near field acoustic holography scans are to be conducted at the open A string resonance of the violin (440 Hz). Pressure microphones along the back plate of the violin allow pressure and particle velocity to be measured, and with that, the acoustic impedance to be calculated and mapped in 1 cm x 1cm increments. This work presents a guide for this procedure. The set-up method and materials used are detailed and the analysis and computations of values …

Cf Album, Transcriptions, And Analyses, Collin Felter

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

CF is an album of Collin Felter original compositions with a focus on creating a more approachable form of jazz harmony. To further the accessibility of the music, Felter has transcribed and analyzed his compositions for the listeners to theoretically understand what they are aurally experiencing. Included is the transcriptions/analysis document along with a link to the recordings of the album (can be found on all music streaming platforms).

“Because We Are Catholic”: Music As A Bridge Between Identities Within The Catholic Community Of South India, Johnathan Theodore Travis Rhodes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I argue that the music of the Catholic Church of South India, which draws from Indian and Western music genres, functions as a cultural bridge allowing the worshiper to express a distinctively Catholic identity without distancing themselves from their Hindu roots. This cultural connection reinterprets Karnatak musical styles, practices, and traditions as distinctively Catholic rather than Indian or Hindu. Thus, Indian cultures are recontextualized within a Catholic paradigm, as these practices are regarded as Catholic regardless of their historical, cultural, or religious origin. These identities, Indian and Catholic, are not in tension with one another, but instead, …

Determining The Composition, Joe Bennett, Sean M. O'Connor

Faculty Works

This chapter explores the interpretation of a musical work in the context of changes to songwriters’ creative behaviors, driven by changes in composing technologies. It argues that in the 21st century, a musical work (MW) is fully embodied in a phonorecording, and that single, artificially isolated elements (such as melodic fragments) should be considered de minimis for the purposes of copyright infringement litigation. This view is evidenced by the self-reported creative activities of more than 200 songwriting teams, taken from the popular podcast Song Exploder. Three detailed case studies are provided from this collection, all based on songwriting teams using …

Ancient Mesopotamian Music, The Politics Of Reconstruction, And Extreme Early Music, Samuel N. Dorf

Books and Book Chapters by University of Dayton Faculty

I write this piece primarily as a musicologist and amateur early music practitioner (viola da gamba player) who tries to understand the ways twentieth- and twenty-first century musicians and scholars have imagined and performed ancient music and dance. This essay emerged from my book project Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890-1935 and brings my training as a historical musicologist and dance historian to bear on issues typically of concern to archaeologists, classicists, and linguists.

While working on that book, I kept running across a number of individuals working now who are deeply engaged in …

Richard Dyer's Star Theory Applied To Musician/Actress: Lady Gaga, Allora R. Lee

Capstone Showcase

Richard Dyer’s Stars and general studies analyze the unusual phenomena surrounding influential film stars and their unmitigated power to compel and amaze those outside of the spotlight. His studies separate the theory into three intermingling parts: stars as a social phenomenon, stars as images, and stars as signs. There are many components in Dyer’s studies that can be extracted and used in analyses of particular actors and actresses. However, this does not solely revolve around film stars. In this analysis, I will be examining the famous pop music icon and recent actress, Lady Gaga. Through an analysis of her style, …

The Roman Catholic Ordinary Mass From Circa 1750 To Circa 1820: A Selected Bibliography, Letícia Gabriele Grützmann Januario

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Orchestrated masses from the 18th century and early years of the 19th century provide a valuable source of repertoire for contemporary choral conductors. This project will explore composers and works from circa 1750 to 1820 to provide choral conductors with a list of works suitable for programming based on the practical size of vocal and instrumental forces.

Western choral music was born in a church setting. Among all choral genres, the mass is the only genre composed throughout all eras, from medieval until the 20th century. The mass remained a prominent genre during the 18th century despite the secularizing influence …