Arts and Humanities Commons^™

City Boy By Judd Greenstein: A Transcription From Chamber Quintet To Full Wind Band, Emmanuel Rodriguez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this project is to create a wind band transcription of the chamber work City Boy by Judd Greenstein. Greenstein describes his own music as being “built on contrasts and juxtapositions between the jittery, competing pulses of the New York City streets where he grew up and the placid landscapes of the rural farm land he now calls home.”1 His music is also influenced by his passion for contemporary popular music genres, specifically hip-hop and rap. This duality is a major aspect of Greenstein’s musical language, which he describes as “a genre- fluid musical infrastructures that endeavors to …

In Search Of The Armorial Aesthetic: The Counter-Reform Of Ariano Suassuna And The Compositional Techniques In Clovis Pereira’S Suite Macambira, Wagner De Oliveira Duarte

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, in the wake of the Week of Modern Art in São Paulo in 1922, Brazil grappled with defining its national identity, distinct from European influences. While eminent figures such as Villa-Lobos, Camargo Guarnieri, and Francisco Mignone provided foundational narratives in this quest, the Armorial movement emerged as a unique and emblematic response to these nationalistic aspirations.

Originating from the creative vision of Ariano Suassuna, the Armorial movement, though often perceived as a regional initiative, epitomized a broader endeavor to represent Brazil's diverse cultural tapestry. Central to understanding this movement is the work …

Performative Mixing For Immersive Audio, Brian A. Elizondo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Immersive multichannel audio can be produced with specialized setups of loudspeakers, often surrounding the audience. These setups can feature as few as four loudspeakers or more than 300. Performative mixing in these environments requires a bespoke solution offering intuitive gestural control. Beyond the usual faders for gain control, advancements in multichannel sound demand interfaces capable of quickly positioning sounds between channels. The Quad Cartesian Positioner is such a solution in the form of a Eurorack module for surround mixing for use in live or studio performances.

Diffusion/mixing methods for live multichannel immersive music often rely on the repurposing of hardware …

Cyberinet: Integrated Semi-Modular Sensors For The Computer-Augmented Clarinet, Matthew Bardin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Cyberinet is a new Augmented instrument designed to easily and intuitively provide a method of computer-enhanced performance to the Clarinetist to allow for greater control and expressiveness in a performance. A performer utilizing the Cyberinet is able to seamlessly switch between a traditional performance setting and an augmented one. Towards this, the Cyberinet is a hardware replacement for a portion of a Clarinet containing a variety of sensors embedded within the unit. These sensors collect various real time data motion data of the performer and air fow within the instrument. Additional sensors can be connected to the Cyberinet to …

Jeff Scott’S "Startin’ Sumthin’, Composed For The Monmouth Winds," Transcribed For Full Wind Band, Trevor Butts

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this project is to create a wind band transcription of a work for a chamber music ensemble by Jeff Scott. Jeff Scott creates works that he considers “Urban Classical Music”. These works are rooted in European traditions and informed by his African American culture. His music is unapologetically influenced by the cultural experiences of his diverse, urban environment upbringing.

This project is intended to contribute to the overall body of wind band literature, specifically the body of wind band literature composed by underrepresented composers. There has been a lack of representation of African American composers throughout the …

Emily Somebody: A Chamber Opera In Three Acts, Rodrigo Afonso Salles Camargo

LSU Master's Theses

Emily Somebody is a chamber opera in three acts that tells the story of the friendship between the American poet Emily Dickinson and the man that would become her first editor, Mr. Thomas Higginson. This story, for me, is ultimately about a poet (or an artist) in the process of finding not only her own voice but also discovering what poetry and art mean to her, in the most genuine way, and standing up for these beliefs and values. All the lyrics used in this work are from Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters exchanged between her and Mr. Thomas Higginson.

A Study Of Indigenous North Vietnamese Ca Tru Music, And The Deities Of The Kalachakra Mandala, Daniel D'Aiuto Schultz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Abstract

This document is in two sections. Chapter I is a study on the history, instruments and performance of Vietnamese ca trù folk music. Indigenous Asian music, especially music from Vietnam, has held an almost mystical interest for me with its links to the doctrines of Buddhism and Hinduism. Ca trù’s singular style, always sung by women in fixed ensembles, is of particular interest because of its colorful history and unique performance practices. The ca trù music of Vietnam’s northern provinces, like much Asian folk music, is considered an endangered genre.

Sources for Ca trù insights are scarce, but some …

Creating Musical Scores Inspired By The Intersection Of Human Speech And Music Through Model-Based Cross Synthesis, William Alexander Thompson Iv

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research addresses the development of machine learning techniques used to create musical scores and performances that are inspired by the intersection of speech and music. Machine learning models are created from MIDI files that are transcribed from datasets of musical audio recordings and human speech audio recordings. Through the creation of succinct models, model based cross synthesis is possible. Models trained on musical MIDI data are asked to replicate MIDI data that approximate human speech. Alternatively, models that have been trained on MIDI data that approximate speech are asked to replicate musical MIDI data. The product of these developed …

Bassoon Concerto: Color & Light, Aaron Alonso Gonzalez

LSU Master's Theses

The Bassoon Concerto: Color & Light, is about light, color, childhood, introspection, and the sense of freedom that one may experience in the spectrum of life. The first movement is about the light in the goodness of all humanity. The second movement is about being lost in color, trying to find its path back to the light. The last movement is about finding the light again in the brushstrokes of an aurora. An aurora is a Spanish word that, according to the Royal Spanish Academy dictionary, is a rose-colored light that immediately precedes sunrise and the beginning or early stages …

New Transcription For Cello And Piano Of The “Sonata For Violin And Piano” By Uruguayan Composer Hector Tosar, Including A Performance Edition, Analysis, And Biography, Jose Pedro Romero-Ottonello

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This paper accompanies my transcription for cello and piano of Héctor Alberto Tosar Herrecart’s Sonata for Violin and Piano. It presents a brief study of Tosar's life, documenting his study with various composers in Uruguay and elsewhere, influences on his evolving compositional style, and an analysis of the sonata itself. I examine the manuscripts of other works by Tosar to provide an understanding of his musical language, including his “Serie sinfónica: en cuatro movimientos,” “Sinfonía no. 2 para orquesta de cuerdas,” “Sonatina no. 2. Solitude,” and “Salmo CII: para coro y orquesta.” The purpose of this project is to document …

A Synthesis Of Contemporary Music Composition Pedagogy Practices For The Undergraduate And Graduate Level Sequences, And An Exploration Of Time, Sound, And Space: An Aleatoric Event Score In Collaboration With The Lsu Museum Of Art, Jeremi Wayne Edwards

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two parts. The first part consists of a synthesis of contemporary music composition pedagogy practices for the undergraduate and graduate level sequences. A conversation of the study of music composition pedagogy is used to investigate current pedagogical practices in music composition and present those findings as a resource guide for new and future teachers. The second part presents an Exploration of Time, Sound, and Space, an Aleatoric Event Score Collaboration with the LSU Museum of Art. This event score is a product of the development of this dissertation commenced with a straightforward question; can we experience/consume …

Looking Down From The Top Of A Redwood Tree, Keri Pertuit

LSU Master's Theses

“Looking Down from the Top of a Redwood Tree” was a collaboration with my brother, Fabein Miguel Disedare. From the onset of this project, I reached out to him about the possibility of him creating the poetry, functioning as the lyrics of this piece. When working with Fabein, he suggested the topic of global warming, and we agreed to incorporate this theme through the telling of a story from the perspective of Redwood Tree located on the California coast. This song cycle follows the story of a family of trees inhabiting the coastline, their struggles with deforestation, their lack of …

Expansion Of The Cello Repertoire In The 21st Century: A Collaboration With Composers Paul Eddison Lewis, Thomas L. Wilson, Austin Franklin, And Alex Shanafelt And The Resulting New Compositions For Cello And Electronics - Examined And Recorded By The Performer, Eduard Teregulov

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Electroacoustic music has been one of the fastest growing genres in classical art music since the middle the twentieth century. Thanks to the pioneers of the genre such as American composer John Cage, Halim El-Dabh, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Subotnick, Iannis Xenakis, as well many others composers and enthusiasts of the twentieth and the twenty-first century the repertoire of electronic and electroacoustic music has grown tremendously withing the last hundred years. Even today it is still a growing art form as contemporary composers are working with yet to be developed and explored electroacoustic programming and equipment.

The purpose of this project …

The Rougarou Concerto And Initial Observations Of The Flex Ensemble, Thomas Wilson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the immediate impact of the coronavirus pandemic through a composer’s lens. It will examine the impact through a variety of means, considerably: interviews of those with first-hand experiences, analyses of prominent adaptable works, and self-analysis of how my own process adapted to meet the moment.

After discovering the Composers Repertoire Initiative and being commissioned to write a concerto by Eduard Teregulov, I wrote a cello concert. The central chapter features the Rougarou Concerto, a cello concerto with accompanying flex ensemble, written for Eduard Teregulov. The work was written over ten months …

Using Distributed Techology To Make Music In The Time Of The Attention Economy, Tate Carson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Sounds Aware is a mobile web app that allows users to record soundwalks and share them so that other people can experience them. The creator of the soundwalk records their perceptions of the restorativeness of a specific place on the walk, these answers are then sonified for whoever experiences the walk later to hear. Sounds Aware aims to be a social app that is restorative to our attention. It does this by encouraging experience of nature and by using decentralized technology that exists outside of the attention economy.

The attention economy is discussed as a force that exists within much …

Amour Symphony Thesis, Vanessa C. Williams

LSU Master's Theses

The word Amour means love. Amour Symphony represents God's love to me. Each movement represents growing up as a Christian under the Love of God. Amour Symphony is a four movement symphony for full orchestra. Each movement follows the traditional movements of a symphony. Movement I is Sonata Form. Movement II is Theme and Variation Form. Movement III is Minuet and Trio Form. Movement IV is Sonata Form.

Indeterminate Sample Sequencing In Virtual Reality, Chase Mitchusson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The VR Sequencer is a tool for composing and performing music which takes advantage of spatial configuration of 3-D objects to generate looping sequences. This project combines dice-rolling with omnidirectional playheads and variable terrain to make a sequencer with indeterminate features in Virtual Reality (VR). A comparison of mapping systems for music games and digital instruments demonstrates a middle ground for interactive music making which the VR Sequencer applies. An inspection of current VR works exhibits a disconnect be- tween VR gamers and experimental musicians. In an attempt to give the gaming community access to experimental music making, the VR …

Bendit_I/O: A System For Extending Mediated And Networked Performance Techniques To Circuit-Bent Devices, Anthony Thomas Marasco

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Circuit bending—the act of modifying a consumer device's internal circuitry in search of new, previously-unintended responses—provides artists with a chance to subvert expectations for how a certain piece of hardware should be utilized, asking them to view everyday objects as complex electronic instruments. Along with the ability to create avant-garde instruments from unique and nostalgic sound sources, the practice of circuit bending serves as a methodology for exploring the histories of discarded objects through activism, democratization, and creative resurrection. While a rich history of circuit bending continues to inspire artists today, the recent advent of smart musical instruments and the …

The Seven Valleys For Orchestra And A Study Of Music Composition Pedagogy, Niloufar Iravani

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two parts. The first part consists of an original orchestral work, The Seven Valleys, featuring seven movements, each of which presents various musical elements. The piece is a symphonic poem inspired by a chapter with the same name in the celebrated masterpiece of Persian literature, The Conference of the Birds, by the 12^th-century poet Farid ud-Din Attar. The second part presents a study of music composition pedagogy, investigating past and present pedagogical practices in music composition. Chapter 3 provides a conceptual and historical examination of music composition pedagogy. Chapter 4 surveys the …

String Quartet No. 1 "Lanterns", Austin A. Franklin

LSU Master's Theses

String Quartet No. 1 “Lanterns” was inspired by a poem written by the American poet, novelist,

and short story writer Stephen Crane entitled “Each Small Gleam was a Voice”. In my

interpretation, this poem creates a world in which sight and sound are intrinsically linked,

connected by our inability to perceive either independently from the other. Throughout the

poem, Crane continuously creates a world in which sounds are only capable of being described

through the use of color. One line in particular, “Little songs of carmine, violet, green, gold.”, is

repeated several times throughout the poem. In “Lanterns” each of …

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 …

Symphony No.2 And The Text Setting Of Henry Purcell's Dido And Aeneas, Sungho Kim

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This work is conceived as a unit that has two parts. Part one is an original composition, Symphony No. 2. This piece is scored for symphony orchestra and it is a sequel of the composer’s master thesis, a symphonic poem titled Moonlight Sprite, which describes the various landscapes of imaginary sprites in nature. The compositional techniques include whole tone scale, octatonic scale, pentatonic scale, atonality, bitonality, polytonality, tone clusters, and minimalism. The piece’s orchestration style and techniques are mainly influenced by Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, Webern, Penderecki, Charles Ives, and Dinos Constantinides.

Part two is an analysis of the text …

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 …

Concerto For Violin And Orchestra And "Nevertheless, She Composed: A Contemporary Survey Of Women Composers Of The Twenty-First Century", Elizabeth Anne Knox

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two parts: the first part includes an original composition titled, “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.” This twenty-minute work is composed for traditional orchestral instrumentation and solo violin. Motivic variation is the primary focus of this piece with a goal to show evidence of a thorough understanding and use of this technique. In music composition, variation is a technique achieved by restating musical material in an altered form. Schoenberg describes a motive as, “a unit which contains one or more features of interval and rhythm [whose] presence is maintained in constant use throughout a piece.” Therefore, motivic …

Increasing The Inclusion Of Women Composers In The Wind Band Repertoire: Pale As Centuries By Sarah Kirkland Snider, Clifton Gerod Croomes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Women composers are underrepresented in the wind band medium. This study aims to determine the major factors for the disparity between men and women composers. I’ve transcribed a contemporary chamber music piece, Pale As Centuries by Sarah Kirkland Snider, for the wind band. Expanding on Snider’s existing work for chamber ensemble I will explore her compositional style and reinterpret the piece using the colors of the wind band.

A review of the literature focuses on trends within western music in the United States over the last century and establishes a documented history of institutionalized marginalization. In an interview with Snider …

Phoenix For Orchestra, Niloufar Iravani

LSU Master's Theses

Phoenix for Orchestra consists of three movements of Life, Death, and Rebirth each presenting specific thematic and rhythmic elements. A variety of modes and textures are presented to depict mythology of the legendary bird phoenix as a tone poem. The first movement, Life, comprises five sections labeled as Sky, Sun, Beauty, Dignity, and Immortality. Each section features specific motives, structures, and textures. The second movement, Death, consists of three sections labeled as Fire, Destruction, and Grief and is based on the twelve-tone and whole tone collections. The third movement, Rebirth, comprises three sections labeled as Transformation, Renewal, and Immortality. The …

Analysis And Utilization Of Hip-Hop Techniques In Classical Music, William Francis Montgomery

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

As of January 4^th, 2018, R&B/Hip-Hop (including rap) had overtaken rock and roll as the most popular genre among music fans. Nielsen Music reported that rap had surpassed rock in terms of total consumption with rappers such as Drake and Kendrick Lamar leading the charge. This would lead to the second-highest growth of any genre of music, spiking at 25% over the previous year.[1] This came as a very big surprise to many, especially when we take into consideration the rocky at best relationship that rap has had with public perception.

There are many misconceptions and …

Designing And Composing For Interdependent Collaborative Performance With Physics-Based Virtual Instruments, Eric Sheffield

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Interdependent collaboration is a system of live musical performance in which performers can directly manipulate each other’s musical outcomes. While most collaborative musical systems implement electronic communication channels between players that allow for parameter mappings, remote transmissions of actions and intentions, or exchanges of musical fragments, they interrupt the energy continuum between gesture and sound, breaking our cognitive representation of gesture to sound dynamics.

Physics-based virtual instruments allow for acoustically and physically plausible behaviors that are related to (and can be extended beyond) our experience of the physical world. They inherently maintain and respect a representation of the gesture to …

Mobile Music Development Tools For Creative Coders, Daniel Stuart Holmes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project is a body of work that facilitates the creation of musical mobile artworks. The project includes a code toolkit that enhances and simplifies the development of mobile music iOS applications, a flexible notation system designed for mobile musical interactions, and example apps and scored compositions to demonstrate the toolkit and notation system.

The code library is designed to simplify the technical aspect of user-centered design and development with a more direct connection between concept and deliverable. This sim- plification addresses learning problems (such as motivation, self-efficacy, and self-perceived understanding) by bridging the gap between idea and functional prototype …

Music Reading For Everybody: Notation For Laptop Music Making, Kathleen Alyse Winn

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to document the creation of a new music notation called KeyMusic for the ASCII/QWERTY keyboard on any computer platform. This notation is designed to enable those without musical training the ability to participate in music making. Creation of the notation is traced from its conception to the application of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) usability criteria to establish its efficacy for users. All of the pieces notated in this format so far, are transcriptions from traditional folk song and arrangements of classical melodies. The development of a chromatic, polytonal, multitimbral laptop instrument which is designed …