Music Practice Commons^™

Buddhism As Performing Art: Visualizing Music In The Tibetan Sacred Ritual Music Liturgies, Jeffrey W. Cupchik

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The eleventh-century Tibetan female ascetic, Machik Labdrön (1055-1153), developed a Vajrayāna (Tantric) Buddhist meditation method called Chöd (Tib. gCod, Eng. “to cut”) and associated ritual practices as a means of eliminating “self-grasping,” which is defined as the mistaken instinct of regarding one’s “self” and all phenomena as intrinsically, or independently, existent. Her musical-meditation method became renowned across Central Asia during her lifetime, and Chödritual practices and liturgies have been transmitted from teacher to disciple in unbroken lineages until today. The ritual is now well known globally, with Tibetan Lamas, nuns, and empowered exponents teaching widely, across a transnational …

Towards An Interactive Environment For The Performance Of Dubstep Music, James Herrington

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This Masters by Research project explores the integration of different concepts relating to the presence of the human body in Dubstep music performance. Three intended performance systems propose that the body is the logical site for the interactive control of live Dubstep music. The physicality and gestures of instrumentalists, choreographed dancers, and audience members will be examined in order to develop new and exciting ways to perform this genre in a live setting.

The systems take on a three-tiered hierarchical approach on two levels in regards to the extraction of gestural information from human body movements, as well as in …

Singing With A Sanxian: A Study Of The Principal Instrument In Bai Musical Tradition , Christian Stanbrook

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The Bai people, a minority group in the People’s Republic of China numbering at least 1.8 million, are heavily concentrated in Yunnan Province’s Dali Autonomous Prefecture. Music has historically been a significant part of Bai culture, as Bai musicians across the region enjoy performing Baizu diao, or popular Bai folk tunes, in the form of singing or on various instruments. These diao, or melodies, often describe the lifestyle of Bai people and the region in which they live in and are commonly performed on a threestringed member of the lute family called a sanxian. This study uncovers both the history …

Syntagma Musicum Ii: De Organographia, Parts Iii – V With Index, Michael Praetorius, Quentin Faulkner Trans. & Ed.

Zea E-Books Collection

Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) achieved distinction as a practicing musician: as organist and Kapellmeister at Wolfenbüttel, Dresden and Magdeburg, and (in his later years) by incessant travel to fulfill commissions at various central German courts. Amid his travels Praetorius found time to publish an impressive series of collections of musical compositions, in all more than a thousand works. Praetorius’s three-volume Syntagma musicum (Musical Encyclopedia) belongs to the last years of his life. Volume I, Musicae artis analecta (1614/15, in Latin), treats principles and practices of religious music, from a decidedly Lutheran perspective. Volume II, De organographia (1619, in German) deals with …

About This Issue, Nancy November

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

No abstract provided.

My Mla At 20, Lisa Rae Philpott

Western Libraries Publications

Highlights of my 20th MLA conference - the 83rd Music Library Association meeting, held in Atlanta, Georgia, Feb-Mar 2014. Sessions I attended included: Stanford University's re-design of their music library website; representation of women scholars in musicological publications (Suzanne Moulton-Gertig); research into women collectors of Irish traditional music (Margaret Erickson); "What NOT to Wear: MLA Interview Edition" (Mistie Shaw, Susannah Cleveland, Mark Puente); RDA and Public Services (Elizabeth Hill Cribbs, Sonia Archer-Capuzzo, Patricia Falk) and Stop Reinventing the Wheel: An Online Repository for Music Information Literacy (Andi Beckendorf, Sara J. Beutter Manus, Clayton Crenshaw, Brian McMillan, Nancy Zavac)

About This Issue, Michael E. Ruhling

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

No abstract provided.

The Art Song Of Edmundo Villani-Côrtes: A Performance Guide Of Selected Works, Irailda Eneli Barros Silva Rodrigues

Theses and Dissertations--Music

The purpose of this study is to present a performance guide for singers on twelve selected songs in Brazilian Portuguese for voice and piano by Brazilian composer, pianist, and arranger Edmundo Villani-Côrtes (b.1930). Since 1949, Villani-Côrtes has been active in the musical scene of Brazil. He has a unique compositional style that seamlessly combines elements of both art music and popular music. Villani-Côrtes’s body of works includes over two hundred compositions for solo instrumental music, orchestral music, choral music, and art song. He has written over sixty songs in Brazilian Portuguese, including the Ciclo Cecília Meireles (1987), winner of the …

Django's Caravan: The Journey Of The Gypsy King, Patrick Ray Monson

Music

The life and musical contribution of Django Reinhardt including musical and visual examples.

Commonality And Diversity In Recordings Of Beethoven’S Middle-Period String Quartets, Nancy November

Performance Practice Review

A widespread opinion in recent research about the performance of Beethoven’s works is that artists need to restore a connection to "tradition," and that recordings from the early twentieth century can help with this. However, these early recordings tell us most about the aesthetics and performance ideals of their day, and hence how Beethoven and his string quartets were received by early twentieth-century audiences. Case studies of early recordings of Beethoven middle-period quartets reveal ways in which these these performances differed, sometimes radically, from the kinds of performances Beethoven would have expected to hear, especially with regard to the use …

Unearthing Forgotten Treasures: Anonymous Arias With Obbligato Violoncello At The Estense Library, Modena, Alessandro Sanguineti

Performance Practice Review

Recent studies regarding the first steps of the violoncello in North Italy at the end of the seventeenth century have been concentrating on the vast musical output collected by Francesco II, Duke of Modena, now held at the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria. Nonetheless, there is still a conspicuous number of anonymous manuscripts copied in Modena at the end of the seventeenth century containing opera arias which include several examples with obbligato violoncello. A connection has been made with one of these collections and a particular performance of L’Ercole Trionfante in Piacenza in 1688 with music by the composer and organist Bernardo …

"Stradivari" By Stewart Pollens, Peter Walls

Performance Practice Review

Peter Walls discusses and reviews Pollens 2010 work.

Pollens, Stewart. Stradivari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

ISBN 978-0-52187-304-8

By Word Of Mouth: Historical Performance Comes Of Age, Ingrid E. Pearson

Performance Practice Review

Since Clive Brown’s 1991 accusation that many twentieth-century manifestations of historical performance lacked an appropriate degree of musical sensitivity, the historical performance movement has truly come of age. In the arena of Western Art music, historical performance is now an essential component of musical training and education. Successful performers must be able to seamlessly function across the widest possible range of musical styles, accommodating an equally wide gamut of tastes, both individually and collectively.

In 1982, nine years earlier, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word explored differences between oral and literate cultures. Of particular interest to …

Jean-François Beaudin: Borrowing From The Old World And The New, Wendell B. Dobbs

Music Faculty Research

The modern flute world is full of innovation. Every year brings a new assortment of changes intended to improve the design or functioning of the modern flute—a new head-joint or a new material, a design innovation such as the vertical flute or a new contrabass flute. Much more subtle are changes to the design of 18thcentury style flutes. Generally, modern makers of these instruments take careful measurements of particular antique flutes that are recognized for ease of playing and copy them. The innovations are most likely subtle—a new wood, gentle tweaking of the embouchure or a tone hole, or cosmetic …

Polychoral Performance Practice And "Maestro Di Cappella" Conducting, Florian Bassani

Performance Practice Review

This article disputes some basic questions concerning the coordination of seventeenth century sacred music, approaching the phenomenon through a musical species of particular interest, though largely unstudied from a performance practice point of view. Roman polychorality with its specific performing conditions offers an illuminating perspective on principles of musical direction and interaction which differ significantly from our modern access path towards these topics. The inquiry ranges from basics of performance (such as sheet music, rehearsals, direction technics, models and stylistic conditioning of the performers) over the concrete role of the maestro di cappella as well as the tactus as cornerstones …

A Survey Of The Sacred Choral–Orchestral Works Of Sir Henry Walford Davies (1869–1941), Martin C. Cook

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, Student Creative Work, and Performances

In the closing years of the 19th Century, when Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry and Edward Elgar were at the height of their fame and influence in British musical society Henry Walford Davies emerged as one of the most promising talents of the day, receiving commissions from the provincial music festivals of Great Britain, which were a rite of passage for emerging composers.

Between 1904 and 1929 Davies produced eleven sacred choral-orchestral works for these festivals and one further work, which were received favorably in their day but are now almost forgotten. There are five large multi movement works: The …

Stravinsky, Tempo, And Le Sacre, Erica Heisler Buxbaum

Performance Practice Review

In reviews of recorded performances by others of Le sacre du printemps, Stravinsky contradicted his metronome markings and his own recorded performance tempos. His preferred tempos in the reviews encompass a range wider than the markings imply, yet more narrow than his own performance tempos suggest.

The "Not-So-Precisely Measured" Music Of The Middle Ages, Hendrik Van Der Werf

Performance Practice Review

Evidence from medieval writers, musical notation, and variant readings in the sources all suggest that troubadour and trouvere songs were performed in more or less equal note values and in a manner that presented the poetry clearly.

'Back To The Land': Performance Practice And The Classic Period, Malcom S. Cole

Performance Practice Review

Although much valuable work has been done on performance practice in the Classic period, many issues await detailed study.

The Performance Of French Baroque Music: A Report On The State Of Current Research, Albert Cohen

Performance Practice Review

A survey, with a bibliography, of published research on French Baroque performance practice that appeared during the period 1978-88.

Musica Mechanica Organoedi • Musical Mechanics For The Organist, Jacob Adlung, Johann Lorenz Albrecht, Johann Friedrich Agricola, Quentin Faulkner

Zea E-Books Collection

This is the first English translation of Musica mechanica organoedi, originally published in Berlin in 1768. Its author Jacob Adlung (1699-1762) was a musician and scholar and organist at the Predigerkirche in Erfurt.

The Musica mechanica organoedi focuses primarily on the organ, from the perspective of the information an organist might need to know about the instrument; specifically, it encompasses the following:

• an evaluation, from an 18th-century perspective, of earlier works on its subject: Praetorius, Werkmeister, Mattheson, Niedt, Kircher and others

• an appreciation of the organ: its value and regard

• the history of the organ

• …

Randall Thompson's Requiem: A Text Setting Analysis And Recommendations For Performance, Zachary J. Vreeman

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, Student Creative Work, and Performances

Randall Thompson is a well-known composer of some of the most familiar and accessible American choral music of the twentieth century. His conservative harmonic language and idiomatic writing for voices has made many of his works popular with both amateur and academic choirs. They are particularly admired for their sensitive setting of English text.

In 1958, Thompson wrote a large work titled Requiem, inspired by a young terminally-ill choral conductor, and commissioned by the University of California. Though positively reviewed, it received only a handful of performances, and is little known today outside of a few extracted movements. The …

David Maslanka's Desert Roads, Four Songs For Clarinet And Wind Ensemble: An Analysis And Performer's Guide, Joshua R. Mietz

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, Student Creative Work, and Performances

Known primarily as a composer for the wind band, few American composers have received the notoriety and widespread acclaim that David Maslanka has since 1970. His works for wind ensemble are now considered standard repertoire and are played frequently by high school, college-level, and professional ensembles alike. Additionally, his works for chamber groups and soloists have continued to gain in popularity.  As of the writing of this document, Maslanka has composed concertos for saxophone, euphonium, flute, marimba, trombone, and piano.  Early in 2005, he completed his first large-scale work for solo clarinet with wind ensemble accompaniment:  Desert Roads.  Desert …

Tunepal: Searching A Digital Library Of Traditional Music Scores, Bryan Duggan, Brendan O'Shea

Reports

Purpose – This paper aims to describe the Tunepal project as an example of a music information retrieval (MIR) system that is having an impact on how musicians access, learn and play traditional Irish music around the world. Design/methodology/approach – This paper describes the functionality of the Tunepal system: consisting of the tune corpus, the web site tunepal.org and mobile apps supporting iOS and Android OS. Tunepal facilitates query-by-title and query-by-playing music (QBP) searches and allows a musician to retrieve and playback scores amongst other supported functions. Findings – Tunepal has been favorably received and musicians report that the system …

A Metrical Analysis And Rebarring Of Paul Creston's Sonata For Alto Saxophone And Piano, Op. 19, Christopher Kyle Sweitzer

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, Student Creative Work, and Performances

The Sonata For Alto Saxophone and Piano Op. 19 is one of the most popular pieces in the saxophone literature, commonly played by professional saxophonists during their training. It features exciting rhythmic devices like irregular and mixed meter, the notation of which is the main focus of this paper. Although Creston often used irregular and mixed meter in his compositions, he rarely specifically notated them, choosing instead to use accents, beams, slurs, and other phenomenal cues at the musical surface to create the effect of these metric plans. Time signatures often remained constant throughout entire movements. Creston believed this would …

Beloved, Thou Hast Brought Me Many Flowers And Sifting Through The Ruins: An Analysis Of Two Chamber Song Cycles By Libby Larsen, Juline Erika Barol-Gilmore

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

American composer Libby Larsen is one of the most active, prolific composers living today. Although she is known for composing in many musical genres, her vocal works are among her most recognized compositions. When selecting song texts, Libby Larsen carefully chooses poems that speak to her personally, both in the rhythm of the language and in the text’s depth of meaning and spirit. In addition, a large number of her vocal works are based on texts by or about women.

In sum, authors and poets have profoundly influenced Larsen, specifically in her chamber song cycles Beloved, Thou Hast Brought Me …

The Contributions Of Axel Jørgensen To The Solo Trombone Repertoire Of Denmark In The Twentieth Century, Andrew H. Converse

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, Student Creative Work, and Performances

Axel Jørgensen is one of a few Danish composers who has contributed compositions to the solo trombone repertoire that gained an international and lasting reputation in the twentieth century. Jørgensen, like many Danish composers from the first part of the twentieth century, is often overlooked due to the imposing figure of Carl Nielsen. Jørgensen’s compositions, while not overly patriotic, give the trombonist a sense of the Danish Nationalistic Romantic style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Jørgensen was one of the first composers to write for the emerging slide trombone idiom in Denmark at the beginning of the …

Conductor's Guide To Mark Camphouse's "To Build A Fire", Amanda L. Kastner

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis is a guide to understanding and performing Mark Camphouse’s composition, To Build A Fire. The thesis includes a biography of Jack London and a literary analysis of London’s short story “To Build A Fire,” upon which the composition is based. Musical analysis of the Camphouse composition, rehearsal considerations, and performance considerations are also discussed. The literary analysis provides background for the composition and a starting platform for the musical analysis. The musical analysis parallels the composition with the short story. This analysis also provides some technical considerations of the instrumental parts. The rehearsal considerations include a rehearsal plan, …

The Historical Development Of The Modern Worship Song, Travis Doucette

Senior Honors Theses

For centuries, followers of Christ have used music as a channel of communicating their love and adoration towards their Creator and Savior, Jesus Christ. In fact, the use of music with God’s people is encouraged throughout the pages of Scripture. In the Old Testament, the psalmist writes, “Sing to him a new song; play skillfully and shout for joy.” In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul writes to the Ephesians, “Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.” Throughout Christian history, wherever there has been renewal, revival and restoration, fresh songs of praise and worship have followed and …

An Early American Family Of Flutists, Wendell Dobbs

Music Faculty Research

An overview of the history of a dynasty of flutists, flute manufacturers and music publishers established by English emigrant Edward R. Riley in New York. Riley and copperplate printer Thomas Adams formed the firm Riley & Adams in 1812. It is said that all his three sons became music publishers, music instrument manufacturers and retailers.