Music Commons^™

New Leaves On Old Trees: A Synthesis Of Early American Music Through Contemporary Composition, Leslie A. Robinson

Selected Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the hymnody and choral music of 17th, 18th, and early 19th century Protestant communities in America with the goal of creating a historically informed composition that articulates musical and theological ideas of the past with a fresh voice. It will emphasize unique characteristics of the musical communities and connections between the communities. It will also focus on two relationships within individual communities: the association between the community’s music and its texts, and the connection between its theology and musical identity. The thesis and composition should reveal an understanding of early American musical …

Hamilton Harty: Musical Polymath, By Jeremy Dibble (Review), Julian Onderdonk

Music Theory, History & Composition Faculty Publications & Performances

No abstract provided.

Blue Mountain: A Chamber Opera For Winds And Voices By Justin Dello Joio: A Unique Contribution For Wind Band Literature, Armando Saldarini

Dissertations

Blue Mountain is an opera in one act scored for four voices, and thirty-three instruments, commissioned by Det Norske Blaseensemble. Under the direction of Kenneth Jean, the premiere took place on October 8, 2007, at Kanonhalen in Oslo, Norway, as part of the Edvard Grieg Centennial celebrations and the 2007 Ultima contemporary Music Festival. The opera takes place in Troldhaugen, Norway, during the last days of Edvard Grieg’s life. Suffering from emphysema, Grieg was being treated by his doctor with morphine that created great anxiety, fear, and mental torment. A visit from his friend, Percy Grainger, gave Grieg great …

Albanian Traditional Music: A General Overview, Spiro J. Shetuni

Provost’s Spotlight on Scholarship Series

Shetuni, a native of Albania, says that the music, still an obscure subject, reflects a musical environment of both the Balkans and the Mediterranean world and is “not simply a heritage of the past, but above all, a vibrant contemporary art.” His presentation will examine the distinct musical culture of Albania, both monophonic and polyphonic, by delineating its four main musical dialects—Gheg, Tosk, Lab and Urban—along with its origins, styles and features.

Syntagma Musicum Ii: De Organographia, Parts Iii – V With Index, Michael Praetorius, Quentin Faulkner Trans. & Ed.

Zea E-Books Collection

Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) achieved distinction as a practicing musician: as organist and Kapellmeister at Wolfenbüttel, Dresden and Magdeburg, and (in his later years) by incessant travel to fulfill commissions at various central German courts. Amid his travels Praetorius found time to publish an impressive series of collections of musical compositions, in all more than a thousand works. Praetorius’s three-volume Syntagma musicum (Musical Encyclopedia) belongs to the last years of his life. Volume I, Musicae artis analecta (1614/15, in Latin), treats principles and practices of religious music, from a decidedly Lutheran perspective. Volume II, De organographia (1619, in German) deals with …

A Document In Death And Madness: A Cultural And Interdisciplinary Study Of Nineteenth-Century Art Song Settings On The Death Of Opelia, Jennifer Leigh Tipton

Dissertations

In the nineteenth century the character of Ophelia transformed from a minor role in Hamlet into one of the great muses of the Romantic period. Ophelia’s rise to an archetype of feminine madness was not a result of Shakespeare’s pen alone, but of the accumulation of interpretations of her character from actresses, artists, critics, writers, musicians, and social attitudes toward women. This paper focuses on nineteenth-century interpretations of her death, specifically art song.

A brief survey of the nineteenth-century European cultural and social climate pertaining to Ophelia is included in the paper:

*Shakespeare in France and Germany

*Nineteenth-Century Actresses in …

A Song Without Music Or Music Without Song: Noise Music And Lexington’S Modern Avant-Garde, Matthew H. Gibson

Kaleidoscope

While Lexington KY appears to be a fairly unassuming college town, it is actually a regional hub for noise, experimental, and improvisational music. This work explores the directions, motivations, and origins of Lexington’s experimental music scene through interviews with its artists, promoters, and participants. What I uncovered was a loose collective of fiercely independent artists who write their own music, create their own visual artwork, and organize their own performances in some of the most unlikely locations. These musicians and artists represent a peculiar contemporary folk art that emerges more from the psyche than the classroom and challenges all artistic …

Antiquarianism & Authority: The Period Instrument Revival Through The Lens Of Modernism, Maia W. Perez

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This thesis examines the Period Instrument Revival of early 20th century England through a lens of contemporaneous Modernist thought, specifically in how each movement addresses its conflicted relationship with the musical past. It centers on Arnold Dolmetsch, the primary instigator of the Revival, and through this exploration of his reception and his works in a Modernist context, unveils the Revival's continuous struggle to subvert Modernist societal isolation and instead actively attempt to connect with and influence both musical and larger English culture and society. Finally, it presents a case for the enduring influence of Arnold Dolmetsch not just as one …

How The Axe Falls: A Retrospective On Thirty-Five Years Of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight Performance, Linda Marie Zaerr

Accessus

This retrospective represents a new approach to using historical performance as a tool for understanding medieval narrative performance. The core of the article traces how an individual performer’s interaction with a stable medieval text both indicates directions medieval performers may have taken and suggests the limitations imposed by modern performance conventions. The discussion touches on issues of adaptation and translation, variation in troupe composition and audience, expectations of modern audiences, impact of costume choices, and limitations of audio and video recordings as documentation of live performance. Juxtaposing eight performances of a single passage clarifies how performance can transform a text, …

Antonio T. De Nicolás: Poet Of Eternal Return, Christopher Key Chapple

Research Resources

This book includes essays in honor of Professor Antonio de Nicolas.

The Preservation Of Subjectivity Through Form: The Radical Restructuring Of Disintegrated Material In The Music Of Gerald Barry, Kevin Volans And Raymond Deane., Adrian Smith

Doctoral

This thesis examines Adorno’s concept of ‘disintegrated musical material’ and applies it to the work of the Irish composers Raymond Deane (b. 1953), Gerald Barry (b. 1952) and Kevin Volans (b. 1949). Although all three of these composers have expressed firm commitments to the ideal of creating new and radical works, much of the material in their music is composed of elements abstracted from the tonal past. This feature of their work would seem contrary to the views of Adorno, who is commonly seen as advocating progressive composition using only the most advanced means. This view comes across most strongly …

"A Song Workers Everywhere Sing:" Zilphia Horton And The Creation Of Labor's Musical Canon, Chelsea Hodge

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Zilphia Horton, a college educated, middle class white woman from the rural American south, created the canon of music that would become central to the black freedom struggle in postwar America. Horton's work in the post-New Deal labor movement established the methods of incorporating protest music in movements of social justice that prevailed for the rest of the century. The work songs and hymns that she collected, arranged, notated, and published while music director at Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, TN--including "We Shall Overcome," "This Little Light of Mine," "We Shall Not Be Moved"--motivated generations of activists as they transformed …

Tunes, Textures, And Trends: The Transformation Of Johann Walther’S Geistliches Gesangbüchlein (1524, 1525, 1537, 1544, 1551), Emily Marie Solomon

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the contents of Geistliches Gesangbüchlein, a sixteenth-­‐‑ century German Lutheran hymnal by Johann Walther, published in five editions between 1524 and 1551, the contents of which were substantially augmented, particularly between the 1525 and 1537 editions. Specifically, this project focuses on the twelve hymns with multiple settings, one or more of which were published in the first two editions and replaced by one or more settings in the last three editions, while assessing the characteristics across the original and removed settings and noting discernable trends of revision employed by Walther. Observable revision trends include length increase …

Engaging With Research And Resources In Music History Courses, Jennifer Oates

Publications and Research

With the ever-expanding sea of resources available to students today, it is now more important than ever to teach students how to navigate, assess, and interpret resources. Given the ease of access to information, students tend to seek out the path of least resistance, most often a Google search and/or Wikipedia. Their unfamiliarity with print resources, such as thematic catalogues, means they are missing out on significant music scholarship that is not available online or through Google. Today’s students have grown up searching the internet. The single-search approach of a web search leaves many students confused by terms like …

Musical Rebirth In Fearless And The Truman Show, Erik Heine

Journal of Religion & Film

Films have long made use of pre-existing music, most notably by well-known composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Director Peter Weir makes use of pre-existing music in nearly all of his films. In his two films from the 1990s, Fearless and The Truman Show, Weir uses music from two living (at the time) and largely unfamiliar Polish composers, Henryk Górecki and Wojciech Kilar, to accompany the climax of each film, coinciding with the rebirth of the central characters. The films show a parallel narrative, each with minor instances of renewals, until the respective characters are reborn, accompanied by music …

A Look At The Musical And Poetical Language Of Secular Vocal Music Of The Seicento Through Selected Works By Barbara Strozzi, Kylee E. Slee

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

In this study, I seek to explore the poetical and musical language of the "cantata" genre of Baroque secular vocal music. The focus is on Italian poetry and music of the Seicento (1600s) with a particular focus on the works of Barbara Strozzi, who was a prominent female composer of the time. I will examine the poetry that Strozzi used in her compositions from a socio-historical standpoint, which will enable a better understanding of how the poetry was written and why the poetry was written in that manner. I will also examine Strozzi’s personal compositional style through the way she …

Music And Theology In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Edited By Martin V. Clarke (Review), Julian Onderdonk

Music Theory, History & Composition Faculty Publications & Performances

No abstract provided.

About This Issue, Nancy November

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

No abstract provided.

A Song Through Time: Tiger Rag And The Twentieth Century, Thomas Grady Hartsock

Music

Tiger Rag is one of the first recorded jazz works.This project investigates the initial creation of the work and follows it through five different artists in the twentieth century to explain how this piece of music has grown in it's hundred years of life.

On Constructing A Sonic Gangbang: System And Subversion In Gerald Barry’S Chevaux-De-Frise, Mark Fitzgerald

Articles

This paper examines Chevaux-de-frise by Gerald Barry. The work is from a transitional period in Barry's work forming a bridge between the work of the 1980s (most notably The Intelligence Park) and the more polyphonic work of the 1990s. The paper describes Barry's use of canonic devices and his manipulation of found material before making some brief links to later works from Barry's output.

My Mla At 20, Lisa Rae Philpott

Western Libraries Publications

Highlights of my 20th MLA conference - the 83rd Music Library Association meeting, held in Atlanta, Georgia, Feb-Mar 2014. Sessions I attended included: Stanford University's re-design of their music library website; representation of women scholars in musicological publications (Suzanne Moulton-Gertig); research into women collectors of Irish traditional music (Margaret Erickson); "What NOT to Wear: MLA Interview Edition" (Mistie Shaw, Susannah Cleveland, Mark Puente); RDA and Public Services (Elizabeth Hill Cribbs, Sonia Archer-Capuzzo, Patricia Falk) and Stop Reinventing the Wheel: An Online Repository for Music Information Literacy (Andi Beckendorf, Sara J. Beutter Manus, Clayton Crenshaw, Brian McMillan, Nancy Zavac)

Theodore Thomas: Building American Orchestras And Choirs, David P. Devenney

Applied Music Faculty Publications & Performances

No abstract provided.

Folk Influences Of Aaron Copland And Britten, Tyler Krug

Theses and Dissertations

In the more recent past, nationalism, or a pride in one's country, has been the dominating factor for much of the world's historical events. Wars have been propagandized, countries have been fundamentally built, destroyed and reinvigorated, and for better or worse, this principle influences one's beliefs today as one's knowledge of the world expands in conjunction with technology. Folk music has always been a form of national pride and has been used as an exploit for the reasons listed above; therefore composers have maintained an interest in a national sound. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, composers began to use …

Patronage: The Renaissance And Today, Thomas E. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Patronage, as it will be discussed in this context, is the "money and support...given to an artist, organization, etc." (Merriam-Webster.com). The word itself comes from "patronus" in the Latin language, meaning "defender, protector...advocate" (Harper, Online Etymology). The concept of patronage existed long before the Renaissance (14th - 17th centuries), but did not come into the forefront in terms of artistic support until the 1300s. There is no specific, definite date to the start of patronage. In fact, it could be said that a hired person working to complete a singular product is being patronized, meaning that this occurred much earlier …

Exploring The Mediality Of Live And Studio Composition: The Case Of Computer Music, And Its Implications In “Ambivalence Of Density”, Michael Terren

Theses : Honours

This dissertation attempts to apply the communications theory concept of “mediality,” as described by Jonathan Sterne, to the context of music composition for different mediums, namely the media of the live performance and the studio work (the recording, the concrete work). Mediality denotes the complex “web of practice and reference” between different media—how we interact with and perceive media, and how this affects the content of the medium. The mediality of live and studio composition is posited as cross-referential, non-hierarchical and non-dichotomous—a relationship of “dependence and imbrication” rather than antagonistic binaries.

I investigate the mediality of live and studio composition …

About This Issue, Michael E. Ruhling

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

No abstract provided.

From Piano Girl To Professional: The Changing Form Of Music Instruction At The Nashville Female Academy, Ward’S Seminary For Young Ladies, And The Ward-Belmont School, 1816-1920, Erica J. Rumbley

Theses and Dissertations--Music

During the nineteenth century middle and upper-class women in Nashville and the surrounding region occupied a clearly defined place within society, and their social and academic education was designed to prepare them for that place. Even as female education gradually became more progressive in the later nineteenth-century, its scope was still limited by gender roles and expectations. Parents wanted their daughters to learn proper social graces, and “ornamental” studies such as music, needlework, and painting were a large part of their education. As the nineteenth gave way to the early twentieth-century, the focus of women’s education began to shift, with …

Re-Thinking Paris At The Fin-De-Siècle: A New Vision Of Parisian Musical Culture From The Perspective Of Gabriel Astruc (1854-1938), Cesar A. Leal

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Gabriel Astruc (1864-1938), a French impresario of Jewish background, is mostly known for his collaborative work as an impresario with Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. His role within Parisian musical culture at the fin de siècle, however, was much broader. He was a critic, creator of a leading periodical, producer of musical and circus events, music publisher, and associate of many important cultural figures of his day. Although Astruc has been mentioned in scholarly literature, his multifaceted activities have never been carefully studied.

Following the revisionist initiatives of previous scholars (e.g., Pasler, Huebner, Garafola, Fauser), this project offers …

Zilphia Horton, A Voice For Change, Alicia R. Massie-Legg

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This dissertation examines the role of Zilphia Horton (1910-1956) in helping to establish the use of music as a powerful tool to unify and train groups involved in social reform at seminars led by Highlander Folk School. In engaging in what has been termed the “mobilization of music,” Mrs. Horton was active in labor disputes, training seminars in the United States and Canada, and the formation of women’s union auxiliaries from 1935 until 1956. The study uses correspondence written by Horton to her husband, Myles Horton; business letters to labor union officials and contributors to songsters; and writings revealing her …

The Art Song Of Edmundo Villani-Côrtes: A Performance Guide Of Selected Works, Irailda Eneli Barros Silva Rodrigues

Theses and Dissertations--Music

The purpose of this study is to present a performance guide for singers on twelve selected songs in Brazilian Portuguese for voice and piano by Brazilian composer, pianist, and arranger Edmundo Villani-Côrtes (b.1930). Since 1949, Villani-Côrtes has been active in the musical scene of Brazil. He has a unique compositional style that seamlessly combines elements of both art music and popular music. Villani-Côrtes’s body of works includes over two hundred compositions for solo instrumental music, orchestral music, choral music, and art song. He has written over sixty songs in Brazilian Portuguese, including the Ciclo Cecília Meireles (1987), winner of the …