Music Theory Commons^™

The Eight Types Of Love, According To Ancient Greece: A Musical Album, Alex Aether

Honors College Theses

This thesis examines the eight styles of love as defined by the ancient Greeks, presented as a musical album with each song dedicated to a specific category.

By exploring new ideas and approaches to the typical “love song” while incorporating my personal experiences, I hope to break through a long-standing cliche in the music industry in a way that’s personal to me and inspire others to fill this topical rift. At a broader scale, I hope to create nuance in people’s minds about what love means to them in the moments they feel it, so they can deeply understand and …

Investigating Creative Possibility Using Automated Composition, Kian Drees

Undergraduate Honors Theses

As a constructive method, Johann Joseph Fux’s theory of counterpoint defines a space of musical possibility for contrapuntal composition. I developed a computational method for generating melodies to systematically investigate selected properties of this space. My program recursively generates a tree of all possible cantus firmus melodies of a specified length or all possible first species counterpoints on a given cantus firmus, starting with an empty root node and adding child nodes representing possible musical notes at each step until the specified length is reached. I then investigated several properties of the generated melodies, such as the approximate relationship between …

Caladrius: Creating A Playable Game Via A Multimedia Experience, Isabelle Morgan Brookshire

Whittier Scholars Program

Caladrius: Creating a Playable Game via a Multimedia Experience hones in on making an experience through different forms of media to represent a game. If this project was fully funded and done, it would be a video game on Steam with an art exhibition, small poetry book, and novel accompanied with it. It would even have a show, a soundtrack, and merch. But at this level, it was to make an experience for my audience that they could experience whether or not they enjoyed video games as a concept. I wanted them to enjoy 'playing' within a physical exhibition and …

Sentential Structures In Alexander Scriabin's Op. 8 Etudes, John Paul West

Theses and Dissertations

Historically, the sentence has proven to be one of the most versatile and pervasive forms in music, appearing since the mid-sixteenth century with occurrences too frequent to quantify. Sentential musical phrases emerged from music and poetry during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries with the same short-short-long rhythmic impulse, originating from poetic and sing-song texts. Although the sentence is most often tied to the Classical period, it is not associated with any single era. Patterns of sentential phrases were already apparent and plentiful before the late eighteenth century, and composers used it as a device to expand musical form throughout the …

Controlling Death: Analyzing Formal Structures In The Music Of Chuck Schuldiner, Cory Cogley

Theses and Dissertations

From 1987 to 1999, the metal bands Death and Control Denied released eight total albums, with music primarily composed by guitarist and vocalist Chuck Schuldiner. This corpus study analyzes the form of these records to demonstrate Schuldiner's compositional idiolect adhering to recognizable formal structures, specifically AABA and ABA.

Reimagining The Cadenza: Bluegrass And Mozart, Linna Zheng

Honors Theses

The bluegrass-inspired cadenza for the first movement of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 is a parallel with the “Turkish” episode of Mozart’s composition. While introducing the bluegrass idiom into a Classical concerto may not be idiosyncratic, it can be understood and seen as an extension of Mozart’s own practice and approach to stylistic disruption. This approach can be understood through the concepts of Sonata Theory, revealing the cadenza as a site of productive deformation within a normative formal framework. Along with this, Robert S. Hatten’s concept of troping further supports the idea that the interaction between Classical and bluegrass idioms …

Fugues, Their History, And Their Status In The Twenty-First Century, William Sulliban

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines fugues from its first inception in the Renaissance to the twentieth century in order to contextualize fugal writing seen in the twenty-first century. The evolution of fugue through the twentieth century is the primary focus for the first chapter. For this, various music scores and academic scholarship are consulted to provide a foundational understanding of fugue. The second chapter examines contemporary fugue writing and explores how composers are approaching this very old compositional technique after several hundred years. Multiple twenty-first century compositions are discussed, as well as an interview I conducted with a composer to gain firsthand …

A Schenkerian Approach To The Marches Of Karl L. King, Dylan J. Custer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the American march is a staple of wind band repertoire, it has been underrepresented in the field of advanced music theory. This thesis examines marches through the lens of Schenkerian analysis, which uncovers deep levels of structural cohesion and brings a fresh perspective to the American march genre. Specifically, this study uses Schenkerian methods to study the music of Karl L. King (1891-1971) across the span of his half-century career. King’s extensive output established an enduring blueprint for the genre. By applying an analytical framework derived from the work of Harald Krebs, this research demonstrates how the march can …

Bass And Drum Grooves In R&B: Analysis And Composition, Hugh Taylor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The term “R&B” has existed within the musical lexicon for nearly eighty years. It was first introduced in 1949 to replace the label “race music,” and was a combination of blues, jazz, gospel, and rock. Since then, the genre has transitioned from swing-based, live instrumentation toward straight-eighth backbeats and electronically produced sounds. Despite these shifts, contemporary R&B continues to borrow from its ancestral roots while maintaining a modern aesthetic. A primary feature that has persisted through this landscape is the “groove,” specifically defined here as the rhythmic layer created by the drums and bass. In R&B, the bass provides both …

The Influence Mariachi Music On Regional Mexican Music, Alexis Suastegui

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

How has Mariachi music influenced other regional music in mexico?

Japanese Music Theory, Elias N. Nichols

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

This research project explores Japanese music theories. By analyzing the basic components of Japanese music, including historical and modern approaches, this presentation demonstrates the similarities and differences in the formation of music in western thought when compared to the methodology of Japan. This research dives deep into tones, scales, melodic approaches, historical development and the effect on modern compositions today. This project informs the audience on the nuances of Japanese music theories in the hope to dispel stereotypes about music theories from different cultures, apart from western thought.

The Paradox Of Musical Vernaculars, By Marina Ritzarev, Jacob Gran

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Contributors To Issue 7

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

On Music Theory And Making Music More Welcoming For Everyone, By Philip Ewell. Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2023 [Review]., George Adams

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Remembering John Rothgeb (1940–2020), Jürgen Thym

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Bach And Mozart And Space And Time, Robert L. Marshall

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Karol Berger’s influential study, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, argues that

“what matters to Bach . . . is not the linear flow of time from past to future . . . Rather, time is made to follow a circular route or neutralized. . . . Mozart and his contemporaries “straighten[ed] the temporal cycle into an arrow.”

The present essay suggests that, in considering the music of Bach and Mozart we are not dealing with two different concepts of time but rather with two different analogies: one with space, the other with time. It argues that, for Bach, the spatial metaphor …

Thoughts Upon Richard Taruskin’S Yahrzeit, Scott Gleason

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Teaching portions of Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music to non-music majors at Columbia University (in the early 2000s) offered special opportunities and challenges. Taruskin’s musical ethics, central to that book, are clearly embodied in his writings about John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer. The Princeton School of composer-theorists is a litmus test of Taruskin’s thinking: in particular, Taruskin’s emphasis on music criticism can aid in an analysis of Roger Sessions’s 1958 String Quintet. David Lewin’s unpublished 1959 analysis of that same piece (by his teacher) shows a very different approach; Lewin’s analysis is a vivid but rarely …

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.”

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

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

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 …

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

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

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.

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.

Cecil Taylor, 1950–1976: Theory & Practice In His Own Words, Michelle A. Yom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cecil Taylor (1929–2018) was a poet, composer, pianist, and dancer who is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of Free Jazz. Despite this historical significance, Taylor has not been a subject of substantial archival research. Some scholars have written his name into music scholarship through explicitly or implicitly reiterating the notion of “freedom” that circulated among contemporary jazz critics of the late 1950s and the 1960s. Others have focused on analyzing Taylor’s solo piano music, often reducing Taylor’s musical theories and practices into the formal structures of the music itself. To date, the scholarship has simplified Taylor’s work …

Chaotic Complexity: Order And Chaos In Works Of Cage, Xenakis And Boulez, Levi Graham

Music Theses

My thesis explores specific applications of chaos theory in contemporary twentieth-century music and analyzes the relationship between order and chaos in their creation. I will do this by referencing the levels of chaos presented by Katherine Hayles and categorized by Judith Lochhead. These levels of chaos include “Expressive Chaos,” “Denotative Chaos,” and “Ontological Chaos,” which provide a framework for grouping expressions of chaos in music.  I will analyze works of John Cage, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez through the lens of these types of chaos, with a particular focus on “Ontological Chaos,” which describes chaos as both dependent on and …

Hear & Now: Culturally Responsive Music Education Through Digital Audio Workstations & Musique Concrète, Benjamin T. Connolly

Pitzer Senior Theses

Hear & Now: Culturally Responsive Music Education Through Digital Audio Workstations & Musique Concrète is a two-part ethnomusicological study of how the capacities and affordability of modern electronic instruments could be utilized within school curricula as an affordable alternative to traditional music classes. I explore the musique concrète movement from mid-20th century France, aiming my examination towards the movement’s emphasis on the materiality of sound production and utilization of modern technology during the composition process. From there, the paper transitions into a study on the affordances of contemporary music technologies through a series of interviews with electronic composers, tracing the …

Hegemonic Microtonality: Decolonizing The Soundscape Of Music Theory Pedagogy, Ash K. Wetty

Honors Theses

This thesis examines how Western music theory pedagogy—long organized around tonal and twelve-tone equal-temperament frameworks—structures both what is taught and how students are trained to listen. Through a literature review tracing the historical construction of tonal universality in undergraduate curricula, the project argues that dominant models of music theory reproduce broader epistemic hierarchies inherited from Western conservatory traditions. Situating these histories within my own experience as a student navigating institutional listening norms, the thesis combines critical self-reflection with ethnographic research conducted across five liberal arts institutions, including the CBB consortium and JanPlan research at Wesleyan University and Amherst College. Rather …

Analytical Commentary And Performer's Guide To Carlos R. Martinez's Four Pieces For Trombone, Bailey Jean Hardy-Price

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Musicians with hearing loss are documented in prominent figures, such as Ludwig van Beethoven. In the age of developing medical technology, hearing aids can turn the course for many musicians. Music can serve as an audio medium for this journey.

Carlos R. Martinez (b. 1978) is an active composer and pianist commissioned to create a piece that explores the journey of hearing loss in a musician. Martinez’s Four Pieces for Trombone and Piano illustrate a musician’s discovery of their hearing loss, its consequences, and joy in implementing the use of a hearing aid. The detailed discussion of the composer and …

Interpretable Repertoire Search For Computer Supported Aural Skills Teaching: A Searchable Sia Based Digital Companion, Peter G. Fielding

Bailey School of Music Faculty Publications

Aural skills teaching depends heavily on repertoire selection, yet many large print and heritage song collections remain difficult to search in pedagogically meaningful ways. Teachers may need melodies with limited pitch collections for early solfège, modal examples for comparative listening, or repertory with controlled chromatic complexity, but such features are rarely indexed in printed sources. This paper proposes a computer-supported response to that problem: a searchable, rights-aware digital companion built around tonic-centered successive interval arrays (SIAs). SIAs provide an interpretable representation of pitch space by encoding the cyclic step pattern among the pitch classes present in a melody after tonic …

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.

Structuring The Musical Year: Dance, Topic, And Semiosis In Eighteenth-Century Calendar Music, Braden Shaw

Theses and Dissertations--Music

In this thesis, I apply a multifaceted analytical approach to examine a niche category of music called calendar music. In chapter one, I discuss Gregor Joseph Werner’s composition, the New and Very Curious Musical Calendar, and specifically address the minuets found within this work. Werner composes irregular measure groupings in his binary minuets and did so to represent the number of hours in day and night. This irregularity of measure groupings might superficially suggest that Werner’s pieces are stylized minuets only, unintended to accompany physical dancing and far removed from any actual choreographic influence of embodied performance. Werner, …

A Performance Practice Guide To Raleigh Dailey's Sonata For Trumpet And Piano, Kody Jernigan

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Raleigh Dailey is recognized internationally as a jazz pianist, composer, and educator whose compositions span solo works, chamber music, and jazz ensembles. While his music is well known within the jazz community, a significant portion of his catalog remains unknown in the classical performance repertoire. Among these pieces is his Sonata for Trumpet and Piano, a composition that integrates jazz stylistic elements within a classical chamber work.

The purpose of this project is to conduct primary-source research on Dailey’s Sonata for Trumpet and Piano in order to create a comprehensive performance guide for trumpet players. This is accomplished through interviews …