Music Practice Commons^™

Performing Methods Of Beethoven’S Violin Concerto In D Major, Op. 61, Third Movement: “Rondo: Allegro”, Zike Qi

Dissertations, 2020-current

This document examines the third movement “Rondo: Allegro” of Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61 by Ludwig van Beethoven, focusing on how structural relationships in the score are transformed into auditory experience through performance methods. Rather than treating performance as a direct reproduction of the text, this research understands it as a process in which structure becomes perceptible in time.

Combining structural analysis, recording comparison, and self-recording practice, the study interprets the movement within a rondo–sonata framework (A–B–A–C–A–B–A). It demonstrates that the rondo theme assumes different functions—presentation, transition, and development—depending on its structural position.

Through comparison of recordings by …

Measuring Administrative Hiring Confidence Of Music Teachers In The Context Of Shallow Hiring Pools, Aaron M. Strum

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to identify and measure the confidence of K-12 administrators in hiring music faculty. This study also aimed to analyze administrators’ perspectives and confidence in key stages of the hiring process, including defining job expectations, posting, advertising, interviewing, and selecting highly specialized music teachers in K-12 settings. Confidence of K-12 administrators can be gauged through their understanding of how well an applicant aligns with the specific needs of the school’s program. Three research questions guided this investigation: (1a) How confident are K-12 administrators in their understanding of music teaching pedagogy when interviewing music teacher candidates …

From Osbcurity To The Stage: A Stylistic And Pedagogical Exploration Of The Four Concert Etudes By Mikhail Bukinik, Luis Bernardo Castro

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research examines Mikhail Bukinik’s 4 Konzertetüden (concert etudes) for solo cello through both a stylistic performance and pedagogical approach. Despite Bukinik’s historical presence as a cellist and composer, these specific works have fallen into obscurity and remain largely absent from the standard pedagogical and performance canon. The research has two primary objectives. The first is to reintroduce these works to the modern repertoire, focusing on dissemination and performance practice. This involves a stylistic analysis of the four etudes, culminating in a recorded live performance during the lecture recital and the creation of a professional studio recording to serve as …

Music History 10100: A Thousand Years Of Listening, Sophia Stoyanovich

Open Educational Resources

A Thousand Years of Listening is an undergraduate music history course elective at Hunter College that introduces students to the history of Western art music from the medieval era to the present through focused listening and musical analysis. Designed for students with no prior musical training, the course develops critical listening skills while exploring major composers, genres, styles, and historical contexts. Through listening, discussion, writing, and a live concert experience, students learn to engage with music as informed and thoughtful listeners.

Teaching Through Sound: Approaches To The Use Of Fixed Media In Pedagogical Viola Etudes, Roberto C. Mochetti Jr.

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the pedagogical possibilities of fixed media in newly composed viola etudes. While fixed media is commonly treated as accompaniment or as a performance medium, this project argues that it can also serve as an active component of technical and musical training. By providing stable and repeatable sonic environments, fixed media can support forms of listening, intonation, sound production, and performer awareness that are difficult to cultivate through traditional etudes alone. This argument responds to a broader pedagogical gap in string training, where long-established etudes and models of technical development remain central even as contemporary viola performance increasingly …

Counted In: Including Female Composers In Orchestral Horn Audition Repertoire, Hope K. Ayers

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Institute of Composer Diversity and the Boulanger Initiative focus on music written by composers who have been historically excluded from the profession. The focal point of the Institute of Composer Diversity is discovery, study, and programming of such composers through its database and reports, while The Boulanger Initiative advocates for women and all gender-marginalized composers. Because of limited exposure, incomplete records, difficulty of procuring music, and identified bias, female composers’ orchestral works are underrepresented in orchestral programming. Professional orchestral horn audition repertoire is no different, with professional orchestras, such as the New York Philharmonic, only very recently including a …

Second Edition Of The Liturgy Of The Hours: Impact On The American Diaconate, Michael Walsh

Obsculta

This piece explores the upcoming Second Edition of the English Liturgy of the Hours coming to the United States. This piece touches on the psalter, hymnal, and other portions of the new edition as well as the publishing companies chosen by the USCCB to promulgate it. This piece highlights the impact this new edition can have on all of the faithful but particularly the American Diaconate.

Ai As A Creative Collaborator In Music: Exploring Human-Centered Innovation In Large Musical Contexts, Nicholas Caluori, Noah D. Taylor

International Journal of Emerging and Disruptive Innovation in Education : VISIONARIUM

AI-driven audio tools are reshaping musical creation, yet the most consequential shift is not automation of artistry but reconfiguration of collaboration, metacognition, and quality control within large ensembles. This paper examines how generative audio models, vocal synthesis platforms, and stem-splitting technologies can function as creative partners in music arranging and composition workflows, particularly in musical contexts where artistic coordination and interpretive judgment remain paramount. We position AI in music creation as analogous to the calculator in mathematics: widely available, efficiency-enhancing, and therefore unavoidable, while still requiring disciplined human oversight to preserve intent, style, and accountability. The paper surveys practical implementation …

Expanding The Practice Of Conducting Through Technologies For New Musical Aesthetics, Majella Clarke

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

For over two centuries, the practice of conducting has been founded on a relatively stable relationship: a score is written, a conductor interprets it, and an ensemble/orchestra/choir realises it in performance. More recently, contemporary music has undergone profound transformations through algorithms, sensors, live electronics, machine learning, interactive systems, and generative technologies, expanding many instrumental practices and opening composition to become interactive, immersive and multimodal. However, the practice of conducting has remained largely tied to inherited models of interpretation and musical coordination via gesture.

This presentation asks how technology might expand conducting beyond traditional techniques and scoring materialities and become a …

Composing Playgrounds, Rebecca Suju Abraham

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis explores music composition as the design of “playgrounds”: structured systems that invite participation, interaction, and the emergence of shared musical experience. Drawing on a background in engineering and a practice rooted in improvisation and community, I investigate how compositional authority can be exercised through the creation of constraints instead of fixed outcomes. These systems are structured enough to support coordination and open enough to allow for play and collective agency. The work is situated within practice-based research and engages qualitative methods to reflect on a series of projects developed over the course of my MFA in Sonic Practice. …

H. C. Robbins Landon (1926-2009): A Brief, But Grateful Tribute, David Wyn Jones

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

Tribute honoring H. C. Robbins Landon on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Haydn’S Creation Challenge: A New Hypothesis About The Genesis Of Beethoven’S Ninth Symphony, Stefan Romanó

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

The article hypothesizes that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was the product of his decision to take up the challenge that Haydn’s Creation had confronted him with since his youth.  Haydn’s oratorio was immensely popular in Vienna and Germany during Beethoven’s time, more popular than Beethoven’s own music.  It represented the golden standard of musical perfection for Beethoven himself, who strove to equal it, but repeatedly felt that he had not yet jumped over the Creation hurdle.  He took up the challenge in the years 1816-18, when he began designing the first movement of his Ninth, as a replica to the …

Future Frames: Ai Tools In Music And The Value Of Human Composers, Jeff Wragg

Staff Scholarship - New Zealand

This presentation examines the pros and cons of using AI within a film composition practice. It identifies some of the roles of music in film and provides advice on how to collaborate with human composers and how to engage effectively with AI when a human composer is not an option.

The Message Of Resilience And Harmony: From War Camps To Modern Calls For Peace, Linlin Uta

Dissertations, 2020-current

Music has a unique power to either foster harmony and peace or contribute to discord and suffering, depending on how it is used. The role of music in three different wartime camps—the Bando Prisoner-of-War Camp in Japan during World War I, Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and Japanese American internment camps during World War II—illustrates both the dangers and the transformative potential of music. While these examples highlight the misuse of music as a warning, they also reveal how music, when used in a positive way, can offer valuable lessons for promoting global peace.

Moreover, in an environment …

The High School Piccoloist: A Resource Guide, Rebecca Needham

Dissertations, 2020-current

This project aims to curate a piccolo resource guide for high school music educators and their students. Currently, there are limited pedagogical materials available for beginning piccoloists or their music educators, and these materials are primarily scattered across decades of The Instrumentalist and the now-defunct Flute Talk journals. In addition, future band directors are rarely required to study auxiliary instruments like the piccolo in their collegiate coursework. These two factors combine to create a detrimental situation: frequently, neither teacher nor student in a typical high school setting has appropriate resources to understand the instrument and its essential differences from the …

A Description Of Zhao Zhang’S Nature No. 2 And Xiaoxuan Xu’S An Unusual Feast Of East, Sicheng He

Dissertations, 2020-current

This research presents a new path in the development of Chinese music by aiming to incorporate both modern Western and ancient Chinese influences in form, texture, tonality, topic, and other dimensions of style and structure. Two Chinese composers whose recent compositions for the piano share similar characteristics: Zhao Zhang (b. 1964; Nature no. 2, 2013) and Xiaoxuan Xu (b. 1990; An Unusual Feast of East, 2022). The research will discuss how Zhao Zhang and Xiaoxuan Xu accomplish this fusion of old and new in their recent piano works Nature no. 2, (2013) and An Unusual Feast of East, 2022. …

Compositional Techniques For Horror Film Soundtracks, Malia L. Hernandez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

With this paper, I aim to explore the history of horror film soundtracks and discover the various compositional techniques that are used to trigger physical responses from a viewer. I also intend to describe how horror scores have adapted and changed over time as our social and political climate continues to evolve by examining several different kinds of sources including academic studies, articles, and film reviews. While every viewer is different, a film scorer can properly build suspense by using specific compositional methodologies to briefly alter responses of the human mind and body.  This type of research would provide useful …

Beyond The Canon: From Classical Foundations To Contemporary Relevance In Shaping Tomorrow's Musicians, Lauren N. Tougas

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

Undergraduate music programs in the United States have historically centered ensemble-based instruction on the Western classical canon in order to cultivate technical mastery, stylistic fluency, and disciplined collaborative musicianship. This pedagogical model has proven durable and remains foundational to professional orchestral and choral performance practice. Canonical repertoire continues to anchor audition requirements, institutional programming, and degree structures across institutions of higher education. Yet the contemporary professional landscape has evolved into a far more diversified artistic ecosystem characterized by stylistic hybridity, living composer integration, interdisciplinary collaboration, constrained rehearsal models, and portfolio-based career trajectories.

This Honors Capstone investigates the relationship between undergraduate …

The Effects Of Visual Supports On The Acquisition Of Guitar Chords, Cole S. Jahna

Thesis Projects

There is a current literature gap in applied behavior analysis (ABA) and music-based leisure activities. This study utilized a multiple-probe design to evaluate the effects of visual supports on the guitar fretboard combined with behavioral skills training (BST) to teach correct strumming and finger placement of three guitar chords (i.e., E, C, and G) to a neurodivergent adult. By using a task analysis, the strum and each individual finger placement were scored as correct or incorrect during each chord trial. Three chords that were under 50% accuracy in baseline were selected for the intervention. The intervention was introduced sequentially to …

Creative Constraints And Studio Ecology: Rethinking Collaboration In Contemporary Music Practice, Sean Foran

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

Presentation at SAE New Zealand Research Seminar Series

This presentation explores how creative constraints can function not as limitations, but as methodological tools within contemporary music production and musical improvisation. In an era of near-unlimited technological possibility in the recording studio, the question of how musicians make effective creative decisions becomes increasingly significant.

Drawing on two practice-based research projects, (1) a constrained studio recording study built around the aphorism “no more than four,” and (2) an interdisciplinary improvisation project using poetry as both stimulus and constraint, this research examines how deliberately imposed limitations shape collaboration, decision-making, and musical outcomes in …

“It Takes A Big Thrust To Destabilize An Entrenched Practice”: On Taruskin And The Western Traditions, Ronit Seter

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This memorial essay begins with a brief appreciation of Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music and its critical reception (Susan McClary, Charles Rosen). It continues with comments on the early stages of his career, noting his strategic pincer movement, that is, a pivot from his early research on Russian operas—to his 1980 groundbreaking JAMS article on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring on the one hand, and a source reading book (Weiss-Taruskin, 1984) on the other. Both became essential for launching his career, and for our field. I then delve into several of Taruskin’s core ideas—about current and past …

Introduction, Ronit Seter, Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin—the single most prominent and influential musicologist of the past half-century—died on July 1, 2022 at age 77. This Colloquy consists of extended versions of papers presented on July 2, 2023, at the annual meeting of the Israeli Musicological Society, and additional essays by scholars who knew Taruskin personally. The essays engage in critical reflections on his personality, ethics, teaching philosophy, methodologies, and massive and skillful literary output. Moreover, they illuminate developments in musicology over the past fifty years, from its positivistic roots and its focus on Western canonical works to challenges from ethnomusicological practices, feminist theory, and anti-racism/colonialism.

Front Matter

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Orthography, Jeremy Gill

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The myth of Pope Gregory I taking melodic dictation from a magical singing bird is the imaginative starting point of Western musicʼs love-hate relationship with the music notation systems it later developed. This essay traces that development through Thomas Tallis and J. S. Bach to the dichotomous modern examples of Brian Ferneyhough and Arvo Pärt. In it, I suggest that Western musicʼs eventual development hinged upon that earliest desire to document and codify melodies, answering Gregoryʼs contemporary Isidore of Seville, who lamented that “unless sounds are held by the memory of man, they perish, because they cannot be written down.”

Pedro António Avondano: Il Mondo Della Luna. Naxos 660487-88, 2021., Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The world-premiere recording of Il mondo della luna by Pedro António Avondano consists of a highly skillful and alert performance by Portuguese musicians, including singers well trained in Italian. The recitatives were rehearsed in an unusual way, with the singers first speaking the lines rather than singing them. The experiment will be judged variously by different observers. The reviewer dislikes the frequent clash in pitch between voice and instruments, especially at cadences. But others have hailed the recording unstintingly.

Two Essays On Contemporary Music, Bálint András Varga

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Bálint András Varga (1941–2019) was an advocate for and a keen critic of contemporary music, first on radio, and later as an acquisitions editor for both Editio Hungarica and Universal-Edition. He interviewed many musical figures and planned to interview visual artists before he died. His interlocutors were impressed with Varga’s insightful questions and frequently answered them much more comprehensively than they would ones from standard journalists. These two essays were intended to be published in Varga’s third book, From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir. The first, “What to Listen for in Music,” refers to Aaron Copland’s book of …

Defying The Conventional: Musical Performance, Embodied Cognition, And The Reconfiguration Of Institutional Discourse, Dillon Parmer

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This essay confronts the dialectic between theory and practice through a comparison of an idea basic to how we understand music (the notion that pitch moves up and down in vertical space) with how pitch is thought of in actual music-making. The comparison leads to both a new conceptual model for thinking about pitch, what might be called Pitch Horizontality, as well as a proposal for how to bring institutional discourse about music into sync, not with how scholars in other disciplines think about their subject matter, but with the thinking that goes on in contexts of real-world artistic production.

Bridging Traditions: An Exploration Of Orchestral And Contemporary Bass Clarinet Performance Practice, Patrick Burke

Research Theses

This thesis presents a practice-led investigation into bass clarinet performance, examining how orchestral and contemporary traditions may be explored as an integrated artistic practice. Grounded in a reflective, semi-autoethnographic methodology, the research traces the evolution of my performance practice through exploration of repertoire, modes of collaboration and critical reflection. Rather than seeking prescriptive models or definitive outcomes, the study embraces the exploratory nature of artistic research, allowing insights to emerge through practice and experience.

Situated within my ongoing work as a professional clarinettist, the research is informed by active engagement across orchestral, solo, chamber, and collaborative contexts. The thesis demonstrates …

Shadows And Stars: How To Bring Student Compositions To Life, Dylan K. Ahrens

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Student composer Dylan Ahrens will present a session titled 'Shadows and Stars: a Symphony for Band,' premiered by the Belmont University Wind Ensemble on April 17, 2026. The composer will provide an analysis of the piece, discuss compositional processes, and outline the experience of learning to conduct one's own work with a collegiate ensemble. This presentation will include audio and video sample of rehearsal and performance, as well as images from the score.

Undergraduate Voice Students’ Understanding Of The Vocalize And Its Purpose, Natalie H. Bazemore

Honors College Theses

This research discusses undergraduate voice students' understanding of vocalizes and their purpose. To discuss this subject, a vocalize has been defined along with its purpose analyzed. By discovering what methods voice teachers are using to prescribe vocalizes tells us how they are educating their singers on developing technical singing skills. This research was collected through a survey conducted in Qualtrics and was shared via social media voice teacher forums and collegiate music settings. This 5-10 minute long survey included participants that are either undergraduate voice students or undergraduate voice teachers. The teachers and students completed different surveys, both asking about …