Music Commons^™

Reconsidering Organicism In Milton Babbitt's Music And Thought, Zachary Bernstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation makes two related but distinct claims. The first explores the influence of organicism, particularly in the hierarchical formulation developed by Heinrich Schenker, on Milton Babbitt's thought. This influence is shown to inform Babbitt's writings on a range of issues, guiding his analyses, his view of music cognition, and his understanding of the tonal and twelve-tone systems, including his own compositional twelve-tone techniques. Analysis of Babbitt's compositions, however, reveals several complications with the organicist model: there are a number of pieces and situations that conflict with the expectations of hierarchical organicism. As a result, this dissertation advocates for a …

The Impact Of French Opera In Nineteenth-Century New York: The New Orleans French Opera Company, 1827–1845, Jennifer C. H. Jones Wilson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the influence of French opera through the touring New Orleans French Opera Company’s summer seasons in early nineteenth-century New York City. In that burgeoning operatic environment, I provide an account of the company’s interaction with both resident and traveling opera companies, beginning with the visit of Manuel García’s company in 1825–26. The French Opera Company, which performed in 1827–33, 1843, and 1845, brought new approaches in performance practice and current opera repertoire to the New World. While Italian opera companies were sought after, I demonstrate that the works coming from Paris—either in French or in English translation—were …

"The Planet Is The Way It Is Because Of The Scheme Of Words": Sun Ra And The Performance Of Reckoning, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This constellatory essay is a study of the African American sound experimentalist, thinker and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial Sun Ra (1914-1993) through samplings of his wide, interdisciplinary archive: photographs, film excerpts, selected recordings, and various interviews and anecdotes. In composing this essay, I particularly consider how these fragments resonate against each other, offering insight into how Ra radically subverts the restraints imposed upon him as a black man in the United States and thus transfigures his racial alienness into a liberatory, literally alien performance. This self-transfiguration allows Ra to transform such impossible restraints into a condition of possibility for reckoning. I …

Siento Una Flauta: Improvisational Idiom, Style, And Performance Practice Of Charanga Flutists In New York From 1960 To 2000, Jessica Lynne Valiente

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Siento una Flauta: Improvisational Idiom, Style, and Performance Practice of Charanga Flutists in New York from 1960-2000.

The charanga, the Cuban dance music ensemble consisting of flute, strings, piano, bass, timbales, congas, and güiro, and vocals, underwent five decades of evolution in Cuba, beginning in the early 20th century. It was the breeding ground for two significant popular dance music genres, the mambo and the cha-cha-chá, before being transplanted to New York City in the mid-1950's. Charangas came to New York when the popularity of the mambo and the cha-cha-chá was well-established there. Once in New York, the charanga gave …

The Problem Of Tonal Disunity In Sergeĭ Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil, Op. 37, Olga Ellen Bakulina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent English-language scholarship has given considerable attention to the issue of tonal disunity, particularly the concepts of tonal pairing, directional tonality, and double-tonic complex. Relatively little attention, however, has been given to Russian music, specifically liturgical repertoires, where tonal centricity has historically been weaker than in most tonal music. This dissertation investigates tonal disunity in Russian sacred works, with special emphasis on Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil (1915). This work, though in many ways tonal, relies largely on the structural principles of Russian sacred repertoire, a reliance that is especially evident in movements that challenge traditional Western norms of monotonality.

The order …

The Symbiosis Between Villa-Lobos's Carnaval Das Crianças And Momoprecoce: A Comparative Study, Vanessa Rodrigues Cunha

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), one the most important figures in Brazilian music, played a crucial role in establishing nationalism in Brazil through musical explorations of the unique character of Brazilian culture. This culture, a cacophonous mix of European lineage and African and indigenous influences, is exemplified in the country's most popular and authentic celebration: the carnival. This dissertation explores Villa-Lobos's musical portrait of the carnival through analysis of Carnaval das Crianças for piano, and that work's reconfiguration as the piano fantasy Momoprecoce, focusing on a comparison of the two works to illuminate how Villa-Lobos kept the core of the original …

Music In Poetry And Poetry In Music: Tumanian's Anush, Beata Asmik Navratil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The poem Anush by the Armenian poet Hovhannes Tumanian (1869-1923) is rooted in traditional Armenian music. Tumanian's poem reflects a number of manifestations thereof: (1) It borrows in its style from Armenian lyrical songs (such as lalik and khagh), from the parerg style (the traditional dance-song), and from the voghb style (laments such as funeral laments, bayati, and tragic odes). (2) Ashug style of storytelling/singing as a main form of conveying the storyline and emotions of protagonists are present. (3) Dancing and music making during Armenian traditional rituals -- in particular, the Hambarsum celebration (Feast of Christ's Ascension), …

Musical Regularity And Rhythmic Patterns: A Quantitative Analysis Of Birdsong Structure, Eathan Ezra Janney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Birdsong is a complex, learned behavior that, like music, has meaningful units at multiple timescales. Birds perform by constructing extended presentations of their phrase repertoire. Each bird's repertoire is built from small units, such as syllables, or groups of syllables with characteristic pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Like a musician each bird has its unique structure of performance that communicates its individual identity. Also contained within a bird's performance, is information about its group identity and species identity. Like a musician's performance, a bird's singing affects the behavioral state of listeners'birds perform to attract mates and defend territory.

Subjectively, many can …

Essays In The Theory And Practice Of The Suzuki Method, Kara Eubanks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation speaks to an audience of string pedagogues inside and outside the Suzuki community to offer a richer understanding of how the Suzuki Method fits into American educational and string-pedagogical practice.

The first chapter presents a history of the Suzuki Method and the current global state of Suzuki theory and practice. This introductory chapter frames the two chapters that follow; it provides the background information necessary to understand them. The second and third chapters each address an aspect of the Suzuki Method that is widely misunderstood by the string-pedagogy community, including the Suzuki community itself. While chapters 2 and …

Ecomusicology: Back To The Roots Of Sound/Music And Environmental Sustainability, Tiffany Challe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We are currently living in the midst of a global warming crisis, and running against the clock to counter the rapid depletion of natural resources in an increasingly technology-run world. The first step toward sustainability is to care for our world that is full of vibrant ecosystems and that we must work together to preserve. While the visual arts have served as a cogent platform for the environmental movement, this paper will argue that sound and music have been vastly overlooked in sustainability topics. Place-making music can capture a place's unique spirit and connect listeners with their local ecologies. Therein …

Ragtime Then And Now: Composers And Audiences From The Ragtime Era To The Ragtime Revival, William Martin Mcnally

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The works from ragtime's revival era, including those by William Albright, William Bolcom, Eugene Kurtz, George Rochberg, and more recently Carter Pann, stand as some of the finest examples of ragtime composition. Yet these works were not generative of the ragtime age, but followed a lengthy drought of compositional interest in the ragtime style. Instead, they were the result of the amalgamation of formal and idiomatic gestures common to the ragtime style and of serious and extensive training in classical styles. In an effort to determine what distinguishes these works by the classical composers of the ragtime revival from the …

Mental Discipline And Musical Meaning, Alice Harriet Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Musical meaning, or what a musical experience communicates to a listener, is predicated on a shared habitus of listening between the musical creator (i.e., composer, performer, or improviser) and the listener. The meaning a listener takes away from a musical experience is partly dependent on the vessel transmitting it (i.e., who is performing, the quality of performance, or the visual aspects of performance), and a musical creator's actions are the result of his or her training, past experiences, enculturation, attentional focus, and bodily control in the heightened mental state in which creativity occurs. Even in traditions that consider the musician …

Twisted Blue, Jessica Rudman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Twisted Blue was written for clarinetist Dan Liptak to perform with the Hartford Independent Chamber Orchestra conducted by Erberk Eryilmaz. The title comes from the bluesy progression that forms the basis of the second movement, which was in fact composed first in a few frantic fall afternoons. The opening movement followed, and then the finale.

Common-Tone Preserving Contextual Inversions In The Music Of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Jessica Rudman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

To truly understand the melodic and harmonic structures of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's music, a transformational perspective is essential. Discussing her works in terms of motivic analysis, set theory, and other similar approaches is often illuminating but fails to account for certain types of subtle musical connections. Specifically, those methods focus on tracing particular musical objects but do not typically follow whatever characteristic processes might be applied to those objects. Transformation theory, on the other hand, focuses on that aspect and can thus reveal connections overlooked in other types of analysis.

Most of the pitch processes Zwilich employs can be described …

The Finales Of Robert Shumann's Piano Sonatas And Fantasie, Emiko Sato

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation sets out to examine the finales of Robert Schumann's Piano Sonatas (opp. 11, 14, 22 [original finale]), and Fantasie (op. 17), with an especial focus on their form, which can be broadly categorized as parallel form. The introduction examines historical criticisms of Schumann's large-scale works, pointing out some of the idiosyncratic features found in Schumann's finales. Each chapter will present a comprehensive analysis of one of the finales. I make use of color diagrams in the formal analyses, which expeditiously and efficiently elucidate the repeating patterns of thematic and transitional materials; they also visually reflect the actual …

Ecological Aspects Of The Music Of John Luther Adams, David Arie Shimoni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The composer John Luther Adams envisions his role as one who re-imagines and re-creates relationships with other human and non-human beings through music. This dissertation consists of an examination of songbirdsongs, Earth and the Great Weather, In the White Silence, Strange and Sacred Noise, The Place Where You Go to Listen, and Inuksuit to determine whether, and how, Adams succeeds in re-creating these relationships.

In the Introduction various means of connecting music and the natural world are reviewed, a semiotic and ecomusicological framework for analysis is established, and a listening typology is suggested. In the following chapters, analysis of …

La Vie Dans Les Plis, Andre Rene Bregegere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

La vie dans les plis was premiered at The Firehouse Space (Brooklyn, NY) on June 9, 2014, by violinist Karen Rostron and pianist Mirna Lekić. The piece's title is a reference to an eponimous collection of texts by Belgian author Henri Michaux. There is no direct connection between Michaux's text and the structure of the piece. This choice of title, in addition to its great poetic beauty, is meant as an acknowledgement of my indebtedness to Henri Michaux's writings, and, more generally, to Surrealist - and Surrealist-influenced - poetry, for revealing to me the artistic value of a bold exploration …

L'Harmonie Révée: An Analysis Of Henri Pousseur's 'Votre Faust' And 'Les Litanies D'Icare', Andre Rene Bregegere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters, largely self-contained, each dedicated to a different piece by Belgian composer Henri Pousseur (1929-2009). The first chapter presents a detailed survey of Pousseur's opera, Votre Faust, attempting to address all major aspects of this vast, ambitious work: origins and reception, compositional design, relationship with the Western operatic and literary tradition, formal experimentations, and harmonic innovations. The second chapter presents a detailed analysis of a work representative of Pousseur's more recent output, Les Litanies d'Icare (1993) for piano solo, focused on Pousseur's trademark techniques of parametric, serial design (technique des groupes), and …

The Contributions Of Earl "Bud" Powell To The Modern Jazz Style, David Joseph Demotta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an analytical study of pianist and composer Bud Powell's contributions to modern jazz (a.k.a. bebop or "bop"), focusing especially on the rhythmic and harmonic implications of Powell's improvisations. The analysis is informed by a series of interviews with professional jazz musicians and is supported by original notated transcriptions of Powell recordings. The aim of this project is to present a cogent technical and theoretical account of Powell's musical style that is grounded in the values of the contemporary jazz community and reflects that community's continued passion for and engagement with Powell.

Chapter One, "Contemporary Pianists and Bud Powell's …

The New York Philharmonic Strike Of 1973, Kuan Cheng Lu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The New York Philharmonic Strike of 1973 is a story waiting to be told. The sole volume to mention it, John Canarina's The New York Philharmonic, devotes less than two pages to it. Until now, the full story has lain buried in archival documents, newspaper articles, and the memories of those who experienced it firsthand. This document represents the first comprehensive examination of this event. The research upon which it is based consists of: interviews with the New York Philharmonic members; research in the New York Philharmonic Archives; newspaper articles and reviews. The results are presented here in three …

Pagh-Paan's No-Ul: Korean Identity Formation As Synthesis Of Eastern And Western Music, Ji Hyun Son

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I address a gap in a great many syntheses of Eastern and Western music, including the crucial moment in Korean music history that brought about revival of traditional music, resulting in the international impetus it has today. In addressing this gap, I chose Younghi Pagh-Paan and her music to initiate a deeper discussion of Korean composers contributing toward the golden age of Korean music, a welcome development in Korean society; it has also heightened pride and respect for the culture and resulted in a robust Korean identity in their music.

I have demonstrated ways in which Pagh-Paan …

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (The Irish Musicians' Association) And The Politics Of Musical Community In Irish Traditional Music, Lauren Weintraub Stoebel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (The Irish Musicians' Association) and its role in the politics of Irish traditional music communities. A revivalist organization founded in 1951, Comhaltas today is an educational and activist organization whose mission includes the preservation and promotion of Irish traditional music. Its numerous programs--from local music classes to a national festival drawing thousands of participants--intersect at some point with the musical lives of nearly every Irish traditional musician. Because of this widespread activity, Comhaltas interacts, often contentiously, with many of the different musical communities through which Irish traditional musicians define themselves both publically and privately. …

Performing Blackness In A Mulatto Society: Negotiating Racial Identity Through Music In The Dominican Republic, Angelina Maria Tallaj-García

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation analyzes Dominican racial and ethnic identity through an examination of music and music cultures. Previous studies of Dominican identity have focused primarily on the racialized invention of the Dominican nation as white, or non-black, often centering on the building of Dominican identity in (sometimes violent) opposition to the Haitian nation and to Haitian racial identity. I argue that although Dominicans have not developed an explicit verbal discourse of black affirmation, blackness (albeit a contextually contingent articulation) is embedded in popular conceptions of dominicanidad ("Dominicanness") and is enacted through music. My dissertation explores ways in which popular notions of …

Todesfuge, Casey Hale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Todesfuge (2008-2010) is a setting, for tenor and chamber orchestra, of Paul Celan's poem of the same name. Celan wrote his landmark work on the Holocaust in the years after he himself was freed from internment in a Romanian forced labor camp in 1944, though its imagery is drawn from accounts of the death camps in Poland. From the outset, I was ambivalent about setting this text to music, but felt compelled, and my response was to frame it with idiomatic references to German music from Wagner to Weill, exploring the discomfort of using aesthetic artifice to represent unspeakable atrocities. …

Gendered Practices And Conceptions In Korean Drumming: On The Negotiation Of "Femininity" And "Masculinity" By Korean Female Drummers, Yoonjah Choi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Korean drumming, one of the most popular musical practices in South Korea, currently exists in a state of contradiction as drumming, historically performed by men, is increasingly practiced by women. Women drummers who enter this male-dominated realm confront the "masculinization" of the practice, which is naturalized and normalized through the field's discourse and performance. At the same time, they seek a "femininity" that may help them to survive in the field. To examine these gendered conceptions and practices, I draw on the ways in which contemporary Korean traditional drum performers, predominantly professional female drummers, conceptualize, experience, perform, reinforce, and/or resist …

Secrets Of A Toy-Box: A Study Of Claude Debussy's La Boîte À Joujoux, Mirna Lekic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The influence of Claude Debussy's inventive musical language can be traced through to the most modern classical repertoire. Yet of the composer's three ballets, which provided the counterweight to the Russian dominance of Parisian ballet culture in the early 1900s, only Jeux has received substantial scholarly attention. The following document is a monograph on La Boîte à joujoux (1913), Debussy's innovative ballet for children or marionettes. It offers an exploration of the work's broader significance and contextualizes it both within Debussy's oeuvre and in a broader historical realm. Included is a survey of the ballet's performance history, as well as …

Different Placements Of Spirit: African American Musicians Historicizing In Sound, Casey Hale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines two recent projects by African American musicians that enact critical and historiographic agency by reconstructing the music of the past: William Parker's project The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield, dedicated to re-imagining the works of the soul music icon with an ensemble featuring the poetic recitation of Amiri Baraka; and Marcus Roberts's reinvention of the Jazz Age rhapsodies of George Gershwin and James P. Johnson, Rhapsody in Blue and Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody. Rooted in African American interpretive traditions, and working both within and against such discursive categories as "jazz," "black music," and "American music," these artists …

Nikolai Medtner's First Piano Concerto: A Metrotectonic Analysis, Aleksandra Sarest

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the work of the Russian-born composer Nikolaĭ Medtner, presenting an original analysis of his Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Minor, op. 33. The analysis is preceded with an overview of Medtner's life and his entire body of music, and with a discussion of the composer's artistic beliefs and musical style. Medtner lived at a time when most composers searched for new paths, believing that nothing original could be produced unless there were drastic changes to musical language itself. Medtner was among the few composers who remained loyal to the Western classical tradition. Working within its …

Timbral Transformations In Kaija Saariaho's From The Grammar Of Dreams, Karen J. Siegel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of Kaija Saariaho's 1988 vocal work From the Grammar of Dreams, with a focus on timbre. It begins with background on Saariaho, and research on timbre in music theory and psychoacoustics (Chapters 1 and 2). Chapter 3 shows how Saariaho manipulates timbre to expressive and formal ends in From the Grammar of Dreams, including creating timbral tension and release, applying Robert Morris' Contour Theory in its analyses. Chapter 4 then explores how the timbral transformations interact with non-timbral musical elements. The conclusion (Chapter 5) puts the compositional techniques of this work in the context of …

Musical Rhetoric, Narrative, Drama, And Their Negation In Morton Feldman's Piano And String Quartet, Ryan Michael Howard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Though Morton Feldman famously expressed his aversion to conventional compositional rhetoric early in his career, an examination of his music from the late 1970s onward reveals a more complex and ambiguous relationship with musical rhetoric than has often been acknowledged. In his own writings Feldman hinted at the notion of illusory function and directionality in his music, as well as to the phenomenon of "negation." It is my contention that the extended-length works written in the last years of the composer's life, which frequently feature tantalizing suggestions of conventional musical narrative, provide rich opportunity for readings of these statements. My …