Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Teaching Piano To Students With Disabilties: A Collective Case Study, Anthony Tracia

Masters Theses

The purpose of this collective case study was to explore the ways in which piano teachers most effectively alter their curriculum to accommodate students with disabilities. Three piano teachers were recruited for this study and were interviewed about their education and teaching experiences. The interview questions used in this study were constructed to detail their educational background, specifically considering their background in special education, if any, and to describe specific ways in which they have accommodated students with disabilities. The questions also sought to discover how familiar they were with the resources available for accommodating students with disabilities.

The participants …

Erwin Bodky As Musicologist, Pedagogue, And Performer: A German Émigre In The United States, Andrew A. D'Antonio

Masters Theses

Before 1933, Erwin Bodky actively participated in musical life in Berlin. When he was a student, the Prussian Government had given him grants in 1920 and 1921 to study with the distinguished composers Richard Strauss and Ferruccio Busoni. His international performing career was launched when, at the last minute, Bodky was asked to replace a pianist for a performance with Wilhelm Furtwängler. When he became a professor at the Staatlich Akademie für Kirchen- und Schulmusik in Charlottenburg in 1926, he immersed himself in early music, performing on harpsichord and clavichord and founding his own collegium musicum. His publications, Der Vortrag …

Cultural Subtexts And Social Functions Of Domestic Music-Making In Jane Austen’S England, Lidia A. Chang

Masters Theses

Barring a few notable exceptions, English music between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries earns scant notice in music history textbooks, despite overwhelming evidence that England enjoyed a vibrant musical culture, especially during the Georgian era. However, I will argue that the English of this period were, in many respects, even more committed to music than their continental counterparts. The problem, for England, was not that it made no music during this period, but that it made the wrong kind of music, and enjoyed it in the wrong ways. At a time when Germanic critics like E.T.A. Hoffmann and A.B. Marx …

Parody And Satire In Hanns Eisler's Palmström And Zeitungsausschnitte, Alyssa Wells

Masters Theses

Hanns Eisler routinely expressed his discontent with the state of music and society in the late 1920s in Die Rote Fahne—an organ of the Marxist revolutionary organization, the Spartakusbund, to which he often contributed. His 1928 essay “Man baut um,” among the most notable of these writings, declares that the high expenditures in art—such as the construction of a fourteen-million Mark opera house—to be the result of capitalist greed rather than a reflection of the desire for musical performances, as had been suggested. Although the cost of the new venue is the subject in this satirical passage, this …

Discerning Harmonic Progressions In The First Movement Of Zoltán Kodály's String Quartet No. 1, Op. 2 In C Minor (1910), Martin Ross

Masters Theses

Zoltán Kodály’s String Quartet No. 1 in C Minor is one of his earliest compositions. Kodály composed this as a tonal work, emulating the style used by nineteenth century composers. Kodály creates highly polyphonic textures and a complex harmonic language within the C minor tonality. Although this piece is considered tonal, Kodály deviates from the prototypical norms of tonal composition. As in most tonal music, harmonic progressions tend to support the overall tonal syntax. This includes chords, chord progressions, and key areas.

The goal of this thesis is to categorize harmonic progressions in the first movement of Kodály’s String Quartet. …

Sound-Off! An Introduction To The Study Of American Military Marching Cadences, Travis G. Salley

Masters Theses

Cadences are call and response marching songs sung by military personnel during drill and ceremony. This music originated in the United States in 1943 and has spread to militaries across the world. It is typically heard at basic training installations where it is used to help resocialize trainees into soldiers and during unit physical training. The lyrics of cadences often engage with facts of military culture: exploring the reality of combat and military life, instilling motivation, and developing unit cohesion.

Scholarship in this field displays significant gaps when it comes to the development of the military cadence, which my thesis …

Hanns Eisler's "Das Vorbild" And The Rebuilding Of Musical Culture In The German Democratic Republic, Alyssa Wells

Masters Theses

In his essay, “Musik und Musikverständnis” (1927), Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) wrote that "the evaluation of a piece of music calls for the understanding of the elements of harmony, polyphony, and form," and that one who is not privy to this understanding will "be in the same situation as one who hears a speech in Chinese, without an understanding of Chinese.” Eisler maintained that music could be rendered intelligible through “a gradual rebuilding of musical culture.” This new musical culture, which he believed could only occur after the proletariat seized societal power from the bourgeoisie, would promote musical education and encourage …

Problem-Solving Pedagogy: A Foundation For Restructuring, Updating, And Improving Undergraduate Theory And Musicianship Curricula, Michael T. Simonelli

Masters Theses

The goal of this thesis is to provide the ideological and practical foundation for an improved approach to undergraduate theory and musicianship pedagogy. I will discuss the structure of conventional theory programs and explore problems inherent to traditional curriculum design. Problem-solving pedagogy, an approach rooted in creative composition and improvisation, will be presented as a complement to traditional theory pedagogy. Balancing problem-solving pedagogy with a more traditional pedagogical approach will provide a practical foundation for improving undergraduate theory and musicianship curricula.

Venerable Style, Form, And The Avant-Garde In Mozart’S Minor Key Piano Sonatas K. 310 And K. 457: Topic And Structure, Andrew L. Moylan

Masters Theses

Although the topoi and elements of what has been described as the “Venerable Style” (V.S.) are found in many places in Mozart’s solo keyboard sonatas, the obsessive juxtaposition of these elements against brilliant, concerted, Empfindsamer Stil, and Sturm und Drang topoi can be shown to define the first and third movements of his minor key piano sonatas K.310 and K.457. This thesis will investigate using the theoretical tools developed by a range of Topic Theory authors such as Ratner (1980,) Allanbrook (1983,) Hatten (2004,) and Monelle (2000, 2006,) a newly developed analytical concept known as topical expansion, and …

The Impact Of Rhythm And Meter On Form In Two Works By David Maslanka: Mother Earth: A Fanfare (2003) And Symphony No. 8 (2008), Renee K. Morgan

Masters Theses

For pieces that do not lend themselves to an analysis of form based completely on tonal harmony and thematic material, an analysis based on rhythm and meter can enrich the reading of a piece and prove to be a more successful endeavor for the analyst. This thesis will provide such a form analysis of Mother Earth: A Fanfare (2003) and Symphony No. 8 (2008) by David Maslanka, paying special attention to the rhythmic and metrical events in addition to shifts in theme, texture, and harmony.

Chapter 1, “Introduction,” addresses information about the composer, the need for research, and challenges that …

A Geometrical Approach To Two-Voice Transformations In The Music Of Bela Bartok, Douglas R. Abrams

Masters Theses

A new analytical tool called “voice-leading class” is introduced that can quantify on an angular scale any transformation mapping one pitch dyad onto another. This method (based on a concept put forth by Dmitri Tymoczko) can be applied to two-voice, first-species counterpoint or to single-voice motivic transformations. The music of Béla Bartók is used to demonstrate the metric because of his frequent use of inversional symmetry, which is important if the full range of the metric’s values is to be tested. Voice-leading class (VLC) analysis applied to first-species counterpoint reveals highly structured VLC frequency histograms in certain works. It also …