Digital Commons Network^™

Jazz, Jobs, And Justice: From The American South To South Africa And Beyond, C. 1960-Present, Regennia N. Williams

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Towards Interaction: Combining Jazz Techniques And Idiomatic Writing For Varied Ensembles. A Collection Of Musical Works -And- An Exegesis, Glyn Alan Macdonald

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This practice-led research project has produced musical works that bring together ensembles from the Western Classical tradition that only read notation, and, jazz soloists who improvise. Three works ‘Standing Ground’, ‘The Journey’ and ‘Matt versus the Zombies’ were composed for three ensembles each with an improvising soloist. These ensembles included a British style Brass Band, Brass Quintet and a double Saxophone quartet.

The project built on the work of Andy Scott and Eddie Sauter, both of whom wrote for non-jazz ensembles and an improvising artist without including a jazz rhythm section. The accompanying non-jazz ensemble was written in such a …

Music Is The "Noise Of Remembering" Tracing The Origins, Influences, And Connectivities Of West African Music, Adam Friedman

Lawrence University Honors Projects

The popularity and universal reach of music genres such as Jazz and Hip Hop attest to the idea that these forms have been long established as a vital part of global musical culture. For people who are familiar with Afrocentric music, it is clear that styles such as Jazz and Hip Hop are rooted in, and inextricably linked with, African culture and history. What is more difficult to make sense of, however, is how and why transplanted African culture came to have such wide reaching impact in the new contexts in which it was taken up – because the stories …

European Jazz: A Comparative Investigation Into The Reception And Impact Of Jazz In Interwar Paris And The Weimar Republic, Douglas A. Kowalewski

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Both Paris and the Weimar Republic were fascinated with American jazz in the interwar period. Because of jazz's connection to African American culture, this fascination is linked with the themes of identity and race relations. This work will demonstrate that interwar Parisians were not always receptive of African Americans that played jazz, and that the citizens of the Weimar Republic were more aware of and interested in the African American culture that permeated jazz in the 1920s and 30s.

Jazz And Recording In The Digital Age: Technology, New Media, And Performance In New York And Online, Dean S. Reynolds

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of the uses of recording technologies and new media by jazz musicians in New York. It privileges the perspectives of professional musicians, gleaned through interviews and observation of their discourses and practices in live and recorded performances and in online new media spaces. Contrary to scholarly and critical approaches to jazz that privilege live performance, this dissertation argues that mediatization, through use of recording technologies, digital formats and platforms, and social media, is a vital mode of jazz performance in the digital age. Chapter 1 shows how formative encounters with jazz by musicians coming of …

Blurred Distinctions; Beyond Third Stream – A Study In Composition Of Confluent Hybrid Musical Styles: The Amalgam Of Jazz And Classical Concert Music, Rafael Piccolotto De Lima

Open Access Dissertations

Categorizations are very necessary as shortcuts to facilitate teaching, academic discourse, and for publicizing, but they are also very dangerous in the attempt to put absolute values on unquantifiable concepts, such as styles, ideas, or eras. This essay presents dividing lines of musical genres as they are: blurred and open to crossovers. The discussion focuses on both musical and historical elements of jazz and classical music, particularly from the perspective of their mutual influence during the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century. Departing from the Third Stream concept, the purpose of this research is to discuss the importance …

The Influence Of Jazz Elements In Don Freund's Sky Scrapings For Alto Saxophone And Piano, Wade Howles

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

Jazz influence surfaces within traditional repertoire for the saxophone more often than other instruments. This is due to the saxophone’s close association with the jazz idiom. Of particular interest is the use of jazz elements in Don Freund’s Sky Scrapings for alto saxophone and piano. Often, while studying a jazz-influenced work, students and professors alike may not recognize the importance of these elements appropriately. Because of this, their performance loses a portion of the stylistic nuance the composer intended while writing the work. This lack of recognition and loss of stylistic nuance is commonly due to a lack of …

Sacred Freedom: Sustaining Afrocentric Spiritual Jazz In 21st Century Chicago, Adam Zanolini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the historical and ideological headwaters of a certain form of Great Black Music that I call Afrocentric spiritual jazz in Chicago. However, that label is quickly expended as the work begins by examining the resistance of these Black musicians to any label. I theorize that this resistance is due to the experiences of Black history, throughout which labels have been used to enslave, exploit, and control people. I begin by discussing early musical labels, several important n-words, and then the innovation of African diasporic subjecthood and its labels. Then Black is examined, along with several corollary social …

102nd Convocation 2016 Address - The Sky And Sea, John Mcknight

Convocation Addresses

Dean of Institutional Equity and Inclusion John McKnight states "I know for sure that the liberal arts teach students how to think critically and provide unparalleled access to opportunities to translate good thinking into action."

Development Of A Rubric For Collegiate Jazz Improvisation Performance Assessment, Kendall Ryan Moore

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to develop a jazz improvisation rubric for the evaluation of collegiate jazz improvisation. To create this measure, research objectives were devised to investigate the aurally- observed performer-controlled components of improvisation, which aurally-observed components should be evaluated in an improvisatory performance, and whether a comprehensive measure could be developed to evaluate such a performance. Published methods on general music performance, jazz improvisation performance methods, jazz pedagogy texts, and statements from jazz educators and performers were content analyzed and cross referenced to determine overarching similarities and create criteria for evaluation. After conducting research, it was determined …

Playing Bebop: Culture And Bebop’S Reciprocal Influence, Audra M. Deboy

Student Publications

Following the sweet, pleasant Swing era style music of the 1930’s, Bebop emerged within the United States as an aggressive, percussive, musician-focused style in the 1940’s. However, Bebop’s creation was not spontaneous. Its composers, John Birks Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk, wrote for the sake of the music itself as a form of self-expression, not as entertainment for an audience. Bebop’s dissonant sound expressed political and cultural frustrations, stemming from World War II and similarly shown in the early Civil Rights Movement. I will argue that not only did Bebop develop out of such conflicts, but in a reciprocal …

Flamenco Jazz: An Analytical Study, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Beyond Harmony: Incorporating Rhythmic Elements Of Jazz Improvisation Through Pedagogy And Curriculum, Jonathan M. Campbell

Dissertations

Jazz studies programs have become established within the realm of formal education systems and currently play an increasingly important role in the development of jazz education as well as providing means for jazz students to study improvisation. Among the array of college-level jazz courses such as jazz history, jazz arranging and composition, jazz theory, and jazz ensembles, jazz improvisation sequences are often the focal point within jazz programs. However, as previous researchers have pointed out, jazz improvisation pedagogy is almost exclusively focused on chord/scale systems and harmonic based elements of improvisation. This has led to a pedagogical model that neglects …

A Comparison Of The Improvisational Styles Of Trombonists Conrad Herwig And Steve Davis, Andrew Hamilton

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the playing styles of jazz trombonists Conrad Herwig and Steve Davis, and compare them side-by-side. Five improvised solos by each player are transcribed. The transcriptions are selected from two albums that the trombonists recorded together, Conrad Herwig’s Osteology and A Jones for Bones Tones. The melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and stylistic contents of the solos are compared, in order to determine in what ways the two subjects are similar, and in what ways they are different. Musical examples are cited throughout the analysis, and the full transcriptions are included in the appendix, as …

Saving Jazz: Applied Ethnomusicology And America's Classical Music, Christopher Long

Masters Theses

In his 2009 article, Can Jazz Be Saved?, Wall Street Journal columnist Terry Teachout asserted that the American audience for jazz music performances was both shrinking and aging. Saving Jazz: Applied Ethnomusicology and America's Classical Music explores this jazz audience problem and finds that over the last thirty years the overall American audience for live jazz performances has not shrunk as has been widely reported, but is essentially unchanged in size. During that same period, though, there is no question that the median age of the audience has changed dramatically. Data collected by the National Endowment for the Arts and …

A Song Through Time: Tiger Rag And The Twentieth Century, Thomas Grady Hartsock

Music

Tiger Rag is one of the first recorded jazz works.This project investigates the initial creation of the work and follows it through five different artists in the twentieth century to explain how this piece of music has grown in it's hundred years of life.

A Methodology For The Application Of Afro-Peruvian Rhythms To The Drumset For Use In A Contemporary Jazz Setting, Daniel Stephen Susnjar

Open Access Dissertations

With a great increase in the global awareness of Afro-Peruvian music in the last ten to fifteen years, jazz musicians have become interested in utilizing the rhythms of Peru to help push their music into new areas of sound and texture. Regarding the art of applying Afro-Peruvian rhythms to the drumset for use in a contemporary jazz setting, inspired heavily by the drumming approach of Hugo Alcázar, there are no published methodologies available which explain how to develop the skills required to make this process a reality. This document details historical background information about Afro-Peruvian music, the application of Afro-Peruvian …

How Bebop Came To Be: The Early History Of Modern Jazz, Colin M. Messinger

Student Publications

Bebop, despite its rather short lifespan, would become a key influence for every style that came after it. Bebop’s effects on improvisation, group structure, and harmony would be felt throughout jazz for decades to come, and the best known musicians of the bebop era are still regarded as some of the finest jazz musicians to ever take the stage. But the characteristics of bebop can easily be determined from the music itself. [excerpt]

Little Eichmanns: A Composition For Chamber Octet, Benjamin D. Norton

Theses and Dissertations--Music

An original composition in one movement for a chamber octet comprised of a string quartet and a jazz piano quartet with tenor saxophone. The work develops an idée fixe, introduced in the opening bars, through a wide variety of transformations, textures, and styles. The two quartets begin in antiphonal alteration, united in thematic material, yet separated by style. A modern art music style contrasts with an improvisational jazz style. Gradually, the two quartets, and their concomitant musics, bleed into one another, breaking down stylistic boundaries. In the conclusion of the work, the idée fixe, the supplementary themes, and …

Graduate Recital, Saxophone, Abby Gross

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The young age of the saxophone in the existence of the music world has influenced the instrument's repertoire and programs to be versatile in genres and stylistic influences. This program features styles from several time periods and cultures including 20th and 21st century contemporary saxophone and piano duets, Brazilian choro, electronic music, and jazz. The nature of the instrument also allows pieces written for other instruments to take a different characteristic and open new meaning to a piece when played on the saxophone. For example, the element of passion in Brahms's Sonata in F minor No. 1 for clarinet takes …

Graduate Recital, Trumpet, Stephen Slivka

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My concept for this recital was to pay tribute to the trumpet lineage of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. I owe a great deal to Blakey, as some of the trumpeters in this group are my biggest influences. Lee Morgan made such an impact on Bobby Timmons' "Moanin" that future Messengers horn players would quote the beginning and ending of Lee's solo. This tune became synonymous with the Jazz Messengers. Horace Silver's composition "Nica's Dream" was recorded on an album featuring trumpeter Donald Byrd. The beautiful Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach ballad "Yesterdays" was a personal favorite of Kenny …

An Anxiety Of Authenticity? Fusion Musics And Tunisian Identity, Rachel R. Colwell

Honors Papers

The analytical trope of "hybridity" has a troubled past in the social sciences. The careless adoption of scientific terminology without adaptation to cultural contexts can result in dangerous consequences for ethnomusicology. This paper challenges, and ultimately accepts, the efficacy of "hybridity" as a model for musical contact. Mindful of essentialization, post-colonial situations, and the perils of over-generalization, ethnomusicology holds sophisticated tools for examining local understandings of hybridity and the role that fusions play in shaping identities. Approaching musics from internal perspectives returns agency to musicians and listeners, liberating the local experience from the cloaking paradigm of "hybridity" as a strict …

George Alan Russell: Jazz's First Theorist, Robert E. Moore

Trotter Review

In 1953 George Alan Russell published The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. By virtue of this work Russell carved out a unique niche for himself in the history of jazz, his opus representing the first theoretical work to come out of the jazz tradition. The purpose of this paper is to define his place in jazz history and to offer a biographical sketch off jazz’s first and most important theorist. My points of departure will be references made to Russell in two widely read works—Gunther Schuller’s Early Jazz and Wilfrid Meliers’ Music in a New Found Land. …

Volume 52, Number 08 (August 1934), James Francis Cooke

The Etude Magazine: 1883-1957

When Liszt Renounced the World

Arpeggio Practice

Energetic Fingers

How to Find the Keys and the Forms of the Minor Scales

Midsummer Musical Laughs

Jargon of Jazz: An Amusing Article Upon the New and Absurd Nomenclature Which Has Grown Up About the Jazz Orchestra

Music for the Local History Pageant

What Use is the Quarter Tone Scale? Is this Innovation in Modern Music Likely to Remain Merely a Curiosity?

Expressive Dictation

Remedy for Tense Muscles

Romance of Mendelssohn: A Favored Son of the Gods

Speeding Up the Left Hand

Wagner in Venice

Georges Bizet and the True Story of Carmen …