Music Commons^™

Triadic Music In Twentieth-Century Russia, Christopher Mark Segall

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Twentieth-century Russian music exhibits a diversity of approaches to triadic composition. Triads appear in harmonic contexts that range from tonal to atonal, as well as in referential contexts where triadic music evokes historical styles. Theorists in Russia have approached this repertoire from perspectives that differ from those of their English-speaking counterparts, but because little Russian theory has been reliably translated into English, the work remains largely unknown. This dissertation explores three case studies dealing with the treatment of triads in contrapuntal, functionally harmonic, and atonal contexts respectively, drawing on untranslated (or in one case, poorly translated) writings from twentieth-century Russian …

Twelve-Tone Cartography: Space, Chains, And Intimations Of "Tonal" Form In Anton Webern’S Twelve-Tone Music, Brian Christopher Moseley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a theory and methodology for creating musical spaces, or maps, to model form in Webern's twelve-tone compositions. These spaces are intended to function as "musical grammars," in the sense proposed by Robert Morris. And therefore, significant time is spent discussing the primary syntactic component of Webern's music, the transformation chain, and its interaction with a variety of associational features, including segmental invariance and pitch(-class) symmetry. Throughout the dissertation, these spaces function as an analytical tools in an exploration of this music's deep engagement with classical formal concepts and designs. This study includes analytical discussions of the Piano …

Music Student Shares Dream For Native Country, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Music Cultures Of Mechanical Reproduction, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Popular musics arc best understood as comprising those genres whose styles have evolved in an inextricable relation with their dissemination via the mass media and their marketing and sale on a mass-commodity basis. While much popular-music activity takes place independently of the mass media, other essential aspects of popular-music production and marketing arc inevitably inseparable from technologies of mechanical reproduction, which perforce condition aspects of music culture in general. Hence, just as one could speak of military cultures based around the stirrup, or later the firearm, or agrarian cultures based on the hoe, the ox, or the tractor, so do …

Popular Music Studies And The Problems Of Sound, Society And Method, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Building on Philip Tagg’s timely intervention (2011), I investigate four things in relation to three dominant Anglophone popular music studies journals (Popular Music and Society, Popular Music, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies): 1) what interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity means within popular music studies, with a particular focus on the sites of research and the place of ethnographic and/or anthropological approaches; 2) the extent to which popular music studies has developed canonic scholarship, and the citation tendencies present within scholarship on both Western and non-Western popular musics; 3) the motivations for two scholarly groups, Dancecult and ASARP, to breakaway from …

Dionysian Symbolism In The Music And Performance Practices Of Jimi Hendrix, Christian Botta

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Nostalgia, Marcus Potts

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Fighting For The Home Team; Music And Stadium Violence, Avital Rosen

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

What Studios Do, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

This essay is focused around a seemingly simple question – what do recording studios do? First, a clarification. I am not primarily asking “what are studios” or “what do people do in studios,” two comparatively straightforward questions that are tangentially addressed in academic and trade writing. Rather, I wish to consider some of the ways in which the studio itself shapes the kinds of social and musical performances and interactions that transpire within. I contend that studios must be understood simultaneously as acoustic environments, as meeting places, as container technologies, as a system of constraints on vision, sound and mobility, …

Negrocity: An Interview With Greg Tate, Camille Goodison

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Smithiger Teaches The Magic Of Percussion, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Bell Teaches Students Art Of Music Conducting, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Ruth Slenczynska, The Pianist Who Took Her Future In Her Hands, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Popular Music As Popular Expression In North India And The Bhojpuri Region, From Cassette Culture To Vcd Culture, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

In the 1980s the Indian popular music scene was revolutionized by the advent of audio cassettes that dramatically decentralized production and precipitated the rise of syncretic folk-pop hybrids aimed at diverse regional audiences. In the years around 2000, the new medium of the VCD, or video compact disc, came to exert a similarly prodigious impact, enabling inexpensive popular music recordings marketed to diverse audiences to have visual as well as audio components. Song picturizations came to display a variety of approaches, from low-budget Bollywood imitations to new formats evolving in response to local sensibilities. This article outlines some of these …

Grunt Work For The Avant-Garde, Andrea A. La Rose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

grunt work for the avant-garde is an original, four-movement composition for solo trombone, clarinet, violin, cello, and accordion.

Cross-Talk: A Shared Parameter Space For Gesturally Extended Human/Machine Improvisation, William Brent, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

This paper describes Cross-talk, a piece of music and performance system for two instruments augmented with infrared motion-tracking capability, and an artificial software improviser. Cross-talk was commissioned by the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College, for the 13th Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology. The work is part of an ongoing collaboration focused on developing integrated hardware and software performance systems to extend the timbral and expressive capabilities of traditional musical instruments and to generate musical structure in response to information retrieved from human performers in real-time. Artistic motivations and prior related work are presented here, along …

Politics, Improvisation, And Musicking In Frederic Rzewski's "Which Side Are You On?" From North American Ballads, Andrea A. La Rose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Discussions of the role of politics in Frederic Rzewski's music generally stop at surface elements: the title of the work, the use of a particular song, and guesses as to what left-leaning audience the piece is directed at. Similarly, discussion of the role of improvisation in Rzewski's work begins and ends simply at the mention of its existence. Using transcription and analysis of improvisations from recordings of "Which Side Are You On?" from North American Ballads combined with ideas about modeling from Christian Asplund, musicking from Christopher Small, dialogue from David Bohm, and Rzewski's own writings about music, I demonstrate …

Minear Teaches The Art Of Teaching Singing, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Wells Teaches The Music Of Business And Jazz, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

For Truckenbrod, Being A Soprano Is Hard Work, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Trajectories Of Transplants: Singing Alha, Birha, And The Ramayan In The Indic Caribbean, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Indo-Caribbean music culture includes a stratum of traditional genres derived from North India’s Bhojpuri region. This article discusses three such genres: Alhâ-singing, an archaic form of birhâ, and an antiphonal style of singing the Tulsidas Râmâyan. Despite the lack of supportive contact with the Bhojpuri region after 1917, these genres flourished until the 1960s, after which the decline of Bhojpuri as a spoken language in Trinidad and Guyana, together with the impact of modernity in general, undermined their vitality. A comparative perspective with North Indian counterparts reveals illuminating parallels and contrasts.

Aspects Of Adaptation In The Egyptian Singing Film, Margaret Jean Farrell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores aspects of adaptation in the Egyptian singing film in the period from 1932 to 1962. The primary types of adaptation examined are those that are evident in the stories the films told, the ways in which the songs functioned within the stories, and the music for which these films formed the setting. Research was conducted through the viewing of over sixty Egyptian films as well as time spent in Cairo to study Arabic language and music, and to collect primary sources in the form of films, press books, books, and periodicals.

The goal of this study is …

Four Dances; For Chamber Orchestra, Ann F. Belmont

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Three Stravinsky Analyses: Petrushka, Scene 1 (To Rehearsal No. 8); The Rake’S Progress, Act Iii, Scene 3 (“In A Foolish Dream”); Requiem Canticles, “Exaudi”, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

Most published work in our field privileges theory over analysis, with analysis acting as a subordinate testing ground and exemplification for a theory. Reversing that customary polarity, this article analyzes three works by Stravinsky (Petrushka, The Rake’s Progress, Requiem Canticles) with a relative minimum of theoretical preconceptions and with the simple aim, in David Lewin’s words, of “hearing the piece[s] better.”

The Social Life Of Musical Instruments, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Accordion Crimes, a novel by E. Annie Proulx, traces the life of and routes travelled by a green diatonic button accordion: its birth in Sicily in the workshop of “The Accordion Maker,” its numerous changes of ownership in the Americas during encounters between various immigrant communities, and its death when it finally falls into disrepair in the town of Old Glory, Minnesota. There are other accordions in the book, and many temporary human owners, but it is one particular green accordion that is the book’s protagonist. We meet and experience other characters largely through their interactions with the green accordion, …

History Of The Performance Practice Of Mozart’S Fantasie And Sonata K. 475/457, Mikako Ogata

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The pieces chosen for the discussion, the Fantasie and Sonata in C minor, K. 475/457, are especially well documented in terms of their sources: in addition to the composing autographs and the first edition, there is the so-called dedication copy, a manuscript written by a copyist that was given to Maria von Trattner, to whom the Sonata was dedicated. The discussion will include a close examination of these three primary sources, several editions published during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries (including that edited by Johann Anton André, who owned the autographs at the time), and representative recorded performances …

Al Sears' Saxophone At York Library, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Among the memorabilia in the York College Library's Music History Archive is a saxophone that was owned by the renowned Jazz musician Al Sears.

The Tardy Recognition Of J.S. Bach's Sonatas And Partitas For Violin Solo, Di Su

Publications and Research

J. S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo (BWV 1001-1006) are among the most important masterpieces in the literature of violin music. They are included in standard repertoire for serious violin students; they are frequently performed in solo recitals; they are recorded by numerous virtuosi; and they are required in major violin competitions. The vast amount of editions also indicates the importance of the works. In Edlund’s catalogue, one finds as many as seventy-seven editions ranging from Simrock (1802) to Henle (1987)

However, the Solos did not enjoy such a prominent status in Bach’s own time and even in …

Metrical Theory And Verdi's Midcentury Operas, William Rothstein

Publications and Research

Both historical and recent theories of meter have tended to assume that meter is a single phenomenon, definable in a single (though perhaps complex) way. Most U.S. theories of meter have been based on a limited repertoire: instrumental music by German composers. Examination of Verdi's mid-century operas, from Macbeth through La traviata (1846–53), suggests that different theoretical approaches may be appropriate for different repertoires. National traditions of composition, depending often on national poetic traditions, may require different ways of hearing and counting, and thus different ways of modeling meter. The metrical theories of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, David Temperley, …

Trumpet Professor Known For Giving Inspiration, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.