Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …