Music Commons^™

Music And Madness: Three Critical Case Studies, Beth A. Cooper

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation interrogates and develops the multiple connections between music history, theory, composition, and reception and the sociopolitical structures of madness in the twentieth century. My work first uncovers the various definitions of psychological abnormality as they have taken shape through discourses of Western medicine, psychology, and history/criticism of the arts. As I argue, madness is not purely a somatic, transhistorical illness, but an elusively constructed term with tentative relations to shifting concepts of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral non-normativity. Following an outline of this methodological premise, rooted in the fields of disability studies and mad studies, I contextualize the life …

A Bird’S Eye View: Large-Scale Tonal Structures In Robert Schumann’S Four Song Cycles (Op. 42, 24, 39, And 48), Peter Kramer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Some of Robert Schumann’s most notable works are his Lieder for solo voice and piano accompaniment. Schumann's Lieder are considered some of the best compositions in this genre, engendering various interpretations by performers and exciting vigorous debate among musicologists and theorists. Robert Schumann’s early music was almost entirely composed for the piano alone; it wasn’t until 1840 that he started to compose almost exclusively Lieder and song cycles inspired by his predecessors Beethoven and Schubert. This was a prolific year for Schumann compositionally, in part due to his marriage to Clara Schumann who was one of Europe’s most preeminent piano …

Music Pedagogy In Venezuela’S Plains: Making Space In Alma Llanera, Elaine Sandoval

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that the process of institutionalizing traditional música llanera (plains region music) education in Venezuela is informed by a hierarchical spatialization of the capital, Caracas, and the historically agricultural- and livestock-producing region known as the llanos, or the plains. Drawing on Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991), I argue that the representations of space that have defined the llanos region and música llanera often obscure the lived space of music-making and dwelling in the llanos. This dissertation is based on fieldwork in Guárico state between 2016-2018, where I observed the state-funded Alma Llanera program, which had been …

A Schema-Theoretic Approach To Hierarchy In Eighteenth-Century Tonality, Simon K. S. Prosser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prevalent modern-day theories of tonal hierarchy for eighteenth-century music, especially those influenced by the ideas of Heinrich Schenker, have been called into question by schema theorists such as Robert Gjerdingen and Vasili Byros, who argue from both cognitive and historical evidence that eighteenth-century tonal cognition was sequential or “windowed” rather than hierarchical. This dissertation seeks to recuperate the concept of tonal hierarchy in eighteenth-century music, drawing on research that reconstructs the implicit tonal theories of the partimento and thoroughbass traditions, as well as concepts of hierarchy from schema theory itself, to formulate a historically and cognitively grounded theory of tonal …

Aloof: Black Divas Of Refusal, Kwame K. Ocran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Aloof: Black Divas of Refusal” studies performers Lena Horne and Billie Holiday as the progenitors of a new tradition of authentic representation of Black female interiority in the entertainment arts. As interiority denotes the wide-ranging amalgamation of human expression, these divas equipped themselves with a sense of refusal and aloofness to strategically posture themselves in conditions that suited their personal predilections best and considered their status as representatives of the Black community. Lena Horne’s evolution as an aloof diva successfully saw the singer and actress escape classist thought of racial uplift to the full embracing of the totality of Black …

The Quartet’S Death: Embodiment, Performativity, And Physicality In Heinz Holliger’S 1973 String Quartet, Vicente Alexim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout the twentieth century and continuing today, many composers have explored and expanded the ways in which performers are asked to interact with their musical instruments. Often referred to as “extended techniques,” these modes of playing frequently produce sounds of indefinite pitch, or which fall outside equal temperament, and the works that employ them rely on the physicality of these techniques in order to create additional layers of meaning. The concrete parameters involved in making use of such resources can sometimes take precedence over or drive other more abstract compositional materials such as precise pitch and rhythm, but their influence …

Gendering The Virtual Space: Sonic Femininities And Masculinities In Contemporary Top 40 Music, Michèle Duguay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes vocal placement—the apparent location of a voice in the virtual space created by a recording—and its relationship to gender. When listening to a piece of recorded music through headphones or stereo speakers, one hears various sound sources as though they were located in a virtual space (Clarke 2013). For instance, a specific vocal performance—once manipulated by various technologies in a recording studio—might evoke a concert hall, an intimate setting, or an otherworldly space. The placement of the voice within this space is one of the central musical parameters through which listeners ascribe cultural meanings to popular music. …

Performing Empowerment: Children's Rights And Musical Participation In Dakar, Senegal, Lynne Stillings

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides a critical examination of how music is used to introduce concepts of children’s rights to children and youth in Dakar, Senegal. I explore why music has been chosen as a tool of engagement and promotion, building on Senegal’s history of youth activism and music as a grassroots tool for inspiring social change and sparking political movements. Both international NGOs and local programs use musical activities, centering children as performers and songwriters, to address rights in Senegal including girls’ equality, the right to education, early marriage, violence towards women and children, access to healthcare, and street children. Outside …

“Leisure With Decorum”: Gentlemen Making Music In The Georgian Era, Lidia A. Chang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project examines the musical activities of Georgian gentlemen with the goal of illustrating the ways that recreational music-making tested the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. While the English nobility could respectably engage in music-making, socialize with professional musicians (subverting, or temporarily suspending otherwise rigid class boundaries), and openly extol the virtues of Continental culture without compromising their gentlemanliness, English gentlemen walked a much thinner line. In pursuit of these claims I will expand the scope of primary sources beyond conduct books and novels to include selections of unpublished, peripheral accounts of recreational music-making as found in letters, diaries, …

Astor Piazzolla's Cinco Piezas Para Guitarra: A Performer's Guide To The "Unwritten", Federico J. Díaz Páez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Astor Piazzolla found his voice as a composer in tango music. Starting in the 1950s, he extended the horizons of the popular genre by using the influences of classical music and jazz primarily. The performance practice is one of the strongest aspects that connects his music with traditional tango. The “unwritten” concepts particular to tango are unfamiliar for musicians outside of this tradition. This dissertation explains in detail these concepts and their application to Piazzolla’s only work for solo guitar: Cinco piezas para guitarra. Besides proving the context of Piazzolla’s life and production, Chapter 1 reviews the use of tango …

Salvatore Sciarrino's Sei Capricci For Solo Violin: Analysis And Performance Guide, Caroline Eva Chin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides insight into the compositional and string techniques used in Salvatore Sciarrino’s Sei Capricci for solo violin. Each of the six chapters provides an analysis and performance guide for a caprice. A diagram of the score analysis for each caprice is included at the end of each chapter. In addition to the examination of Sciarrino’s original techniques for violin, caprices that make references to Paganini’s 24 Caprices for solo violin are discussed. Salvatore Sciarrino is an Italian composer (b. 1947) whose use of untraditional hushed sounds has become his signature compositional style. His innovative use of instrumental techniques …

Listen Like This: Audiovisual Argument In Rockumentary, Lindsey Eckenroth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rockumentaries are commodities that construct authoritative interpretations of popular music history, shaping how we come to know, value, hear, consume, and identify with popular music and those who create it. The arguments rockumentaries make, and the ways they make them, are the subject of this dissertation. Rather than position rockumentary as a genre, I investigate it as a set of representational tendencies to be examined in relation to stardom, authenticity, fandom, the culture industry, and the music(ians) these films represent. My introduction argues that rockumentaries operate according to what I call the offstage pattern, a dialectical structure in which …

Between Occitania And Al-Andalus: Reconsidering The Emergence Of Troubadour Melody Through Algorithmic Analysis, Veronica Maria Da Rosa Guimaraes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How the musical and poetic traditions of the troubadours arose remains unknown, despite a century of scholarship that has attempted to account for their seemingly ex nihilo appearance in late twelfth-century Europe. Scholarly debate was particularly intense during the first half of the twentieth century and revolved around two competing theories: the Andalusi theory, which linked the troubadours to the poetic-musical traditions of medieval Muslim Iberia (also known by its Arabic name al-Andalus), and the Aquitanian theory, which argued that the troubadours were rooted in the folk and sacred traditions of the Aquitanian region. Since the 1980s, interest in the …

The Emotional Illusion Of Music: Contemporary Western Musical Aesthetics In Dialogue With Ancient Eastern Philosophy, Yin Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project aims to examine whether music has an emotional nature. I use the ancient Chinese text Music Has No Grief or Joy to construct three arguments for the illusion view, according to which music has no emotional nature and the emotional appearances of music are illusory. These arguments highlight representational inconstancy, expressive incapability, and evocative underdetermination as three ways to problematize the idea that music has an emotional nature. I draw on the Confucian tradition to formulate three responses to the illusion view from representational reliability, expressive sincerity, and evocative appropriateness. These responses are shown to be inadequate. To …

Plainchant Accompaniment And Modal Harmony In Nineteenth-Century France, Ruka Shironishi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, harmonization of plainchant melodies had become a trend among church organists. In their harmonizations, many of these organists freely applied the harmonic conventions of what may be characterized today as common-practice tonality, such as dominant-to-tonic cadences, often including the use of accidentals. French scholars and educators of the time, like Louis Niedermeyer and his collaborator Joseph d’Ortigue, viewed such practices as a corruption of plainchant and sought to reform the ways in which plainchant was harmonized on the organ.

The nineteenth-century reformation led by these harmonists ignited discourse on the nature of plainchant …

Indian Classical Music In The New York Metropolitan Area: The Development Of A Transnational Ecosystem, Andre Fludd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the development of North and South Indian classical music communities in the New York metropolitan area from the mid-20^th century to the present. In this investigation, I primarily focus on local musicians from diverse backgrounds and communities rather than internationally recognized stars. In the instances where I discuss famous musicians such as Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain, I focus on how they impacted New York metropolitan area communities particularly and what their success can teach about international Indian classical music careers. The dissertation is organized chronologically, and I highlight vital people, non-profit organizations, historical moments, and …

The Art Of Listening: A Conversational Approach To Lecture Recitals, Javor Bracic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lecture recitals as the practice of pairing live music performance with verbal explication have been around since at least the end of the eighteenth century, but research on them is surprisingly scarce despite how ubiquitous they have become. What exactly are lecture recitals? Where did they originate? How are they conducted? Is there anything we could do to improve upon them?

In this dissertation I not only consider these questions but also propose a new kind of lecture recital I call a conversation concert. After a brief historical overview of lecture-recitalists from Johann Nikolaus Forkel to Rob Kapilow, I showcase …

New Chinese Music In New York City: From Revival To Musical Transnationalism, Serena Yiai Wang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Pulitzer Prize (2011, Zhou Long’s Madame White Snake), a Metropolitan opera commission (Tan Dun’s The First Emperor, premiered 2006), and the Ives Living Award (Chen Yi, 2001) are just some of the high-profile awards and commission bestowed upon Chinese émigré composers who have studied and built their professional reputation in New York City. The works of Chinese composers constitute what I call “new Chinese music,” which I argue has played a defining role in New York City’s cultural landscape and in the development of Western art music in general. The influence of Chinese composers and their works …

From Object To Icon: The Unpredictable Path To Everlastingness, Donna M. Desideri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how a squeaky-clean object transformed into a girl-next-door icon and became a role model for generations to come. And in an industry built on illusions and dreams, reality wore many masks.

Still in its beginning stages and looking to sell tickets, the motion picture industry needed to reconstruct its current downscale public image by presenting a much-improved polished and upscale public image to audiences, all while silencing contradictory images and information. Appealing to a middle-class sensibility to boost this new public image gave the motion picture industry the acceptance it was seeking. By marketing to middle-class audiences, …

Emulating The "Country Fiddler": A Performance Analysis Of Fiddle Parodies And Impressions In Charles Ives's Second Violin Sonata, Emily Vold Weiss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In his violin sonatas, Charles Ives frequently parodies fiddling style, both through overt quotes of fiddle tunes, as well as inventive compositional devices that mimic the fiddler’s style of bowing, ornamenting a melody, or generally rustic performance. Given the breadth of these fiddling allusions, it is important that violinists who perform Ives’s sonatas understand the distinctive aesthetics of fiddle performance, including the numerous ways in which it diverges from classical performance. In this dissertation, I survey pedagogical writings on fiddling, notated tunes, and recorded fiddling performances in an effort to characterize the performance practices of fiddlers from Ives’s native New …

For The Love Of Inner Voices: Miriam Gideon, Orchestration, And Fortunato, Whitney E. George

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Post-tonal American opera composer Miriam Gideon (1906-1996) completed a chamber opera, perhaps intended for television, titled Fortunato, based on a dark comic tragedy set in turn-of-the-20th-century, economically-ravaged Madrid. The expressive staged work follows the life of the unfortunate title character Fortunato in three operatic vignettes, each one becoming more desperate and moribund by the scene. A curious piece in Gideon’s oeuvre, the work remained unfinished, with a piano score for the complete work, but only a sample of her orchestration for Scene 1. This study examines the orchestration of Scene 1 as a template for creating an orchestration similar in …

Princess Maleine, Whitney E. George

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Act I Full Score. Chamber opera in two acts, based on a story by the Brothers Grimm and the play by Maurice Maeterlinck. Commissioned and first produced by dell’Arte Opera Ensemble. Premiered at LaMaMa Experimental Theater, New York August 2019 with The Curiosity Cabinet, conducted by Whitney George.

The Making Of An Avant-Gardist: A Study Of Rafael Aponte-Ledée’S Early Life And Works (1957–1966), Noel Torres-Rivera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the interconnectedness of political and musical discourses in Latin America by examining the formative years of Puerto Rican composer Rafael Aponte-Ledée (b. 1938), a leading figure in the Puerto Rican avant-garde movement in the late 1960s. Through extensive archival research, oral history, and qualitative field work, I analyze his time as a student at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid (1957-1964) and at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires (1965-1966). With this, I address the intricate network of musical works, events, mentors, institutional discourses, textbooks, technologies, …

Dancing Through Time: A Biographical Look On The Evolution Of Tap Dance, Jaimie Cranford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A uniquely American art form, tap dance has often been misrepresented and under-appreciated when positioned alongside other dance forms. This is largely due to the form’s racialized history, which builds upon contributions from African-American culture. Unlike other dance forms, which stem from white European traditions, tap dance evolved out of a necessity for cultural preservation as enslaved Africans adapted to life in America. As tap dance evolved, its association with slave culture led to it not being taken seriously; if anything, tap dancers were viewed simply as “entertainers” – certainly not as artists. Using a biographical lens, this work looks …

The Politics Of Hip Hop: A Political Analysis Of Hip Hop’S History And Its Complicated Relationship With Capitalism, Danielle Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the emergence of the Hip Hop movement in the 1970s in areas of New York City often referred to more generally as the South Bronx. Focusing mostly on the 1970s and 1980s, this thesis explores the underlying conditions that Hip Hop was born out of. Influenced by both global and national politics, Hip Hop provided a common space for underrepresented individuals and groups to unify, create common identities, and liberate themselves from the oppressive norms and political activity of a rich, mostly white, and dominant American society that tried to erase or silence them. This revolutionary aspect …

“A Space Where You Can Imagine In”: Queer World Building With Wynne Greenwood’S Tracy + The Plastics, Colleen M. O'Shea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Tracy and the Plastics was a video and music project conceived and performed by artist Wynne Greenwood from 1999 - 2006. In it, Greenwood played lead singer Tracy alongside keyboard player, Nikki and drummer, Cola (both also played by Greenwood) where Tracy performed live alongside prerecorded images of Nikki and Cola. For Greenwood, the interaction between Tracy, the Plastics, and the audience provided an opportunity to create new, intentional worlds together. In this paper, I will demonstrate that Greenwood relies on collisions and alternative temporalities to instigate the creation of these worlds with her audience. I will incorporate the principles …

The American Symphony Orchestra Today: Problems In Community, Diversity, And Representation, Hilary Slade Jansen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the symphony orchestra and its socio-political context in the United States. Using three orchestral case studies—the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Venezuela’s El Sistema—I examine the ways in which American symphony orchestras have responded both today and in the past to the public and academic discourse around social inclusion. Interweaving musicology, sociology, urban anthropology, cultural studies, education, economics, ethnomusicology, economics, data from grant-giving institutions, and from symphony orchestras themselves, I seek to situate the wider discourse on social justice in the arts (which has, until recently, lived largely outside of academia) within a musicological …

Extracting Theory From Practice: A Computational Analysis Of The Persian Radif, Sepideh Shafiei

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies radif, the repertoire/system of Persian classical music, by developing a framework for computational research on vocal music performance. The radif consists of seven dastgāhs and five āvāzes (secondary dastgāhs). Each dastgāh consists of several pieces (gushes). Throughout this research, I draw on three areas of knowledge to study each subject: the historical aspects, the current theories, and the practice. When possible, I attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice by extracting the relevant information from practice. To this end, I use and modify existing computational methods for analyzing audio and symbolic data. The main subjects …

The Singing Self: An Exploration Of Vocality And Selfhood In Contemporary Vocal Practice, Emily C. Eagen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Every vocal training technique relies on understandings of how a singer’s “voice,” both literal and metaphorical, participates in the act of interpreting the works of composers. Western classical singing, as codified by the early twentieth century, typically puts the singer in the role of the “medium” or “channel” for the composer. Later twentieth-century reactions promised liberation from the composer’s “voice” with a validation of the singer’s “authentic” or “natural” voice. This dissertation questions both sides of this binary and asks: what alternative models are possible? This work is in three parts. The first section provides an overview of pedagogical constructions …

Teaching Choral Music Of The African Diaspora In The United States: Toward A “Living Black History”, H. Roz Woll

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In higher education choral curricula, the opportunity to study the breathtakingly rich scope of music rooted in Africa and the African diaspora with rigor and depth is often marginalized, neglected, or missing. If studied, it may be framed in the context of “other music” in contrast to music of the Western European canon, creating an oppositional framework rather than an interdependent one. Moreover, opportunities to study the political economy of this music in relationship to race, class, gender, and religion are lacking. This has multiple ramifications for music students’ preparedness to engage in global habits of citizenship in support of …