Music Theory Commons^™

String Quartet, Brut, Bernie Walasavage

Masters Theses

l’Art Brut , also commonly referred to as “outsider art,” is comprised of a variety of visual media by untrained or mentally ill artists. The string quartet is subtitled this because it takes inspiration from the work of these artists; with its jagged edges, vibrant colors, and horrid scenes, there is an organic beauty inherent in such eclectic and divergent art. Another factor which drew me to the artwork of the mentally ill was the commonality of Kenophobia: an abnormal fear of empty spaces. Schizophrenic, Swiss artists, Adolf Wölfli (18641930) and Aloïse Corbaz (18861964) were noted for suffering this phobia …

About This Issue, Michael E. Ruhling

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

No abstract provided.

Understanding Music: Past And Present, N. Alan Clark, Thomas Heflin, Jeffrey Kluball, Elizabeth Kramer

Fine Arts Open Textbooks

Understanding Music: Past and Present is an open Music Appreciation textbook co-authored by music faculty across Georgia. The text covers the fundamentals of music and the physics of sound, an exploration of music from the Middle Ages to the present day, and a final chapter on popular music in the United States.

Accessible files with optical character recognition (OCR) and auto-tagging provided by the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation.

Jazz And Puerto Rican Traditional Music: A New Generation Of Musical Exploration, Pedro Lavezzari

Masters Theses

Many musical styles around the world have been born from struggle and search for cultural identity. The same idea applies to Jazz and the Afro-Caribbean music created within the African diaspora and influenced by Latin and European styles in the United States. More recently, the meaning of diaspora has been used to refer to a group of people and some aspects of their culture (Rivera 2010, 104). For older and newer generations of Puerto Rican musicians two traditions have intersected to create a modern form of expression that reaffirms Puerto Rico’s musical creativity and contemporary tendency. In 1989 Warren Pinckney …

A Jamaican Voice: The Choral Music Of Noel Dexter, Desmond A. Moulton

Dissertations

As we approach the twenty-first century, the world generally is moving away from the dominance of the European aesthetic towards a world music that owes much to the musical resources of the African-American tradition. Jamaica’s social and philosophical music belong mainly to that tradition, which includes the use of rhythms, and timbral and melodic resources that exist independently of harmony. Already in this century, Jamaicans have created two totally new music - Nyabinghi, which performs a philosophical function and Reggae, which performs a social function. The choral music of Noel Dexter is important because it is uniquely Jamaican/Caribbean in its …

Editorial, Michael E. Ruhling

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

No abstract provided.

Bach's Christmas Oratorio, Bwv 248, And The Jews, Daniel R. Melamed

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

It has been recognized since the nineteenth century that most of the poetic arias and choruses in J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 are parodies of music composed to other texts. In the early twentieth century it was claimed that at least one gospel narrative chorus was also derived from extant music, a hypothesis subsequently expanded to include several such movements said to be parodies as well. The claims are flimsily argued and are unlikely on source-critical grounds, but they have stuck, persisting in scholarly writings, reference works, and popular literature.

The origin of this idea is a 1916 …

Counterpoint Applied In The Invention, Fugue, Canon And Other Polyphonic Forms: An Exhaustive Treatise On The Structural And Formal Details Of The Polyphonic Or Contrapuntal Forms Of Music, For The Use Of General And Special Students Of Music, Percy Goetschius, Jonathan Kulp

School of Music

No abstract provided.

Exercises In Elementary Counterpoint, Percy Goetschius, Jonathan Kulp

School of Music

No abstract provided.

Starships, Gallifrey, Krypton, And Earth: Searching For The Hero Archetype In The Melodies Of Science Fiction And Superhero Films, James Wesley Talbot

Wayne State University Theses

The study of science fiction and superhero melodies is relatively new in the academic world of music theory. Analysis of hero archetypes found in Doctor Who, Star Trek (and its major motion pictures), Star Wars, and Superman provide excellent conduits for all students of music to access the hidden and overt musical meaning assigned to heroes. Realization of this study’s findings will feature interval tension and Schenkerian analysis, score reductions, and topic theory to provide perspective on how heroes are identified and perceived by directors, composers and audiences alike. Deryck Cooke, Leonard Ratner, and V. Kofi Agawu’s approach to thematic …

The Microtonal Guitars Of Harry Partch, John Schneider

Soundboard Scholar

Known as an "American Maverick," Harry Partch (1901–1974) was surely one of the United States's most colorful composers. His dissatisfaction with the scales and instruments of Western music inspired him to design and build an orchestra of over two dozen handcrafted "microtonal" instruments that were tuned to his notorious "monophonic" scale of forty-three tones per octave. Between 1934 and 1952, Partch created four different adapted guitars, using them in fifteen compositions ranging from solo song cycles (Barstow, December 1942, U.S. Highball, Three Intrusions) to chamber music, dances, and four of his five major …

Deconstructing Chaos: The Role Of Pitch Hierarchy In Music Perception, Gabrielle Stetz

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

During the early twentieth century, art music composers pushed Western tonality to the limits and eventually abandoned tonality altogether, creating a system that treated every pitch equally. This atonal system broke down all keys and harmonic progressions that are cornerstones of Western musical pitch hierarchy. Through an extensive review of current literature, this research aims to show that the concept of hierarchy, present in tonal but not atonal music, is central to music perception. This presentation will explore the role hierarchy in music perception through several means: examining the physical nature of sound on a mathematical basis, determining innate structures …

Suite For Kabbalat Shabbat: Five Hebrew Prayers, Steven J. Kaup

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

Suite for Kabbalat Shabbat: Five Hebrew Prayers is a setting of five Hebrew prayers that are presented during Kabbalat Shabbat, the welcoming portion of a customary Shabbat service. The musical setting for each prayer strives to embody characteristic feelings conveyed by the text in order to capture the essence and power of the Shabbat tradition. One of the primary goals of this composition was to explore new harmonic possibilities using tonalities derived from traditional Jewish musical structures and motivic ideas as a point of departure, and then find ways to fluidly blend them within the more common compositional practices of …

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 …

The Preservation Of Subjectivity Through Form: The Radical Restructuring Of Disintegrated Material In The Music Of Gerald Barry, Kevin Volans And Raymond Deane., Adrian Smith

Doctoral

This thesis examines Adorno’s concept of ‘disintegrated musical material’ and applies it to the work of the Irish composers Raymond Deane (b. 1953), Gerald Barry (b. 1952) and Kevin Volans (b. 1949). Although all three of these composers have expressed firm commitments to the ideal of creating new and radical works, much of the material in their music is composed of elements abstracted from the tonal past. This feature of their work would seem contrary to the views of Adorno, who is commonly seen as advocating progressive composition using only the most advanced means. This view comes across most strongly …

Tunes, Textures, And Trends: The Transformation Of Johann Walther’S Geistliches Gesangbüchlein (1524, 1525, 1537, 1544, 1551), Emily Marie Solomon

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the contents of Geistliches Gesangbüchlein, a sixteenth-­‐‑ century German Lutheran hymnal by Johann Walther, published in five editions between 1524 and 1551, the contents of which were substantially augmented, particularly between the 1525 and 1537 editions. Specifically, this project focuses on the twelve hymns with multiple settings, one or more of which were published in the first two editions and replaced by one or more settings in the last three editions, while assessing the characteristics across the original and removed settings and noting discernable trends of revision employed by Walther. Observable revision trends include length increase …

Musical Rebirth In Fearless And The Truman Show, Erik Heine

Journal of Religion & Film

Films have long made use of pre-existing music, most notably by well-known composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Director Peter Weir makes use of pre-existing music in nearly all of his films. In his two films from the 1990s, Fearless and The Truman Show, Weir uses music from two living (at the time) and largely unfamiliar Polish composers, Henryk Górecki and Wojciech Kilar, to accompany the climax of each film, coinciding with the rebirth of the central characters. The films show a parallel narrative, each with minor instances of renewals, until the respective characters are reborn, accompanied by music …

About This Issue, Nancy November

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

No abstract provided.

On Constructing A Sonic Gangbang: System And Subversion In Gerald Barry’S Chevaux-De-Frise, Mark Fitzgerald

Articles

This paper examines Chevaux-de-frise by Gerald Barry. The work is from a transitional period in Barry's work forming a bridge between the work of the 1980s (most notably The Intelligence Park) and the more polyphonic work of the 1990s. The paper describes Barry's use of canonic devices and his manipulation of found material before making some brief links to later works from Barry's output.

About This Issue, Michael E. Ruhling

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

No abstract provided.

The Synthesizer: Modernist And Technological Transformations In Film Sound And Contemporary Music, Dusin J. Green

CMC Senior Theses

The invention of the synthesizer meant the possibility of achieving virtually any sound in one mechanism, a superbly convenient device for musical creativity. Perhaps the perfect space for this approval of sound creativity was in the modern electronic film score. The synthesizer also flourished in popular music immediately following its emergence, but a common form began to solidify itself among synthesizer music. Shortly after, improvements in electronic instrument technology led to the democratization of electronic music and equipment, ultimately leading to electronic music as the new mainstream.

Romantic Exoticism: The Music Of Elsewhere In The Nineteenth Century, Josiah Raiche

Senior Honors Theses

Western art music has drawn on many sources. One of these is non-western music, which can be integrated into European classical music tradition in the form of exoticism. This paper will highlight musical elements used by composers seeking to create exoticism, examine selected works, and note common elements of western music that have exotic roots. In the nineteenth century, there were three general trends in exoticism. The first, non-musical exoticism, utilizes conventional western music alongside extra-musical exotic elements. Romantic exoticism portrays distant lands using musical elements, drawing these from the audience’s perceptions of the music represented. Realistic exoticism attempts to …

The Design Of P200: Mensural Quantity And Proportion In The Early Version Of The Art Of Fugue, Joel Thomas Runyan

Theses and Dissertations--Music

The intended structure of Bach's ostensibly unfinished Die Kunst der Fuge has been debated since the work's publication in 1751. This study examines the proportional design of an early version of the work, subsisting in the autograph manuscript (P200) of the early 1740s. As the only complete source extant, P200 and its revisions provide substantial insight into Bach's intentions for the later version of the Art of Fugue.

Pitch Perception In Changing Harmony, Cecilia Taher

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The role of harmony in the definition of tonality provides theoretical framework for the hypothesis that harmonic context affects pitch perception. In tonal music, the stability of individual notes depends on the harmonic setting. It seems then reasonable to expect harmonically guided variations in the cognitive representation of tones. With the purpose of enhancing current models of pitch perception, this thesis proposes an empirical investigation of the effects of harmony on pitch sensitivity. In two experiments, nonmusicians performed a same/different discrimination task on two pitches (a reference tone RT and a comparison tone CT) that were embedded in a melody …

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 …

Ars Musice, Johannes De Grocheio, Constant J. Mews, John N. Crossley, Catherine Jeffreys, Leigh Mckinnon, Carol J. Williams

TEAMS Varia

Ars musice, composed in Paris during the late thirteenth century, reflects Johannes de Grocheio's awareness of the complexity of the task of describing music. As the editors note in their introduction, "Grocheio is aware of the enormous range of types of music performed in different ways in different places. How can he impose order on this enormous subject matter? He decided to resolve this question by structuring his discussion around the practice of music that he observed in the city of Paris, organized into three main 'branches': music of the people (musica vulgalis), composite or regular, 'which they call measured …

Kevin Volans' She Who Sleeps Witha Small Blanket: An Examination Of The Intentions, Reactions, Musical Influences, And Idiomatic Implications, Peter D. Breithaupt

Masters Theses

Using and expanding upon a theoretical model for examining the meaning of music presented by ethnomusicologist Timothy Taylor, one of the leading scholars on composer Kevin Volans and his music, this research will attempt to properly position Volans' percussion solo, She Who Sleeps witha Small Blanket, composed in 1985, within Volans' African Paraphrase classification. It will also attempt to dissociate She Who Sleeps from the claims of hegemonic cultural appropriation that are attached to Volans' African Paraphrase pieces. In his model, Taylor talks about the "inseparable metatext" that surrounds a piece of music and includes the composer's intentions, the listener's …

Metrical Theory And Verdi's Midcentury Operas, William Rothstein

Publications and Research

Both historical and recent theories of meter have tended to assume that meter is a single phenomenon, definable in a single (though perhaps complex) way. Most U.S. theories of meter have been based on a limited repertoire: instrumental music by German composers. Examination of Verdi's mid-century operas, from Macbeth through La traviata (1846–53), suggests that different theoretical approaches may be appropriate for different repertoires. National traditions of composition, depending often on national poetic traditions, may require different ways of hearing and counting, and thus different ways of modeling meter. The metrical theories of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, David Temperley, …

The Structure And Genesis Of Copland's Quiet City, Stanley V. Kleppinger

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Aaron Copland’s Quiet City (1940), a one-movement work for trumpet, cor anglais, and strings, derives from incidental music the composer wrote for an unsuccessful and now forgotten Irwin Shaw play. This essay explores in detail the pitch structure of the concert work, suggesting dramatic parallels between the music and Shaw’s play.

The opening of the piece hinges on an anhemitonic pentatonic collection, which becomes the source of significant pitch centres for the whole composition, in that the most prominent pitch classes of each section, when taken together, replicate the collection governing the music’s first and last bars. Both this principle …

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 …