Music As A Tool For Ecstatic Space Design, Pranav Amin

Masters Theses

Music and architecture share a sacred bond across cultures. Their histories intertwine and together, they shape ritualistic, religious, and popular practices. As one of the few remaining avenues of universal transcendental experiences that have been so integral to humans, music’s ability to create ecstatic spaces is ever more necessary for the modern human. This thesis uses spatial, artificial intelligence, visual, and aural tools—while engaging in a dialogue between rationalist architecture and shamanic conceptions of spaces—to create an ecstatic space that seeks to reimagine the union of music and architecture. It reveals new ways in which this union can be experienced …

Feeling Uneasy On Easy Street: Decoloniality, Mental Health, And Social Culture Within A University Department Of Music, Ucee-Uchenna L. Nwachukwu

Masters Theses

As a graduate student in a university music department, I have devoted a lot of time to working in associated yet also disparate realms: as a performer, a Teacher's Assistant, and a student. During this time, I have also begun conducting research examining the music department’s social culture. I have observed my colleagues– meaning my fellow graduate students–sacrificing their mental health, physical health, and emotional wellbeing in order to meet ambiguous expectations that I will argue are often rooted in the coloniality of Western Art Music. I have observed and experienced conversations that neglect to acknowledge the ways in which …

"Voices In My Head:" Representations Of Mental Illness In Contemporary American Musical Theater, Mckay Perry

Masters Theses

In the years since 2010, themes of mental illness on the musical theater stage have increased dramatically, most notably with the Broadway premiere of Dear Evan Hansen in 2016, which quickly became a popular and critical success, winning six Tony Awards the following season. Despite scope and reach of the modern American musical, relatively little musicological scholarship has explored this area, and of that literature, even less has examined contemporary musicals. In this thesis, I will begin to fill this gap in the literature through the application of emerging critical musicological lenses to modern musical theater, both on and off …

Form In The Preludes Of J.S. Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, Daniel E. Prindle

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the forms of the preludes in J.S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. The prelude originated as an improvised genre in the mid-fifteenth century. Treatises of the period gave instruction on how to improvise and eventually compose preludes and that tradition informed Bach’s compositional practice. However, an additional genre, the invention, played a similarly important role in influencing the composition of the preludes in the Well Tempered Clavier, particularly in Book II. I analyze the forms of the preludes by proposing a new method: dimensional interplay. This method examines the form of each prelude in three musical dimensions: melody, …

Lgbtq+ Safe Space And Inclusive Practices: Perspectives Of Collegiate Music Education Majors, Desmond Armentrout

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions and experiences of collegiate music education students’ perceptions and experiences in secondary U.S. music classrooms as they pertain to classroom climate, safe spaces, and academic/inclusive practices for LGBTQ+ students. Six hundred sixty-six emails were sent to music education coordinators and music department chairs inviting undergraduate music education majors to participate in the research study, which resulted in 143 participants. Findings from the study indicated that nearly two-thirds of the participants considered the secondary school music classroom a safe environment, and choice of concert uniform attire and use of personal pronouns …

Three Essays On The Political Economy Of Cultural Production And Creative Labor, Luke Pretz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the relationships between capital, cultural production, and creative labor. Essay one theorizes the basis for the intensification of pop music stardom following the introduction of on-demand streaming technology. Prior to the emergence of on-demand streaming, record labels and broadcasters had a mutualistic relationship, wherein the near cost-free music provided by record labels formed the basis for radio broadcasts, which in turn formed the basis for the consumption of that music. Following the emergence of on-demand streaming the mutualistic relationship was ruptured. Broadcasters, in the form of streaming platforms, transitioned to the cost-efficient cultivation of masses of highly …

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 …

Perspectives Of International Music Teachers In The United States, Pedro Gomes Lobato

Masters Theses

Today’s world is vastly impacted by the effects of immigration and globalization. The cultural diversity in the student population in the United States continues to grow steadily along with the immigrant population. Although there is a large body of research that is concerned with culturally responsive teaching in music education, preservice teacher preparation to address and serve diverse communities, as well as issues of recruitment of diverse educators, there is a gap in the literature when it comes to the perspectives of international music educators in the United States. Researchers have provided information on diverse student populations and resources for …

Viewing Heinrich Schenker Through The Lens Of Disability, Charles Hsueh

Masters Theses

Many scholars have discussed Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). While discourse has mainly focused on Schenkerian analysis, recent scholarship has started to examine the role of Schenker as a person (e.g., Schenker as a Jewish individual, Schenker as a racist, etc.), and how these identities influenced his views on music. Yet, within these new explorations and discussions, the aspect of disability and Schenker as an individual with a disability have not been as seriously examined. After examining his biography through the lens of disability in the introduction (Chapter 1), this thesis discusses disability's influence on Schenker through two additional …

Memory Vague: A History Of City Pop, Jeffrey Salazar

Masters Theses

This thesis gives a definition and chronology of city pop and places it within the context of Japanese history. City pop can be traced from the 1960s folk movement in Japan until its demise in the early 1990s, coinciding with the end of the bubble economy. This thesis also examines the mid-2010s resurgence of interest in city pop among English-speaking internet users, beginning with a nostalgic rediscovery and curation of city pop around the turn of the century by DJs in Japan known as “crate diggers.” City pop was then transmitted to the West through sampling in hip-hop and especially …

The Cunning Little Vixen: A Folktale Illustrated On Stage, Mikayla Reid

Masters Theses

This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Mikayla Reid to explore how color choice and application within designs can help create storybook characters off the page and onto the stage. This concept is explored through the costume designs for the opera The Cunning Little Vixen, a production theoretically staged at the Alice Busch Opera Theater for the Glimmerglass Festival in New York. The paper discusses Reid’s attempt to create designs that still feel like watercolor illustrations, even when realized in physical garments. It follows her process as she tests different dye techniques in search for what …

Imagining The Trans Symphony: Integrating Transgender Composer Identity In Music Analysis, Penrose M. Allphin

Masters Theses

Contemporary music analysts have generally downplayed the relevance of composer intent, a dismissal which ignores the potential for an enhanced expressive context afforded by composers' own assessments and also contributes to the silencing of already othered voices, such as in the case of queer and trans composers. Allowing the trans composer a voice in the reading of their work affirms the integral part of the trans experience that is self-determination. Over time, this project to tell trans stories evolved into a series of vignette-like analyses of trans composers’ works in which I use a methodology that incorporates the voices of …

The Voice Of The Other: The Influence Of Capitalism On The Representation Of Gender And Race In Western Classical Music, Marie Comuzzo

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that in order to understand the non-representation of women and BIPOC in the Western musical canon, the analysis of their cultural musical production and reception must start in early modern period, a time heavily influenced by the establishment of capitalism. Intertwining political feminist studies, critical race theory and musicology critique, I argue that the witch hunts and the inhumane colonial practices in Africa and the America (fundamental to establish capitalism as a global system), had an important role in shaping Western musical culture as homogeneous and monolithic. Thus, I first trace the change in female customs in …

War Of The Moon, Bibiana Medkova

Masters Theses

Space, in the post-World War context, was the new frontier of ‘global’ dominion. Space Race of the 1950s was a competition to signal technological capability and military strength. The objective of War of the Moon is to unpack the motivation for Moon race in 1950s. What did countries have to gain politically, economically, socially and technologically by conquering space and landing on the moon. At what cost? Who financed it, and where did the labor, land, and raw materials sourced come from. And how it was used to accomplish said landing. Space security is a massive aspect of all current …

Determination Of Biases In Sight-Singing Textbooks Published Between 1980 And 2018, Beth Huey

Doctoral Dissertations

In sight-singing classes at colleges and universities in the United States, there are various solmization methods in use, such as movable do, scale-degree numbers, and fixed do. Few sight-singing textbooks and other related books are willing to stake a claim of preference for one method over the other. Since many textbooks and other books are unwilling to take a pedagogical stance on a solmization system, instructors need to research each book in order to determine the biases in the book and how well it works for their classes. To aid them in that endeavor, this dissertation determines the …

The Reception Of Liszt’S Faust Symphony In The United States, Chloe Danitz

Masters Theses

Liszt reception has largely suffered from lack of academic research. In 2011, Michael Saffle’s initiative detailing Franz Liszt’s influence on musicians around the world spearheaded the historicization of Liszt reception. In response to his efforts, this thesis provides the first detailed documentation of the Faust Symphony’s reception in the United States. Occupying a unique approach, focusing purely on United States reception, this thesis demonstrates United States music dissemination trends and contributes to efforts creating a more global picture of Liszt and his music. Above all, the documentation of conductors, performances, broadcastings, recordings, and requests proves Liszt’s symphonic work impacted larger …

Implicit Learning As A Means Of Tonal Jazz Pitch-Listening Skills Acquisition, David Mosher

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present a method for developing tonal jazz pitch-listening skills (PLS) which is rooted in scientific experimental findings from the fields of music cognition and perception. Converging experimental evidence supports the notion that humans develop listening skills through implicit learning via immersive, statistically rich exposure to real music from a particular musical idiom, such as tonal jazz. Therefore, I recommend that to acquire tonal jazz pitch-listening skills, learners should (1) immerse themselves in the real music of that idiom, (2) remediate their listening skills, where necessary, by listening to slowed-down versions with exaggerated features, and (3) organize …

Karaoke At The Train Station, Joseph Crescente

MFA Program for Poets & Writers Masters Theses Collection

An American singing prodigy escapes to Russia following the death of his bandmate and stays after his last close relative – his mother – dies. It’s the late 1990s and he’s found a new home. After a decade in obscurity he makes a comeback by joining a Russian musical collective, but when they embark on a tour during the events in Crimea in 2014, accusations swirl about his past as a democracy promoter for a U.S.-funded NGO in Vladivostok. Condemned by the media as a spy, he’s eventually denounced by Rokko – the man who rediscovered him, mentored him, and …

Developing Musicianship And 21st Century Learning Skills Using The Lisk “Creative Director” Series, Thomas Reynolds

Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Extrinsic Phrases In Early-Classical Sonata Forms, Rebecca Long

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to introduce, identify, and document a set of syntactic insertions in sonata forms that I call extrinsic phrases. At its most basic, “extrinsic phrase” refers to any phrase-length insertion between the transition and secondary theme of a sonata-form movement. This concept encompasses several terms (or examples thereof) from current writings about sonata forms. However, unlike those terms, I purposefully define extrinsic phrases broadly so that they act as a generic option for an analyst. Instead of attempting to create a long-range view of extrinsic phrases across the whole of sonata-form writing, this initial work on extrinsic phrases …

The Experience Of Chinese Students Enrolled In Graduate Music Education Degree Programs In The United States, Kailimi Li

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the experience of Chinese graduate students enrolled in music education master’s and doctoral degree programs in the United States. Specifically, it explored participants’ perceptions of (a) their educational experiences (past and present), (b) the challenges they faced, (c) their strategies for success, (d) the benefits they experienced as international graduate students in the United State, (e) the effect of this experience on their thinking, self-perception, and behavior, and (f) how they planned to move forward or move on following this experience. Participants were six native Chinese graduate students enrolled at the time …

Motion As Music: Hypermetrical Schemas In Eighteenth-Century Contredanses, Alison N. Stevens

Masters Theses

An important part of the recent growth in scholarship on meter focuses on reconstructing 18th-century listening practices. Danuta Mirka (2009) studies contemporary accounts of meter in theory treatises to build a model of 18th-century metric listening, while Stefan Love (2016) takes a corpus studies approach, arguing that surveying repertoire provides a more accurate view of meter than 18th-century theorists. But despite the known debt that much 18th-century art music owes to dance and dance music, Mirka and Love only briefly mention dance. In touching so lightly on dance, these and other authors overlook the more fundamental connection between meter and …

Recursive Properties Of Srdc Structures In Golden Age Musical Theater Songs, Morgan Markel

Masters Theses

The srdc is a four-part phrase pattern in popular music consisting of four formal functions: statement (s), restatement (r), departure (d), and conclusion (c). In recent scholarship, the applicability and scope of the four-part pattern has been vigorously debated. The question of whether entire song forms, such as the AABA and verse–prechorus–chorus song forms, can be interpreted as large-scale SRDC patterns has become a primary topic of interest among popular music scholars. In this thesis, I seek to further the argument for the large-scale SRDC reading of the AABA song form by demonstrating the recursive potential of srdc structures in …

Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, And Censorship: Reflections On Religious And Political Radicalism In John Adams’S The Death Of Klinghoffer, Allison R. Smith

Masters Theses

The issue of anti-Semitism in John Adams’s 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, has been widely discussed by scholars such as Richard Taruskin, Robert Fink, and others. For instance, Taruskin asserts that Adams favors the Palestinians through musical grandiosity and by describing them as “men of ideals.” However, this fails to consider the possibility that Adams intended to portray an evenhanded view of diverse religious groups. Through close readings of the libretto and select numbers from Klinghoffer, such as the “Chorus of Exiled Palestinians,” the “Chorus of Exiled Jews,” and the “Aria of the Falling Body,” my thesis maintains that …

Meter In French And Italian Opera, 1809–1859, Nicholas Shea

Masters Theses

Current and historical methods of metric analysis often assume that the first beat of a metric group is stronger than the second. This, however, is not the case in all repertoires. For example, a study by William Rothstein (2011) demonstrates that Verdi’s midcentury operas often place emphasis on even-numbered beats. This paper shows this metric trend to be even more prevalent in a corpus of 208 nineteenth-century operatic excerpts, (1809-1859).

I present a formal model that classifies phrases according to anacrusis length and prosodic accent, showing where large-scale metric accents fall within a phrase. This model produces three metric types …

A Transformational Approach To Japanese Traditional Music Of The Edo Period, Kenneth J. Pasciak

Masters Theses

Analysis of sōkyoku jiuta, Japanese traditional music of the Edo period for koto and shamisen, has in the past relied primarily on static tetrachordal or hexachordal models. The present study takes a transformational approach to traditional Japanese music. Specifically, it develops a framework for six-pitch hexachordal space inspired by Steven Rings’s transformational approach to tonal music. This novel voice-leading space yields insights into intervallic structure, trichordal transposition and hexachordal voice leading and transformations of this music at both its surface and large-scale levels. A side-by-side comparison with Rings’s approach highlights differences between the hexachordal and diatonic systems.

Gender Ambivalence In Late-Renaissance Italy: The Career And Reception Of Tarquinia Molza, Kathryn Firth

Masters Theses

The role of women changed constantly during the Renaissance era. Especially notable was the evolution of the role of women within the arts, in which the female gender was becoming particularly sought after. One woman deserving of attention is poetess, philosopher, and musician Tarquinia Molza (1542-1617) who enjoyed notable success at the court of Ferrara. Molza by-passed gender conventions of the day by engaging in traditionally “masculine” activities like philosophy and “feminine” ones such as singing. While there is plentiful scholarship about Molza, no current scholarship has specifically considered how questions regarding the ambivalence of her gender affected Molza’s relationship …

Harmony, Voice Leading, And Microtonal Syntax In Ben Johnston’S String Quartet No. 5, Daniel Huey

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on a new method for examining harmony, identifying consonance and dissonance through differential tones, and describing voice leading for pieces using just intonation, in particular for Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 5 (1979). Johnston employs microtonality in nearly all of his works, which contain more than the typical twelve equal-tempered pitches in the octave. This particular quartet features a great number (over 100) of pitches within the octave as is the case with many of his pieces up to his composition of String Quartet No. 5. This complex tuning system for microtonality requires a meaningful method …

"Amazing Together": Mason Bates, Classical Music, And Neoliberal Values, Marianna Ritchey

Music & Dance Department Faculty Publication Series

We are all connected...one universe...one planet...one ecosystem...thriving as one network...working with one purpose...we are...amazing together

These sentiments, accompanied by images of dolphins, forests, cell-phone towers, and outer space, were projected onto screens encircling the Las Vegas Youth Orchestra as it performed at the 2014 partner summit of Cisco Systems, Inc., a multinational conglomerate specializing in networking technology. The music on offer was The Rise of Exotic Computing, a composition for orchestra and laptop by the 38 year old composer Mason Bates. The piece musically depicts synthetic computing, in which lines of code are replicated without human intervention. Thus, it …

Songs Of Ishq, Freedom And Rebellion: Selected Kafis Of Bulleh Shah In Translation, Zainab Sattar

Masters Theses

Abdullah Shah (1680-1757) was the birth name of the boy who would later become one of the most eminent Sufi poets of South Asia, and the master of Sufi lyrics in Punjabi—Bulleh Shah. Living during times of strife and major conflict between the Sikhs and the crumbling Mughal Empire, Bulleh Shah wrote poetry with an underlying humanist and tolerant philosophy that challenged the turmoil of his times. Blind to the bounds of religion and caste in an increasingly divided India, Bullah’s spiritual philosophy and his message of equality found voice in his kafis—a genre of poetry indigenous to the …