Music Theory Commons^™

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 …

Producing ‘Bedroom Pop’ Music: A Compositional Project That Employs Production And Compositional Techniques Identified Through Analysis Of Select Chelsea Cutler Songs, Anna Therese Dabbs

Theses : Honours

This study explores key production and compositional techniques in popular music, specifically within the genre of ‘bedroom pop,’ focusing on the distinctive style of artist and producer Chelsea Cutler. The aim of this project was to compose an entirely new work grounded in existing genre structures and shaped by Cutler’s unique approach. To achieve this, available literature on popular music production and composition, specifically ‘bedroom pop’, was reviewed to identify common processes and techniques. A listening analysis featuring five of Cutler’s songs was conducted to establish her unique production and compositional style, with findings applied in an original song, ‘You …

Uncovering The Emotional Line: An Analysis Of Three David Maslanka Wind Ensemble Works Using Formal Emotive Intensity Analysis, Michael John Kahle

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

David Maslanka (1943–2017) was a prolific American composer who wrote most frequently for the medium of concert band/wind ensemble. His music is frequently performed by ensembles around the world. Due to his more intuitive and idiosyncratic compositional style, Maslanka would center what he described as the “emotional line” of the work, certain aspects of his music are undetected by traditional analytical models. Formal Emotive Intensity Analysis bridges that gap to focus on the supposed emotional line within Maslanka’s work. Through a case study of three of Maslanka’s works for wind band, The Seeker, Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Wind …

Developing A Framework For Musical Ekphrasis In Jazz Composition, Jessica Carlton

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Musical ekphrasis, as defined by musicologist Siglind Bruhn (2001), refers to musical compositions that transform, re-create, or ‘re-present’ a work of visual art or poetry. Though there exists a significant body of musical works that are based on visual art and poetry, there is a distinct lack of research and documentation on musical ekphrasis, particularly in the field of jazz and improvised music. Further, a formalised process framework for practitioners approaching ekphrastic composition has yet to be developed. This research project investigated musical ekphrasis through qualitative interviews with key practitioners, and a combination of practice-led research and research-led practice methodologies, …

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 …

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

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

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 …

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

Exemplars

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

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

Exemplars

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

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 …

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 …

Functional And Non-Functional Harmonic Devices In The Music Of Wayne Shorter From The 1960'S: Analysis And Application, Max Reynolds

University Honors Theses

During the 1960's, composers within the jazz genre began to expand their harmonic palette, diverging aesthetically from the compositional tendencies of music from the Great American Songbook and the Bebop repertoire. Of the people making these developments, Wayne Shorter was among the pioneers and is one of the most widely influential composers in jazz from the mid 20th century. My project has identified a selection of techniques that he used to explore new harmonic territory and applied them within an original body of work.

Play Makes Perfect: An Exploration Of Game And Play Elements In Composition And Performance, Gabrielle Chou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to explore the intersection of play and games in Western classical music and define a new category of pieces, “ludic pieces,” which contain play structures and game mechanics within their composition. Starting with surveying perspectives in ludology and ludomusicology, including those by Roger Caillois, Johan Huizinga, Jesper Juul, Katie Salen, and Eric Zimmerman, I will examine various definitions of a “game” and what its qualifying aspects are. I will then turn to music and consider pieces that interact with play and games without containing game structures, including examples of musical humor and pieces which evoke the imagery …

Experimenting With Colors In Music: Making And Breaking Rules In The Butterfly Effect, Chloe King

Honors Theses

The following thesis is a culmination of four years of academic and musical development as a percussionist at the University of Mississippi. It offers a discussion and analysis of my original composition, The Butterfly Effect (2021-2023), exploring the compositional process from preliminary sketches to the finalized score. It also discusses the inspiration for composing an original work, the use of different music theory techniques relevant to an analysis of the work, and comparisons to relevant compositions throughout the history of Western music. The Butterfly Effect experiments with compositional techniques that often depart from established rules of harmony and counterpoint, a …

Proceedings Of The 21st Century Guitar Conference 2019 & 2021

The 21st Century Guitar

This volumeʼs contributions grew from 20 of the 94 scheduled keynotes, lectures and lecture-recitals of the first and second editions of The 21st Guitar Conference. Five items stem from the inaugural edition (2019, 44 contributions) and 15 from the second edition (2021, 50 contributions).1 This conference is unique in that it is centered on contemporary guitar research, performance and pedagogy.2 Previously, guitar research had gained increased visibility thanks to the International Guitar Research Centre, launched in 2014 (Stephen Goss, President), which regularly (co-)organizes conferences on guitar research; and Soundboard Scholar, launched in 2015 (Jonathan Leathwood, Editor) ‒ currently the only …

Microtunings, Complexity, Variability: A New Sound Map For The Guitar, Pascale Criton, Caroline Delume

The 21st Century Guitar

How do microtunings help broaden the guitar's sound map and bring new musical possibilities? In this contribution, we present a set of works in which the guitar is tuned in the 72 or 96 equal temperament. They are representative of Pascale Critonʼs writing and were composed between 1996 and 2019. Each type of tuning favors its own map of harmonic relations and the generation of specific acoustic behaviors. We examine their structural, technical and expressive peculiarities and highlight how the writing and the instrumental gesture are renewed by these tunings.

Overlapping Gestural Zones And Modulation On The Fifteen-Tone Guitar, William R. Ayers

The 21st Century Guitar

With its unconventional tuning, notation, and performance requirements, Easley Blackwoodʼs Suite for Guitar in 15- Note Equal Tuning serves as a reappraisal of both tonality (through its application of a microtonal equal temperament) and guitar performance practice (with a modified fretboard and note layout). Using concepts from the fields of transformational theory and gestural music theory, this study considers modulatory and sequential passages in two movements from Blackwoodʼs Suite. This paper demonstrates how the fifteen-tone tuning and fretboard provide a unique opportunity to recontextualize the diatonic scale and its generative interval cycles in a consistent transformational space that allows the …

Making Malice Musical: Verdi’S Compositional Journey Through The Eyes Of Six Villains, Michael Chadwick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Giuseppe Verdi is a pillar of the operatic world and had a profound impact on the evolution of the art form. From a rudimentary beginning, he developed over time from a popular creator of operas in the solita forma style of 19^th century Italy into a master craftsman of combining music, text, and theatrical drama. Verdi utilized the popular compositional formal convention of solita forma to begin his career. Over time he evolved beyond its boundaries and shifted his focus to the holistic theatrical presentation of the drama. Much has been written about this evolution through analysis of Verdi’s …

Chopin’S Piano Sonata No. 3 In B Minor Op. 58: A Structural Analysis, Maverick Harrold

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in b minor Op. 58 is an incredibly important composition to the world of music. This work will uncover many of the unique facets and features of this piece as well as discover the beautiful intricacies of each of the four movements. By learning about this sonata, the reader will gain an understanding of the importance of musical structure and musical form and will gain insight into the ways of Chopin’s compositional style and of romantic piano music as a whole.

Give The Drummer Some: A Dive Into Drum Breaks And Drum Break Production, Kyle Kaldhusdal

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper traces the history of hip-hop culture through the evolution of the drum break, the original context of drum breaks in funk and soul music, their influence on DJ culture, and the subsequent impact of drum breaks on music and music production. It follows the development of breakbeat compilations in the 1970s and 1980s, parallel to the development of turntablism and sampling techniques. It also examines in detail how copyright litigation in the 1990s shaped the development of sample-based music genres and created a niche market for originally-recorded drum breaks over the subsequent decades.

Early Instruments In 21st Century Composition And An Original Composition For Saxophones And Viols, Jacob Bitinas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Composers continually seek new timbres and sonorities to bend to their will. The early music revival of the twentieth century has resurrected dozens of instruments that have gone unutilized in contemporary composition for centuries. The historically-informed-performance movement has now evolved to a point where early instruments and period performance techniques can add extraordinary new characters to twenty-first century compositions. This thesis explores how composers effectively utilize early instruments like the viola da gamba, harpsichord, lute, and recorder in their compositions.

The document also contains interview transcripts from eight composers and performers, including Nico Muhly, Liam Byrne, Martha Bishop, David Loeb, …

A Composer's Perspective On The Clarinet Concerto, Sarah Marze

Honors Scholar Theses

While seminal literature on concerto form analysis and compositions for clarinet and orchestra has been conducted, this undergraduate thesis is an exploration from a young composer’s perspective. My priority was discovering the breadth of what the clarinet concerto has to offer in order to learn how to place my own work as a composer into historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts.
First, I present an abridged history of the clarinet concerto. Despite this musical form being hundreds of years old, concerto composition is still relevant today because it is a display of balance; the best concerti are delicate balancing acts of …

Identity And Complexity In Chaya Czernowin’S Ina, Eliav Kohl

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chaya Czernowin’s Ina (1988) for solo bass flute and six pre-recorded flute parts, unfolds the drama of a protagonist battling her conflicting inner voices. Czernowin interrogates the concept of identity and asks the questions—what is an identity? To what extent can a particular identity endure its own complexities? My analysis demonstrates how the growing levels of musical complexity represent the growing independence of Ina’s multiple inner voices, and how musical simplicity enables their unification. I present two oppositional forces: an intertwining force, and a splitting force. The intertwining force acts very much like a gravitational force in the musical domain—it …

Applications Of Video Game Music Theory For The Highschool/College Theory Curriculum, Daniel L. Thompson

Honors Theses and Capstones

This paper covers the origins of video game audio and the technical limitations that effected what composers could write. Several audio excerpts have been transcribed with roman numeral analysis. The goal of this project was to determine if musical excerpts from video games could supplement an existing highschool/college theory curriculum. Theory techniques ranging from simple cadences to secondary function chords are present throughout the pieces. The pieces are from a variety of games and composers from 1983 - 2014. Overall, many of the compositions contain excellent examples of theory techniques. These excerpts would best be utilized alongside existing theory material. …

From A Humble Cry To A Holy Chaconne: The Background, Analysis, And Performance Guide To Chaconne For Tokkae, Op. 96 By M. W. Johann Kim, Jurang Kim

Theses and Dissertations--Music

The cries of animals have been used as motivic material in classical music literature throughout history. This project considers the Cambodian tocay gecko’s cry as the motif which embodies the harmonic structure in Chaconne for Tokkae for Violin and Piano, Op. 96 by Dr. Myung Whan Johann Kim. It reveals how Dr. Kim adapts unique compositional style and technique such as the bell harmony of Dr. Kurt Anton Hueber, to develop the theme into 39 colorful variations. The essential elements of the chaconne and the composer’s intentions are examined through personal interviews and correspondence with the composer. These elements are …

David Gillingham’S Stained Glass For Wind Ensemble: A Transcription From The Standard Percussion Repertoire, Ashley Shoupe

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Stained Glass (1994), by David Gillingham, is a work that is considered one of the standard pieces of percussion repertoire. To date, there are no known arrangements or transcriptions which exist for wind band that originated from the percussion ensemble repertoire. Stained Glass is a work which utilizes many musical characteristics and compositional techniques that could translate successfully to the wind ensemble, such as sweeping ostinato, sustained chordal structures, and a variety of colors and textures. It is because of this observation of musical characteristics that makes this work a good candidate for a successful first transcription from percussion ensemble …

Liquid Tab, Nathan Hulet

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Guitar transcription is a complex task requiring significant time, skill, and musical knowledge to achieve accurate results. Since most music is recorded and processed digitally, it would seem like many tools to digitally analyze and transcribe the audio would be available. However, the problem of automatic transcription presents many more difficulties than are initially evident. There are multiple ways to play a guitar, many diverse styles of playing, and every guitar sounds different. These problems become even more difficult considering the varying qualities of recordings and levels of background noise.

Machine learning has proven itself to be a flexible tool …

Composers At War: A Study Of Composers Who Fought In World War I And World War Ii, Jason T. Hoffmann

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This research document explores the connections between the war experiences of four composers and whether the possibility existed that any of the composers had posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), moral injury, mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI), traumatic brain injury (TBI) or chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Scholars have not thoroughly examined the music of composers written before, during, and after war experiences and any potential changes to musical styles or compositional techniques. In my research I look at the effects that war can have on composers through autobiographical and biographical accounts of Ivor Gurney (WWI), Olivier Messiaen (WWII), Maurice Ravel (WWI), and …

Scores Of Nature (Volume 2), Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

Scores of Nature (Volume 2) is a collection of experimental notation and scores, which are created through serial, unplanned, and partially planned musical sequences overlaid onto natural scenes, spaces, or objects that the composer has taken photographs of in different places. This sequence is of five sets of images, many of them with curvature or lines that can be redesigned within an imaginative or manipulated musical staff with parallel or intersecting lines, clefs, time signatures, and other elements of a traditional score. In some cases the composer has offered a possible interpretation of the experimental score and notation through traditional …

Scores Of Nature (Volume 1), Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

1. Bone & Stone Sonata;

2. Jellyfish & Seaweed Suite;

3. Bonfire Bay Sonata;

Three works of experimental music and notation are included in Scores of Nature (Volume 1), which include pieces written on beaches with fishbone and pebbles, a bonfire and bay in Sointula, and a piece recommended for solo 'cello, where the score is an image of a beached jellyfish in a bedding of seaweed, in which the musician needs to react to the image and play what they are imagining from that image. From the description provided in the score text: "In this piece, Jellyfish & …

Wordmuse, John M. Nelson

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Wordmuse is an application that allows users to enter a song and a list of keywords to create a new song. Built on Spotify's API, this project showcases the fusion of music composition and artificial intelligence. This paper also discusses the motivation, design, and creation of Wordmuse.