Music Commons^™

Towards Interaction: Combining Jazz Techniques And Idiomatic Writing For Varied Ensembles. A Collection Of Musical Works -And- An Exegesis, Glyn Alan Macdonald

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This practice-led research project has produced musical works that bring together ensembles from the Western Classical tradition that only read notation, and, jazz soloists who improvise. Three works ‘Standing Ground’, ‘The Journey’ and ‘Matt versus the Zombies’ were composed for three ensembles each with an improvising soloist. These ensembles included a British style Brass Band, Brass Quintet and a double Saxophone quartet.

The project built on the work of Andy Scott and Eddie Sauter, both of whom wrote for non-jazz ensembles and an improvising artist without including a jazz rhythm section. The accompanying non-jazz ensemble was written in such a …

Graduate Recital In Composition, Denzel Washington

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This graduate composition recital took place on 5 February 2019 at 8:00 pm in Davis Hall. The compositions on the program included: Washington Variations for Solo Violin, Utopy for Alto Saxophone and Piano, Freedom Concerto for Clarinet Quintet, and Four Songs on Liberty. This abstract will summarize the structural, rhythmic, and harmonic conception of each work.

Master's Recital In Jazz Pedagogy: A Performance-Demonstration Of Rhythm Section Instruments, Trumpet, Electric Wind Instrument, Synthesizer, Compositions, And Arrangements By Demetrio Lyle, Demetrio Lyle

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

My education at the University of Northern Iowa in the Master of Music, Jazz Pedagogy track has included two full academic years of continuous study as well as one year of independent study. During my two years in residence, I had the pleasure of experiencing an in-depth curriculum of classes, ensembles, and applied lessons, as well as opportunities to lead large and small ensembles. All of these components were designed to make me into a more effective jazz musician in the disciplines of performance, composition, arranging, and pedagogy.

The latter of these disciplines acts as the synthesis of the recital …

String Quartet In Three Movements, William R. Malchow

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Audio To Architecture: House Music As A Form Generator, Polina Timchenko

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Contemporary music undergoes similar process of creation to that of the design process through computation and variation. House music as a representation of contemporary culture has a layered structure that allows specific characteristics to identify it as house music. Song components can vary and mix in different orders that form new dynamic compositions. I am going to explore the idea that every house music component can be translated into geometry with the use of parametric design techniques.

Schulman, Steven A. (Fa 1227), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 1227. Student paper titled “The Preacher’s Just Like a Grasshopper: A Study of a Kentucky Song Maker” in which Steven Schulman details the life of Howess Dewey Winfrey, a song-maker from Cumberland County. Schulman collected folk songs and performances from Winfrey over the course of two months. His fieldwork revealed that Winfrey was a creator of satirical tunes, which were influenced by his childhood, his experiences with the Church of the Nazarene, his time spent as a logger, his relationships with family and friends, politics, and land ownership. The paper includes excerpts from …

Austin Taylor Papers, 1916, Austin Taylor

Center for Restoration Studies Archives, Manuscripts and Personal Papers Finding Aids

No abstract provided.

Weeps Happiness: The Dysfunctional Drama Of The White Album, Devin Mckinney

All Musselman Library Staff Works

With Wilde’s words in mind, listen again to the White Album, or simply its opening. About seven seconds into the first track, “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” as we hear the descent of a jet—a masterful, momentous sound, universally recognized—there’s another, much odder sound: a sound that is not monumental at all, and that no one could recognize. If you know the Beatles, you know the sound; you can hear it in your head this moment if you try. But what is it? A throat imitating a guitar? A guitar imitating a throat? It’s like something out of Spike Jones. Yet …

Destruction Du Monde, Alex Shawver

Music Theses and Dissertations

Destruction du monde is composed for a small orchestra comprised of piccolo doubling flute, flute doubling alto flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon doubling contrabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, trombone, bass trombone, tuba, piano, timpani, three percussionists, and chamber strings. The piece duration is 26 minutes. The title of the work is a play on Darius Milhaud’s ballet La Creation du monde. The instrumentation is similar to the Milhaud, the only additions being one horn, one trombone, tuba, viola in place of alto saxophone, and strings in threes rather than one per part. The form is similar only in that …

The Roles Of Academic Libraries In Shaping Music Publishing In The Digital Age, Kimmy Szeto

Publications and Research

Libraries are positioned at the nexus of creative production, music publishing, performance, and research. The academic library community has the potential to play an influential leadership role in shaping the music publishing life cycle, making scores more readily discoverable and accessible, and establishing itself as a force that empowers a wide range of creativity and scholarship. Yet the music publishing industry has been slow to capitalize on the digital market, and academic libraries have been slow to integrate electronic music scores into their collections. In this paper, I will discuss the historical, technical, and human factors that have contributed to …

Fragments D'Un Diari Musical, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Vetllada musical al pis d'Ursula Oppens. A pesar de les connotacions vuitcentistes que pugui tenir qualsevol saló musical, Ursula no és ni una Guermantes ni una Verdurin, sinó una defensora tenaç dels segles XX i XXI. Elliott Carter, John Adams, Lutoslawski, Ligetic, etc., tots els grans compositors des segles XX i XXI li han dedicat obres, i ella, amb els seus enregistraments, alguns amb nominacions als Grammys, ha estat la gran advocada del pianisme contemporani als EUA.

Complex Personalities: An Original Composition For Virtual Wind Ensemble And An Accompanying Exploration Of The Effects Of The Internet On Music Collaboration And Composition, Chris Kamerling

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the impact that the internet has had on the esprit de corps of the musical community. As a mechanism for that exploration, it also includes an original composition comprised of three character pieces. The exegesis of the piece will describe the basis of these musical representations and explore the application of the piece as a vehicle for a shared musical experience across the internet. A virtual ensemble was created by crowd-sourcing from social media. Participants played different parts that were combined by computer manipulation into a final product.

A Study On The Compositional Style Of The Flute Chamber Works Of Mel Bonis, Geraldine Margaret Padilla

Dissertations

Mélanie Hélène Bonis (1858-1937) was a female French composer born at a time when musical trends started shifting away from Romanticism. Amidst the various styles that emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, Bonis remained faithful to the practices of the Late-Romantic period. Her style, characterized by its adherence to tonality and classical forms, was considered outdated by the Parisian public and proved to be detrimental in her career. This document focuses on the four chamber works originally written for flute. Bonis’ chamber works demonstrated a composer who was willing to experiment with the modern techniques of the twentieth …

Midwestern Portrait For Chamber Jazz Ensemble And Solo Tenor Saxophone, Andrew Janak

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, Student Creative Work, and Performances

“Midwestern Portrait” for Chamber Jazz Ensemble and Solo Tenor Saxophone is an original composition consisting of three main movements, an introduction, and two interludes. The piece is written for a full ensemble of 17 musicians – one solo tenor saxophone, four woodwinds, four brass, four strings, and four rhythm section players. The “Introduction,” “Interlude 1,” and “Interlude 2” feature smaller performing forces while the three main movements (“For GK,” “The Tradition,” “The Search) are written for the full ensemble.

“Movement 1: For GK (Lincoln)” is a tribute to my time at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and showcases the solo tenor …

Songwriting, Digital Audio Workstations, And The Internet, Joe Bennett

Faculty Works

This chapter investigates the interrelationship between songwriting process and product, focusing on two digital tools that became available to songwriters toward the end of the twentieth century: the digital audio workstation (DAW) and broadband internet connectivity. Two songwriter case studies are used—a “digital immigrant” who began to write songs professionally before either of these tools were available, and a “digital native” who has always used DAWs and an internet connection in his songwriting. The participants were asked to describe their creative processes in detail, and to reflect on how these tools may have influenced their decision making and artistic direction. …

Generating Audio Using Recurrent Neural Networks, Andrew Pfalz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Long Short Term Memory cells are a type of recurrent neural network that perform well when predicting sequence data. This works presents four approaches to modeling audio data. The models are trained to predict either raw audio samples or magnitude spectrum windows based on prior input audio. In a process called sampling, the models can then be employed to generate new audio using what they learned about the data they were trained on.

Four methods for sampling are presented. The first has the model predict a vector for each vector in the input. The second has the model predict one …

Transformations Of Chant In Marcel Grandjany's Rhapsodie Pour La Harpe, Caitlin A. Thom

Celebration of Learning

Marcel Grandjany’s Rhapsodie pour la Harpe is a standard in pedal harp literature. This essay explores Grandjany’s use of the Gregorian Easter Chant Salve festa dies.

The Composer, The Musicologist, His Wife, And Her Lover: On Lacan’S Relevance To Music, Thomas Reiner

Directions of New Music

This paper asks what it is to write about music. When we ask students or colleagues to write about music are we asking them to describe music structurally, or to cope with music’s ever-shifting signifieds? The paper attempts to answer this question by clarifying the relationship between composition, musicology, and music “itself” by way of a Lacanian reading of Peter Greenaway's film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Lacan’s existential concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real are first introduced in relation to music with reference to music by Hans Werner Henze, Lady Gaga, …

"Lehadlik": Radical Jewish Music, Gender And Disidentification In Aviva Endean’S Work, Shoshana Rosenberg

Directions of New Music

This paper undertakes a hermeneutic analysis of Aviva Endean’s “Lehadlik”, exploring the complex relationship between the player, a Jewish woman living in Australia, and traditional Jewish culture and rituals. This analysis connects Endean’s work to the larger body of Radical Jewish Music, a movement which seeks to diversify and expand the meaning of contemporary Jewish music beyond the confines of Klezmer and religious hymns. The analysis includes an exploration of the relationship between Endean’s womanhood, Orthodox Jewish traditions, and women’s historical place in Judaism.

Steve Reich's ‘Music For 18 Musicians’ As A Soundscape Composition, Jesse Budel

Directions of New Music

Over the past half century, there has been much research into the acoustic qualities of soundscapes from a variety of perspectives: the humanities and social sciences as per the ‘acoustic ecology’ movement (established by Schafer, Truax, and Westerkamp et al.), and more recently the environmental science and ecology as per ‘soundscape ecology’ (established by Farina, Pijanowski, and Krause, et al.). Collectively, these disciplines provide diverse methods for engagement with analysis of acoustic environments. Simultaneous to the rise of the acoustic ecology movement in the 1970s (marked by the publication of Schafer’s ‘The Tuning of the World (1974)), the composition of …

Guitar Suite, Stephanie Boyer

Theses and Dissertations

Guitar Suite is a two movement piece composed for solo guitar. In addition to the guitar suite, an orchestral arrangement of its second movement, "Dance of the Fields," concludes this thesis, presenting the same melody in various textures.

Operabbit, Mariel C. Mayz

Theses and Dissertations

OPERAbbit takes place in an unknown country with unnamed characters who are struggling for basic necessities amongst a political, social, and economic crisis. Questions of loyalty, trust, and nationalism are brought to the foreground as our Protagonist receives an unconventional government hand-out: a bunny. This fictional story— written by the composer and her brother— is met with humor and the liveliness of Latin American culture. The underlying truth, however, is more tragic. Many countries in Latin America have faced deep political, economic, or societal problems throughout their histories. None, however, have faced them all simultaneously as the country of Venezuela …

Melting Crayons, Ho Lam Tang

Theses and Dissertations

Melting Crayons was inspired by a conversation with a clarinetist and a good friend, Jena Nahnsen, last summer in Italy. As we were waiting for our friend to finish her shopping for souvenirs next to Ponte Vecchio, Jena and I had a conversation about combining visual colors and music.

A few months go by, and Melting Crayons is created. A collection of melodies is generated using the six-digit crayon color code based on the fundamental E-flat. Using Mango Tango #e77200 as an example, the color code is a combination of letters and numbers. Letters reference for pitch, with my choice …

Two Suites For Solo Instruments, Matthew O. Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

TWO SUITES FOR SOLO INSTRUMENTS:

MA Thesis

Matthew O. Thomas, Composer

This Thesis contains two Suites for Solo Instruments: Suite Médiévale for guitar and Seven Recital Studies for Intermediate Grade for piano solo. The recital studies were conceived as a way to fill a void in music literature for beginning advanced pianists; those students not quite ready for the large works of the masters, but are seeking challenging repertoire beyond the formulaic lesson and recital books. Each of the seven is an example of a different style, form, or theoretical concept. Notes for the performer have been included with recommendations …

Missa Gloriæ Patris (Score Sample), Alexander Seefeldt

All College Thesis Program, 2016-2019

Missa Gloriæ Patris is a Latin mass setting in four movements for SATB choir and organ. The complete score is 55 pages long, and the full piece runs just over 25 minutes. Included here are first pages of each movement, as well as a companion paper, recordings of two of the pieces, and a worship aid from the premiere of the piece.

8scenes, Spencer G. Perkins

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, Student Creative Work, and Performances

This work explores the juxtaposition of a live ensemble, and pre-collected field recordings. The material for the ensemble is divided into eight sections, or “scenes,” which unfold one after the other without pause, at times blending musical material to where it is unclear when the music has transitioned to the next section. The field recordings are divided into three main sections, which are defined by the underlying loop as follows: “sunny day recording”; “people talking recording”; and “rainy day recording.” Atop these structural loops, it is the responsibility of the “electronics player” to que other recordings in a manner that …

Asylum For Mezzo-Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone, & Chamber Orchestra., Cullyn D. Murphy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1884, Daniel Paul Schreber was admitted into an asylum in an attempt to help treat his paranoid schizophrenia. He documented his time in the asylum through a memoir titled Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. His memoir noted the extremely poor living conditions and treatment of patients, while also illustrating Schreber’s slowly deteriorating mental state. Prior to his admittance, Schreber was a well respected judge in Germany and the son of a renown child psychologist. This societal decline contributed to the acceptance of these memoirs as a serious account of the events that transpired on a daily basis for mental …

The Far Green Country., Lincoln A. Sandham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work was inspired by a beautiful image from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: “And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.” ~The Return of The King, Book VI chapter 9. This imagery inspired the three movements of this work. The first, The Gray Raincurtain, depicts a violent end, the world crashing down around you. The musical material of this movement gradually …

When The Ground Shakes., James May

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the spring of 2017, I approached friend and writer Mickey Osthimer about collaborating on text for a song cycle. I was concerned about questions of identity, especially in America—why and how do certain ideologies lay “claim” to American values? Are protesters less representative of our values than police or government? More? Why do we ignore certain sub–communities, uphold others, and mourn or empathize with them accordingly? What emerged from our discussions was a series of poems and prose selections about community, identity, memory, and trauma. Some of the text deals with childhood and nostalgia, while we culled other excerpts …

Tuba Concerto In D Minor, Eric Dreggors

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Writing the Tuba Concerto in D minor was a long and tedious process that required help and inspiration from many different people. The process began with a suggestion from a friend to write a tuba concerto for him, and soon progressed into a thesis. Since only one tuba concerto exists in the standard repertoire (the concerto by Ralphe Vaughan-Williams), the challenge to create a new concerto was very powerful.

Eleven minutes long, it is much shorter than the average concerto, but only a minute or two behind the Vaughan-Williams concerto. The first movement, the Prelude, is made to sound just …