Music Theory Commons^™

Chaconnes, Sonatas, And Fugues, Oh My: A Study Of The Influence Of Baroque, Classical, And Romantic Musical Forms On Today's Media, Cadence A. Graves

ATU Research Symposium

As a future music educator, it is my duty to have not only understanding and knowledge of composers, music history, and compositional techniques, but to also have an appreciation, passion, and interest in what music is, where it has been, how it has changed, and where it is going now. With this research, I deepened my appreciation for the evolution of music over the course of history, expanded my understanding of how and when they came into existence, and broadened my understanding and appreciation of music that draws on those techniques today.

In the comparisons I made between compositions of …

Music Therapy Techniques In The Commercial Music Industry, Sarah Heath

Senior Honors Theses

Despite the fact that music is commonly described as free therapy with easily accessible content in the modern age of streaming, most people do not realize that music they already listen to contains many legitimate, psychologically tested therapy. This creative artistic research study examines the role that music therapy processes and techniques play in affecting the form, songwriting and creative processes of the modern music industry. These foundational aspects of songs elicit neurological responses, the emotional effect of which is discussed and incorporated through creative research and implementation through a creative artifact. This study explores songwriting techniques found in various …

Violin Intonation: The Connection Between The Violin’S Tuning System And Performance, Marion J. Johnson

Musical Offerings

The history of the violin’s intricate tuning system is rich with various pitch standards, the influence of musicians, and diversity of violin craftsmanship. The violin offers a wide array of tuning techniques, and even the smallest intonation adjustment can wildly impact the violin’s pitch and playability. Violinists possess an enormous capability to facilitate effective tuning in a solo and ensemble setting. The design of the instrument’s body, dating as far back as the early Renaissance and extending to the modern violin, impacts timbre, resonance, and string tension. Every detail of the violin, even those that may seem inconsequential, affects its …

Soundscape - A Guided Approach To Post-Tonal Horn Repertoire, Selena B. Boyda

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

More modern post-tonal works are being composed and it is imperative that horn players interpret the music as accurately as possible. Analyzing the music is a way one can interpret the music accurately. The purpose of this research is to develop a guided approach for interpretation of post-tonal horn repertoire using analytical techniques. Selected works analyzed and used are Olivier Messiaen’s “Appel Interstellaire,” Stanley Friedman’s Topanga Variations, and Jenni Brandon’s Dawn. Analytical techniques used include set theory, limited modes of transposition, contour relations, motivic patterns, modal analysis, and motifs.

Orthography, Jeremy Gill

Music & Musical Performance

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.”

Metric Expressivity: An Introduction, Felipe Avellar De Aquino

Music & Musical Performance

This article discusses how meter and musical impulses can generate distinct character traits in music according to a performer’s interpretation of the metric notation. It is part of an ongoing research project focused on interpretative elements and using analytical as well as auto-ethnographical methods. This article includes analysis and comparisons of historical recordings contiguous to performance-focused analysis. It is based on the study of metric components, organizational structures, and metric-structuring elements and concepts developed by Edward T. Cone (1968), David Epstein (1995a, 1995b), Roy Howat (1995), Mine Doğantan-Dack (2012, 2014), and Nicholas Cook (2001). These writers’ thoughts are placed in …

In Praise Of Simplicity: Marie Hinrichs’S Op. 1, Neun Gesänge, Stephen Rodgers

Music & Musical Performance

In a chapter from German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century (1996), Jürgen Thym describes the historiography of the German Lied as “a hike through the high-peak area of a mountain landscape where the trail along the ridge leads from one glorious peak to the next.” Beneath the high peaks of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf, he notes, are smaller peaks not reachable by trail. Thym clears paths through this unexplored landscape by surveying the Lieder of Carl Loewe, Fanny Hensel, Franz Liszt, Robert Franz, Clara Schumann, and Peter Cornelius. My essay extends one of these paths, exploring the songs of …

Applications Of Information Literacy To Teaching Independent Music Analysis, Katrina Roush

Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy

Undergraduate and graduate music students learn many tools beneficial for music analysis, and they practice applying these tools to music in their music theory classes. However, they often struggle to perform useful analysis on their own without the guidance of an instructor. They can have trouble understanding that analysis should communicate their personal interpretation of a work, and they may not realize that independent analysis usually requires some preparatory work (analytical research),such as discovering if others have analyzed the work and learning new analytical methods. This article shows that there is a strong connection between various steps in the music-analytical …

Report On The 2023 Workshops In Music Theory Pedagogy At The University Of British Columbia, Jason Yin Hei Lee, Kaylee Therieau

Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Rodrigo’S Concierto De Aranjuez Through The Writings Of Regino Sainz De La Maza, Leopoldo Neri

Soundboard Scholar

Regino Sainz de la Maza was the guitarist who premiered Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez at the Palau de la Música in Barcelona in 1940. Although musicologists have studied this musical phenomenon from different approaches, this study approaches the subject from the perspective of the performer and his musical writings, affording us new historical, aesthetic and technical data on Rodrigo's work.

In Search Of The Armorial Aesthetic: The Counter-Reform Of Ariano Suassuna And The Compositional Techniques In Clovis Pereira’S Suite Macambira, Wagner De Oliveira Duarte

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, in the wake of the Week of Modern Art in São Paulo in 1922, Brazil grappled with defining its national identity, distinct from European influences. While eminent figures such as Villa-Lobos, Camargo Guarnieri, and Francisco Mignone provided foundational narratives in this quest, the Armorial movement emerged as a unique and emblematic response to these nationalistic aspirations.

Originating from the creative vision of Ariano Suassuna, the Armorial movement, though often perceived as a regional initiative, epitomized a broader endeavor to represent Brazil's diverse cultural tapestry. Central to understanding this movement is the work …

Experimental Document Analysis—An Analytical Framework For Document Design, Niels W. Lund

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In this paper I will present an analytical framework for future documents, an experimental document analysis providing support for document design. The American economist, Herbert A. Simon outlined how to design an artificial object in his work "The Sciences of the Artificial" (1969, 1996) and described how this can be done in a systematic way, by a science of design. Simon describes the design process as a matter of finding possible alternatives among the potential optimal alternatives and finding a satisficing solution, by which he means a solution in-between satisfactory solutions and optimal solutions which can work in real life, …

Sculpting Time: A Performance Guide To Four Fragments Of Time By Marcus Siqueira, Luis Felipe Vargas Magdaleno De Moraes

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This dissertation investigates the musical and phenomenological aspects of Four Fragments of Time by Marcus Siqueira (b. 1974) and provides a performance guide for this work. Furthermore, this dissertation analyzes previous guitar works by the composer, seeking to understand Siqueira’s compositional idiosyncrasies and to provide context for the interpretation of Four Fragments of Time. This dissertation includes a biography of the composer, an analysis of the compositional process of Four Fragments of Time, an analysis of the recurrent idiomatic procedures in Siqueira’s guitar works, and an overview of the collaborative process between the composer and the author. Additionally, an analysis …

La Fiesta Del Espiritu Santo: An Original Work For Choir, Soloists, And Small Ensemble Influenced By The Santeria Music Of The African-Dominican Community In The Dominican Republic, Rafael Scarfullery

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This study examines the role of Santería music as practiced by African Dominicans in Villa Mella, a neighborhood of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. This musical tradition comes from the culture and religion of the Yoruba people who were brought as slaves from Africa, and features complex drum rhythms and call-and-response chants. This paper deals with the historical and social context of Santería music within the Dominican Republic, but its principal objective is to adopt the musical language of this tradition and use it to create a new contemporary work for mixed choir and small ensemble.

One of the most …

Character Development And Revolution: Use Of Leitmotif In The First Acts Of Les Misérables And Hamilton: An American Musical, Mary Katherine Pezzillo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Leitmotif, a recurring musical theme that represents a character, idea, or situation, is a device used in operas, film scores, and musical theater. Accredited to Richard Wagner, leitmotifs enhance storytelling and provide a sense of cohesion to a production. The popular musicals Les Misérables and Hamilton bear many similarities, including the use of leitmotif as a storytelling device. This thesis explores how the two musicals use leitmotif differently, through the lens of the protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters. Though the leitmotifs in Les Misérables generally represent ideas and the leitmotifs in Hamilton are mostly character-based, this tool aids the overall …

Joaquín Rodrigo And Julian Bream: Aspects Of A Relationship, Javier Suárez-Pajares

Soundboard Scholar

In light of the complex diplomatic relations between Spain and the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the deteriorating relationship between the Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo and the English guitarist Julian Bream describes a telling arc—from 1951, when Bream gave the British premiere of the Concierto de Aranjuez, to 1959, when he emphatically rejected the Sonata giocosa that Rodrigo had written for him. To explore Bream's negative reaction, this study considers both Rodrigo’s relation to England and Bream’s ambivalent attitude toward the Spanish guitar tradition. An epilogue examines the recordings that the guitarist subsequently made of the Concierto de Aranjuez …

Andrés Segovia And Federico Moreno Torroba’S Danza Castellana, Julio Gimeno

Soundboard Scholar

The guitar’s early twentieth-century repertoire is of unique importance, containing as it does the first guitar pieces by non-guitarist composers known for their symphonic, operatic and chamber music. Many of these composers wrote for the pioneering Andalusian guitarist Andrés Segovia, and among the most prolific of them was Federico Moreno Torroba. In various memoirs and interviews, Segovia identified Torroba’s miniature Danza castellana as not only the first piece written for him by a non-guitarist composer but even the first such piece by anyone, predating, in Segovia’s telling, Falla’s 1920 Homenaje. This article challenges Segovia’s claim by recounting the details …

Music Of The Divine: Interweaving Threads Connecting Contemporary Chant-Based Piano Repertoire, Jeremy D. Duck

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

The purpose of this document is to prove chant remains an important source of inspiration among living composers, and, despite the number of piano works already incorporating chant, composers today are still finding unique ways to include chant in their music. To achieve this objective, representative works have been selected for research and analysis for four of the major chant traditions. Connor Chee’s The Navajo Piano, Victoria Bond’s Illuminations on Byzantine Chant, and Hayes Biggs’ E.M. am Flügel: Poem-Étude for Piano Solo, though the chants from which they are inspired are diverse in concept and style, they …

Larson's Musical Forces In Schlenker's Music Semantics, Mick De Neeve

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Larson’s musical forces of gravity, magnetism and inertia link music to metaphors of physical motion. Schlenker’s music semantics is based on similar physical world associations. Because Larson’s forces are about note movements towards harmonic stability, his framework implies note groupings at stable boundaries, given common cadential harmony. These groupings with forces assignments can then be viewed as musical events in Schlenker’s approach, and mapped to structure-preserving external (world) events as required for this author’s semantics. To this end, Schlenker’s truth definition, specifying when an event is ‘true of’ a musical expression, will be adapted. The synthesis amounts to what Schlenker …

Aum314.1 Music For Non-Linear Narrative Example 2, Sae Institute

Exemplars

HD / Exceeds Specification exemplar for AUM314.1 - Music for Non-Linear Narrative

Aum314.1 Music For Non-Linear Narrative Example 1, Sae Institute

Exemplars

Exceeds Specification exemplar for AUM314.1 - Music for Non-Linear Narrative

The “Rebuff Chorus” In 1960–2000 Pop Music, David Heetderks

Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

In some verse–prechorus–chorus (VPC) songs from 1960–1990, the prechorus sets up an expectation for tonic arrival, only to have the subsequent chorus reject this tonal implication and either withhold tonic resolution, abruptly change to a new key, or contain a passage whose relation to the previous one is tonally ambiguous. I call this event a “rebuff” chorus. Formal analysis and intertextual comparison show how rebuff choruses use absent-tonic passages or modulatory “breakout” passages in order to swerve away from the implications of the previous section. The formal device often transforms the expressive effect of the chorus from arrival and sincerity …

William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes: "Why The Hell . . . Should Anyone Listen To This?!", R. Douglas Reed

Music & Musical Performance

William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes: "Why the hell...should anyone listen to this?!"

By Douglas Reed--2022

The article explores William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes (1989) through historical context, musical analysis, performance practice, and the composer's essay on the relationship between his composition and Whistler's paintings. Commentary by composer Sydney Hodkinson gives information about the 1960s new music scene in Ann Arbor (the ONCE Group, The Grate Society) composition study with Ross Lee Finney.

A View From Within: Timbre As An Analytical Tool In Contemporary Viola Music, Ash Mach

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Timbre is an elusive musical parameter that musicians, physicists, and cognitive scientists have been grappling with for centuries. While timbre can roughly be defined as an auditory attribute that distinguishes one tone color from another, this definition does not capture the complexities of sound and our perceptions thereof. Research on timbre has flourished since the 20th century, however, timbre studies has largely gone unnoticed within the viola community. This study, “A View from Within,” helps close the gap between timbre studies and viola repertoire scholarship by presenting analyses of three pieces from the 20th and 21st centuries through a timbre …

Componiendo El Núcleo: Una Exploración De La Bomba Y La Identidad Afroecuatoriana En El Valle De Chota, Ethan Guok

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Este proyecto se centra en la bomba, una tradición musical y de danza afroecuatoriana que se practica en el valle del Chota, situado entre las provincias de Imbabura y Carchi, pero también más ampliamente en el Territorio Ancestral que comprende el valle del Chota, La Concepción, Salinas y Guallupe. Históricamente y en la actualidad, la bomba ha desempeñado un papel importante en la creación de comunidad y la preservación de la identidad cultural afrochoteña, y el conocimiento de cómo tocar la bomba se ha transmitido intergeneracionalmente a través de la tradición oral. Sin embargo, como tradición negra y oral, la …

Fundamentals, Function, And Form: Student Workbook, Ivette Herryman Rodríguez, Andre Mount, Jerod Sommerfeldt

Milne Open Textbooks

Students of tonal Western art music will find in this workbook a full set of exercises and activities to deepen and reinforce their understanding of music theory and analysis. The book begins with such rudimentary topics as rhythm, meter, and pitch and progresses through polyphony, chromatic harmony, and musical form. In addition to exercises tailored to each topic, the book features recurrent activities focused on four-voice part-writing (figured-bass/Roman numeral realization and melody harmonization) as well as score analysis, which become progressively more advanced as new concepts and skills are covered.

Included for analysis are over 500 excerpts drawn from the …

André Mocquereau's Theory Of Rhythm, Charles Weaver

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the theory of rhythm developed by Dom André Mocquereau (1849–1930), a French Benedictine monk. Mocquereau’s theory was originally conceived as a method for performing Gregorian chant and has been the source for numerous publications and recordings since the beginning of the twentieth century. This dissertation places Mocquereau’s theory in the context of both the evolving performance practice of medieval monophony and the history of music theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 1 surveys the history of the notation of Gregorian chant, introducing the problem of constructing a rhythmic practice from historical sources. Chapter 2 examines …

Sonorous Movement: Cellistic Corporealities In Works By Helmut Lachenmann, Simon Steen-Andersen, And Johan Svensson, John Popham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Sonorous Movement: Cellistic Corporealities in Works by Lachenmann, Steen-Andersen, and Svensson, I analyze three compositions that foreground the cellist-body, its physical gestures, and instrumental interactions: Helmut Lachemann’s Pression für einen Cellisten (1969/2010), Simon Steen-Andersen’s Study for String Instrument #3 (2011), and Johan Svensson’s marionette for string instrument, electro-mechanical devices and lights (2018). These works center sound production and the performing body as sites of ontological and creative exploration. Their physical gestures serve multiple sensorial functions, heightening the visual and kinesthetic dimensions of a traditionally aurally oriented practice. For each work, I develop a corresponding analytical method based on …

Ways Of Silence And Other Absences In The Music Of George Crumb, Jean-Patrick Besingrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The music of American composer George Crumb (1929-2022) is undeniably singular in the musical landscape. His aesthetic is often characterized by his exploration of timbre, his graphic scores, his use of quotation, his theatricality, and his interest in unusual instruments. This study proposes to take a different approach to Crumb’s aesthetic through the spectrum of silences and other absences. The concept of silence will be broken down and reconstructed through the Japanese concept of ma (間) and of empty spaces. Multiple types of silences and absences will be considered throughout this dissertation, expanding thus the concept of silence not only …

Form In Hip-Hop Music: Sections, Songs, And History, Stephen M. Gomez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores musical form in recorded hip-hop music from 1979–present. Form, defined as the large-scale organization of songs, is a parameter that artists consider in the creative process and fans experience while listening. Hip-hop’s historical foundation as a live, improvised, party-oriented genre influenced formal functions and patterning from the earliest days of its popular recorded life, beginning with the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. While many of the section and song form labels used by scholars of pop-rock music are transferable to the analysis of hip-hop, the latter genre conveys a unique sense of time rooted in …