Composition Commons^™

Personification: A Short Film, Charles R. Adams

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Projects

Personification follows a group of college students as they receive news that mysterious shape-shifting creatures are posing as humans. They quickly turn on each other, realizing there is no one they can trust. In the style of mid-20th - century horror films, notably Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the short film explores themes of paranoia and the value of human expression in a time when generative AI seeks to replace the creative method. In keeping with this theme, the emphasis for this project was on the act of creation. Pre-production—which included scriptwriting, casting, and various organizational tasks—ran …

Transformer-Based Symbolic Music Generation, Ben Buentello

Master’s Theses

This thesis investigates the capacity of transformer-based architectures to learn generalized musical patterns through symbolic generation. To support this exploration, a complete music generation pipeline was developed, beginning with the construction and classification of a large-scale dataset of over 170,000 MIDI files. The dataset was processed using rule-based heuristics and custom neural classifiers to separate tracks by musical function and contour. A novel tokenization scheme, MINTii, was introduced to encode musical information compactly through interval-based representations, reducing redundancy and promoting generalization. Using this infrastructure, a transformer model was trained to generate single-track melodic sequences. Its performance was evaluated through both …

Minority In Baroque Trumpet Repertoire: Minor-Key Literature For Baroque Trumpet, Wing Heng Victor Yuen

Theses and Dissertations--Music

The repertoire for trumpet in the Baroque era is overwhelmingly in major keys for obvious reasons. As natural trumpet is limited by design to play the notes of the harmonic series, most players have little access to sonorities outside the major scale and arpeggios within the series without the help of technical innovations such as the slide, and much later, vent-holes. Baroque trumpet makers built valveless natural trumpets, which are limited by design to play the notes of the harmonic series. Since the fundamental physics limit the musical notes available to the natural trumpet, minor key is not an essentially …

Paul Bowles’ Blue Mountain Ballads For Wind Octet And Solo Voice: A Transcription Of A Song Cycle Using The Instrumentation Of Stravinsky’S Octet , Cleveland P. Forrester

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Blue Mountain Ballads (1946), by Paul Bowles, is a song-cycle and setting of four poems by Tennessee Williams who was the composer's friend and mentor. The work has long held a place in the vocal repertoire. Bowles’ unique harmonic language, wide accompanimental range and the use of jazz idiom provide a unique opportunity for the music to be re-cast for wind instruments. Furthermore, chamber music makes up most of Bowles’ musical output as a composer, so using small instrumental forces seemed an appropriate medium to re-orchestrate this song cycle.

The purpose of this document is 1) to provide a detailed …

Luis Serrano Alarcón’S Second Symphony For Wind Orchestra Background, Analysis, And Conductor’S Guide, Adam P. Miller

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Luis Serrano Alarcon’s composition, Second Symphony for Wind Orchestra (2017), is a significant work for the wind ensemble. Written as a tribute to the great Romantic composers it was inspired by their symphonies. It is neo-classical in form but contains a neo-Romantic language and a compositional style unique to the Spanish composer.

The purposes of this dissertation are: 1.) to provide biographical details regarding Luis Serrano Alarcon and his musical career; 2.) to place the Second Symphony for Wind Orchestra in perspective within other modern works for wind band and within the composer’s own catalogue; 3.) to elaborate on the …

Analyzing Rap Through Poetry: “Zen Scientist” By Milo & Kenny Segal, Mason S. Jensen

Anthós

milo, now known as R.A.P. Ferraria, has described his music as synonymous with poetry. This article examines his song “zen scientist,” testing the linkage of poetry and rap through poetic analysis. Jensen analyzes the song through metrical systems, marking it in scansion, poetic feet, and rhyme to delineate rhythm and to show how rhythm is created and experimented with. Jensen then applies Vendler and Chan’s methods for deriving poetic meaning, providing potential interpretations of “zen scientist.” Jensen argues these poetic methods dissect the rap song into perspicuity. The article concludes that poetic analysis can be used effectively to analyze rap …

Commissioning And Recording Project Of New Works For Saxophone Focused On Promoting Mexican Composers And Educating Future Commissioning Saxophonists, Andres Efrain Santana

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This document chronicles my process of commissioning and recording five new works by Mexican composers. To contextualize this experience, I provide a brief introduction of Mexican contemporary music history, an overview of second-hand accounts of the commissioning process, my personal experience of this process, and my assessment of the impact these works could have on the classical saxophone repertoire. As I have reflected on my own experience with historical and contemporary accounts of the commissioning process, it has become clear that personal connections between composers and performers and the patronage or funding linked to those relationships are just as important …

La Valse And The Parisian Salon: Nostalgic Continuities And Sonorous Modernisms, Claire Weydt

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Immediately following World War I and the death of prominent French composer Claude Debussy, French composers and music critics were concerned that the war created an unbridgeable chasm between generations of composers who, through their various aesthetic allegiances, worked to define musical sounds as undeniably French. Numerous scholars have characterized this process as an aesthetic rupture brought on by the World Wars. French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), however, seems to have bridged this gap, at least for some influential critics. My project challenges notions of wartime rupture by resituating musical modernism within a framework of aesthetic continuity. Ravel’s choreographic poem …

The Satyr's Last Lament, Joseph A. Sandy

Theses and Dissertations

The Satyr’s Last Lament is a multi-movement work drawing from the traditions of early jazz and musical theater and consists of eight songs and five interludes. The plot is an original fantasy tale about an abandoned village of satyrs that is discovered by a wandering bard who uses magic to bring the spirits of the dead back to sing their story to him. They spin a sad tale about how The Stranger came to their town and convinced them to abandon their good habits and community to instead indulge in hedonism and isolation, leading to their downfall. Each song is …