Music Commons^™

Who Is Allowed To Compose Catholic Church Music? Ferdinand Hiller's Insightful Report On The Sacred-Music Competition In Louvain (1866), Jürgen Thym, Ralph P. Locke

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

In 1866, a competition was held in Louvain (Belgium) for a new setting of the Latin Mass text; the aim was that the winning piece be accessible in style and require only choir and organ. The jury included, among others, the composers Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, and Ferdinand Hiller; the lexicographer Fétis; and Joseph d’Ortigue, music critic for the Journal des débats, editor of Le Ménestrel, and a prominent advocate for the regeneration of Catholic church music.

In 1880, Hiller—longtime director of the Cologne Conservatory—published an essay describing the competition in detail. His essay, never before translated or discussed, forms …

Old Becoming New Again: A Form-Function And Narrative Analysis Of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 'Fantasia On A Theme Of Thomas Tallis', Aileen E. Sager

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ralph Vaughan Williams, a leading figure in the early twentieth-century movement to preserve traditional English music, composed Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis as a tribute to his love of Tudor music and English folksong. The piece is based on a psalm setting by Thomas Tallis, known as the Third Mode Melody, which features the Phrygian mode. Vaughan Williams discovered this theme while researching for the new English Hymnal. A brief history of the Tallis theme, along with an exploration of Vaughan Williams' education and early endeavors as a composer, are critical to understanding the Fantasia's historical …

Soundscapes Of The Pillow Book: Creating Music Exploring Pamela Z'S Sonic Landscapes, Asuka Kakitani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pamela Z stands as a pioneering force in contemporary music, seamlessly integrating her roles as a composer, performer, and media artist. Renowned for her innovative approach, she masterfully combines her voice with live electronic processing, sampled sounds, and video elements, crafting a distinctive musical landscape that embodies the forefront of artistic exploration in our time. The primary aim of this thesis is to create “The Pillow Book,” a new musical work inspired by Z's creative process and methods. This work will also incorporate elements of my native language and ancient Japanese text from The Pillow Book, written in 1002 …

Sing A New Song: Analyzing A Cappella Arrangements Of Contemporary Worship Music, Ashley S. Cox

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Music is indispensable to Christian worship services, and pop/rock-influenced contemporary worship music (CWM) serves an important role in modern worship. This thesis explores strategies for arranging CWM for a cappella settings by comparing the originals with two a cappella arrangements: one intended for group performance and the other for congregational worship. This will be accomplished through examining the following five songs: “Hymn of Heaven,” “Raise a Hallelujah,” “Build Your Kingdom Here,” “Psalm 34 (Taste and See),” and “Battle Belongs.” Analysis of elements such as form, texture, harmony, and rhythm reveals many arranging techniques. The songs are categorized by the level …

Letters Between Lovers: A Wartime Woe A Romantic Seven Scene Dance, Rachel Gruszecki

Graduate Thesis Collection

Letters Between Lovers: A Wartime Woe is a ballet that tells the tragic tale of Genevieve and Raymond. Once childhood best friends, their bond grew into a romance that is quickly ripped apart when Raymond is drafted into World War II. Genevieve must fight for her love of Raymond, as well as within the war itself to get him back. This ballet instrumentation features a brass quintet, strings, piano, and various percussion.

Digital Synthesis And Music Making : A Comprovisational Approach To Music Making Through Digital Synthesis And Sound Manipulation, Joshua Cusack

Postgraduate

This exegesis documents my practice and process through the development and production of three albums of electronic music. Employing a methodology where the exploration of sound design drives the music making process. I used experimental music making approaches and “practice-led research” methodologies to make these creative works (Smith & Dean, 2009, p. 5). Through the exploration of the sound design process, I developed a methodology that enables the creation of musical material to serve as the foundation for the pieces I produced. Exploring iterative processes in music making, I employed a “Comprovisational” approach (Dale, 2008, p.5). Listening while recording, I …

Elevator Music., Lillian Caroline Reed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A spy, doctor, engineer, and businessman find themselves trapped in a malfunctioning elevator in a contemporary, humorous take on Sartre's No Exit. Are these four, who come to despise each other, gathered here by chance? Is this eternal elevator ride some sort of divine punishment?

Is this hell?

How Schubert’S 9th Symphony (“The Great”) Serves As A Turning Point For The Orchestral Trombone, Tim Mccord

Bakerman Student Research Awards

No abstract provided.

Condemned To Affliction, Cameron Hachigian

Honors Theses

Hello, all. I'd like to thank you all for coming. Your attendance means a lot to me. First, I would like to thank my family and friends for their constant support. And I would like to give a huge thank you to all of my teachers and mentors. For without you, my musical journey never would have flourished.

This concert that you are about to witness is my senior recital. It is a culmination of my best works. I have toiled hard for many years to create music that I deem suitable for public consumption and it has finally come …

Looping: The Music Of Steve Reich, Ty D. Ellender

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Steve Reich, a New York-based composer and percussionist, was best known for his innovative compositional techniques during the minimalist era. Early in his career, Reich began manipulating recorded tape by splicing it into small repetitive loops and playing the tapes simultaneously. Through this process, Reich discovered a musical phenomenon known as phasing, ultimately creating pieces such as It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). Phasing is a process in which two identical melodic and/or rhythmic patterns gradually change their relationship to one another throughout the course of a work. As the piece progresses, new melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic …

From The Earth, Ezra Welborn

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

Composer’s Note

This original musical piece was created as part of Water Stories: A River Harvest, under faculty direction of Dr. McCluskey and Dr. Leverette Hall, which utilizes key elements of storytelling blended with environmental justice. One main visionary facet is how the arts and water connect people and link communities, specifically along the Ribault River. To ensure alignment, style preferences, sound movements, tone, and timbre were discussed with Dr. McCluskey and choreographer Rayanna Campbell. After on-site visits to Ribault River Preserve Park and Eartha’s Farm and Market, this musical soundscape was produced, which serves the Water Stories vision and …

Songs For Dead Sailors, Toby Wren

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

Songs for Dead Sailors is a psychological exploration of love and loss in the era of tall ships; a song cycle about leaving a home and loved ones, to journey with no promise of a return. The work was scored for a sextet of improvising musicians and reflects my interest in the creative process and my experiences teaching creative practice research. I consider my personal musical language to be a kind of novel amalgam of my influences, and so from the start I conducted a kind of archeology of influences, documenting my own musical choices in relation to the works …

String Quartet, Scott A. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This quartet begins by providing glimpses of three distinct musical ideas. Although they seem totally unrelated, the music seeks to confound this initial expectation. Related textural contrasts are developed between dialogical textures and the quartet speaking as one voice. The pitch material combines just intonation with twelve tone equal temperament.

Musical Semiotics In Kate Soper’S Ipsa Dixit (2010–2016), Scott A. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the six parts of Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit (2010–2016). While individual parts have received some music theoretical attention, this is the first analysis of the entire Pulitzer Prize-nominated work. Ambiguity and contingency are major themes of Ipsa Dixit, and by treating each part independently and in combination, I hope to honor Ipsa’s contingent status as a unified work comprised of six complete works. Soper’s libretto unifies an assemblage of texts with adaptations of Aristotle to investigate the intersections of language and music with authority, veracity, and (un)intelligibility.

I theorize that Soper’s “philosophy-opera” dramatizes the formation of …

Mus101.2 Write A Song Example 1, Sae University College

Exemplars

This project was a collaborative songwriting project.

A Transcription For Piccolo Trumpet With Historical Context And Methodology: Oboe Quartet Kv 370/368b By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Christopher Massa

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This document explores the challenges of transcribing Mozart's Oboe Quartet for piccolo trumpet, emphasizing performance practices. Both oboe and trumpet navigate mid-high to high ranges with fluidity, underscoring the importance of mastering flexibility through study and practice. This document examines the process of transcription by comparing other successful transcriptions.Achieving balance among instruments is crucial due to the piccolo trumpet's volume compared to the oboe or violin. Careful dynamics adjustment ensures harmonious blending within the ensemble, allowing each instrument to shine without overpowering the others. Breath management poses another significant challenge, and while similarities between oboe and piccolo trumpet breath control …

Australian/Japanese Electropunk S.F.D.U. 11 Singles & Album, Guy A. Cooper, Jake A. Morton

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This creative work is a self-produced Electropunk album by Guy Cooper and bandmate Jake Morton, created for the band Super Fun Down Under (S.F.D.U.). Written, performed (vocals, guitar, drums, bass, synth), produced, mixed, and mastered independently, the 11-track release is an exploration of genre fusion—melding the raw, political aggression of punk with the synthetic textures and structures of electronic music. The project examines how these two sonic worlds can be merged to create a high-energy, confrontational, and culturally resonant sound that retains the DIY ethos of punk while embracing modern production tools.

A core focus of the album is the …

Chinese Calligraphic Dance (Ccd) And Generative Arts: Phantom Of Utopia, Ka Hei Cheng

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The intricate elements embedded in the pictorial, ideological, and semantic facets of Chinese characters find their origin in simple calligraphic gestures. This generative arts research and creative work elevates traditional two-dimensional Chinese calligraphy into a multidimensional realm in extended reality (XR) by translating it into a three-dimensional dance movement, integrating music and visual media. This transformation is achieved by decomposing the words into gestures and somaesthetic
movement/interaction, encoding the collective bodily expressions into a manifestation termed Chinese Calligraphic Dance (CCD). Within this dance form, the fusion of categorized and uncategorized gestures/movements is sonified through a motion tracking system, giving rise …

Hymns Of Babel: A Song Cycle Fmus Composition Project, Reed Spencer, Steven Day

Lux et Fides: A Journal for Undergraduate Christian Scholars

Hymns of Babel Research Brief

Over the course of the eight-week faculty mentorship undergraduate scholarship period, Dr. Reed Spencer and senior Steven Day composed a twelve-song cycle on the theme of Generation Z’s interaction with social media. This piece sought to articulate the thoughts, emotions, responses, and impulses that accompany the virtual world. Many of the songs explored where we find God in our social media age, as well as how we create gods, try to act as a god, and pretend there is no God. The collaborative process began by creating a rough lyrical structure and purpose, followed by …

Asmrtistry In Immersive Sound: Investigating The Effectiveness Of Immersive Sound Technologies In Eliciting Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, Scott D. Nelson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Despite a wide array of immersive sound technologies available to digital media creators who specialize in making audio-visual content that aims to elicit Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), only a few sound reproduction modalities are widely used: mono/stereo and binaural recording. To date, nearly all research studying ASMR, a bio-sensory phenomenon wherein people feel brain tingles triggered by calming audio-visual cues, has been content to carry out ASMR studies entirely with stereo and binaural sound reproduction methods. Therefore, it stands to reason that more understanding about how diverse immersive sound modalities like wave field synthesis, or three-dimensional spatial audio for …

Some (Deliberately Un)Answered Questions.., Colin N. Webber Dr

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

The presentation explores the use of artificial intelligence singing software in the compositional exploration of spiritual concepts. Synthesiser V is used as a "virtual singer" throughout the composition. This technology represents a shift in resources akin to the availability of sampled orchestral instruments, with the added factors of presenting the "composer's voice". This is significant as the author is autistic and has alexithymia, so the questions around the link between the compiser's emotion and the expression of a synthetic voice are relevant.

Music Creation: A Look Into The Process And Products Of Organizing And Performing A Concert Of Arrangements And Original Musical Works, Cameron Beers

Honors Projects

As a composer, arranger, audio engineer, and musician, I have created many works in my time at SPU. These works have been showcased and performed at a concert in SPU’s own Nickerson Studios, in a joint composition recital with Emily Abshere. The process of putting this concert together was long and complicated, and is detailed in this paper, along with my own artist statement and other details about the concert. Most importantly, the works I have written and arranged for this concert are also included.

Teaching Double Bass Through Lost Traditions Of The 18th Century, Tina Battaglia

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Through learning how to improvise entire compositions from unfigured bass using stock classical schemata, this paper seeks to bring awareness to the technical and musical benefits of translating 18th century compositional keyboard etudes called partimenti into double bass etudes.

Arranging, Teaching And Performing The Cypriot Folk Song, Αχερόμπασμαν (Aherombasman), Georgia Orfanides

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

This paper documents my process of arranging, teaching, and conducting the Cypriot folk song, Αχερόμπασμαν (Aherombasman) to JMU’s Treble Chamber Choir. I am Cypriot-American and I wanted to create an accessible arrangement of a Cypriot folk tune in order to introduce the musical culture and language of Cyprus to a Western audience. The first section of this paper provides a brief history of the cultural and political influences on Cyprus, and an introduction to common practices in the Cypriot folk tradition. The second section details the process of transcribing the original tune from Alkinoos Ioannides’ arrangement, creating the final arrangement …

Making Old Things New Again: The Northridge Psalter, With Antiphons Based On Lessons From The Revised Common Lectionary, Bryan Scott Page

Doctor of Pastoral Music Projects and Theses

Responsive psalmody is one of the primary musical vehicles for presenting the Psalms in worship by choir and congregation. Existing responsive psalmody features congregational antiphons with texts derived directly from the psalms. Working with the Revised Common Lectionary, this thesis presents fifty newly written and composed antiphons with texts derived from the accompanying RCL lessons. The goal of this method is to emphasize prophetic connections between the Old Testament lesson and Gospel lesson via the antiphons. This thesis also features a history of lectionary development, a detailed account of the creative process, rubrics for presenting the responsive psalmody in worship, …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Impressionism In The Hands Of Griffes, Bauer, And Howe, And The Musical Climate In Early 20th-Century America, Elaine Sara Lim

Dissertations, 2020-current

American composers Charles Griffes (1884-1920), Marion Bauer (1882-1955), and Mary Howe (1882-1964) are considered “Impressionist” composers by some scholars. This document will explore selected piano works of each composer to determine the extent to which impressionistic traits are present. Topics such as tonality, harmony, texture, and individual style will be examined, as well as the significant relationship between music and poetry. American Impressionism was short-lived but served as a link to Modernism, as all three composers eventually experimented with other styles. Early 20th-century American audiences, accustomed to the influx of European artists and music, were slow to embrace the new …

Apple Of My Eye, Lili Tobias

Theses and Dissertations

In a near-future defined by climate change, apples have been driven extinct by a blight. Now, a biologist has engineered them back to life, and the opera centers on a mother and child waiting on line to obtain one of the first new apples.

Ākāśā, Ramya Thiyagarajan

Theses and Dissertations

Program Notes

Ākāśā represents the subtlest form of matter and is often described as the infinite space in which all other elements exist, akin to a canvas upon which the universe is painted. From this primordial element emerges all vibrations that become Sound.

While waiting in line at a Shiva temple in South India, I was struck by the multitude of sounds filling the vast space. Percussion instruments played different rhythms in front of different deities, there was a melodic reed instrument, chants, singing and bells. Voices of people conversing intertwined with this musical tapestry. As the busy soundscape intensified, …

Just Save Me, Terrence Mcmanus

Theses and Dissertations

Just Save Me is a work that deals with tremendous personal struggle. The piece was written primarily in May of 2022, with revisions taking place in the months after. Just Save Me utilizes a complex formal structure, improvisation, and incorporates elements of jazz, rock, and minimalism.