Music Theory Commons^™

Musical Forces In The Serial Music Of Igor Stravinsky, Adam Moffett

Master's Theses

In his 2018 book A Theory of Virtual Agency, Robert Hatten briefly describes the potential to analyze atonal music through the lens of musical forces. These musical forces are phenomenological sensations listeners experience, akin to physical forces felt in daily life. Larson (2012) categorizes and explains these forces as gravity, magnetism, and inertia, but his work only applies them to tonal music.

Gravity is a universal force that exerts influence over the music on a global level. In a tonal context, this would be the tonic pitch, however in the absence of tonal hierarchy the locus of gravity comes …

Boethian Variations: Musical Thought In Sir Orfeo, Troilus And Criseyde, And Robert Henryson’S Orpheus And Eurydice, Joshua T. Parks

Masters Theses

This study approaches three poems from the late medieval British Isles—the Middle English Breton lay Sir Orfeo, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice—through the lens of medieval music theory. The most important authority for medieval music theorists was the late antique philosopher Boethius, who held to a Neoplatonic philosophy of music that valued reason, theory, and contemplation of the music of the spheres. Later medieval theorists cited Boethius extensively while also adapting his thought to suit their own purposes. In particular, the early fourteenth-century French theorist Johannes de Grocheio, influenced by Aristotle, departed …

Working With Metal: The Stylistic Characteristics Of The Swedish Band Meshuggah And An Original Composition Inspired By Their Work, Adam J. Benefield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I have long been fascinated by music that is created through the amalgamation of more than one style of music. As a composer, this has led to me exploring paths that combine elements of contemporary, classical, jazz, world, film, and video game music. In this thesis I explore elements of progressive metal band Meshuggah. More specifically I examine their use of polymeter, polyrhythm, and other rhythmic devices used in six of their songs. I then demonstrate how I applied those same components to an original composition, Armageddon, scored for flute, Bb clarinet, C trumpet, trombone, percussion, piano, violin, viola, cello, …

An Analysis Of Harmonic Color Use By Impressionist Composers, Lennon J. Ashton

Undergraduate Honors College Theses 2016-

Harmony is the musical element that truly distinguishes Western music from other kinds of music around the world. This is the vertical aspect of music that results when two or more pitches are heard simultaneously. The type of harmony that has formed the basis for most music over the past few centuries is known as tonal harmony. Tonal harmony involves having a tonal center, using major and minor scales, and using tertian chords that are related to one another and to the tonal center in various ways.

There was a period of time when tonal harmony and its principles were …

Cf Album, Transcriptions, And Analyses, Collin Felter

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

CF is an album of Collin Felter original compositions with a focus on creating a more approachable form of jazz harmony. To further the accessibility of the music, Felter has transcribed and analyzed his compositions for the listeners to theoretically understand what they are aurally experiencing. Included is the transcriptions/analysis document along with a link to the recordings of the album (can be found on all music streaming platforms).

Volume 34, Various Authors

Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Analysis And Utilization Of Hip-Hop Techniques In Classical Music, William Francis Montgomery

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

As of January 4^th, 2018, R&B/Hip-Hop (including rap) had overtaken rock and roll as the most popular genre among music fans. Nielsen Music reported that rap had surpassed rock in terms of total consumption with rappers such as Drake and Kendrick Lamar leading the charge. This would lead to the second-highest growth of any genre of music, spiking at 25% over the previous year.[1] This came as a very big surprise to many, especially when we take into consideration the rocky at best relationship that rap has had with public perception.

There are many misconceptions and …

Marvin Gaye's What's Going On And The Civil Rights Movement: A History And Analysis, Jacob Barnhill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Marvin Gaye’s first self-produced album, What’s Going On is a timeless work in American popular music. This thesis illuminates many of the intricacies that went in to the creation of the album and discusses its relevance during the Civil Rights Movement. Chapter 1 provides a background in popular music analysis and the genre of Soul music. Chapter 2 includes a biography of Gaye and a brief history of the Detroit record label known as Motown. The collaboration of musicians and engineers at Motown, along with Gaye’s influences from his personal life and music career, had profound effects on the outcome …

Dense Geometry Of Music And Visual Arts: Vanishing Points, Continuous Tonnetz, And Theremin Performance, Maria Mannone, Irene Iaccarino, Rosanna Iembo

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

The dualism between continuous and discrete is relevant in music theory as well as in performance practice of musical instruments. Geometry has been used since longtime to represent relationships between notes and chords in tonal system. Moreover, in the field of mathematics itself, it has been shown that the continuity of real numbers can arise from geometrical observations and reasoning. Here, we consider a geometrical approach to generalize representations used in music theory introducing continuous pitch. Such a theoretical framework can be applied to instrument playing where continuous pitch can be naturally performed. Geometry and visual representations of concepts of …

Analyzing Hermeto Pascoal's Calendário Do Som, Adam Rosado

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Hermeto Pascoal is one of the most prolific composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, having composed thousands of pieces across his career. Despite his immense and eclectic catalogue, the current analytical literature on him is comparatively scant, particularly outside of the composer’s native Brazil. In order to represent the diversity of his music, this dissertation studies a collection of his works entitled the Calendário do Som. This collection was an exercise in daily composition and comprises 366 short pieces written from July 23, 1996 to July 23, 1997. Through the analysis of the pieces in this collection, this dissertation …

Volume 33, Various Authors

Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

The Song Style Of Antonio Carlos Jobim: An Analysis Of Four Songs, Rachel Rogers

Master's Theses

The songs of Antônio Carlos Jobim are a national treasure of Brazil, beloved around the world. Their beauty and subtle simplicity have enthralled audiences for the last 60 years, yet they often reveal some unusual construction. Following the lead of other Brazilian theorists, this study was commenced with the belief that applying rigorous theoretical analysis to bossa nova would show its qualityand enduring worth. Four songs were selected for analysis based on their importance in Jobim’s career and their centrality to the bossa nova genre, “Chega de Saudade,” “Corcovado,” “Insensatez,” and “Garota de Ipanema.” They are among the most recorded …

Aural Skills I-Iv (Ksu), Jeffrey Yunek, Benjamin Wadsworth

Fine Arts Grants Collections

This Grants Collection for Aural Skills I-IV was created under a Round Ten ALG Textbook Transformation Grant. The course transformation included the creation and revision of materials on the instructors' Free Music Dictations website.

Affordable Learning Georgia Grants Collections are intended to provide faculty with the frameworks to quickly implement or revise the same materials as a Textbook Transformation Grants team, along with the aims and lessons learned from project teams during the implementation process.

Documents are in .pdf format, with a separate .docx (Word) version available for download. Each collection contains the following materials:

• Linked Syllabus
• Initial …

Analysis Of Sampling Techniques By J Dilla In Donuts, Zachary Diaz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The late James Yancey, known by his producer name of Jay Dee or J Dilla, is considered by many hip-hop scholars and musicians to be one of the most influential producers of the genre. His techniques of sampling are some of the most creative and intricate in the world of hip-hop beat making and are viewed as virtuosic in their own right. By analyzing his compositional process through selected tracks on his seminal (and final) album Donuts, I will be exploring how Dilla used over seventy-five samples from a variety of music genres and artists to create a sonic collage …

Music Theory And The Epistemology Of The Internet; Or, Analyzing Music Under The New Thinkpiece Regime, William O'Hara

Sunderman Conservatory of Music Faculty Publications

Over the past twenty-five years, the growth of the Internet has completely transformed journalism and media. «The relationship between new media and journalism», write Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis, «has become a close embrace to the point where it is difficult to imagine an exclusively offline journalism» [Siapera-Veglis 2012, 1]. This relationship has not only seen existing publications - from traditional newspapers like The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel to magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and The London Review of Books - move partially …

Music Therapy In The Modern Era: Three Discussions, Kate Pisarczyk, Sean Harty, Victoria Kleeman

Celebration of Learning

This Senior Inquiry presentation includes the findings of three Pre-Music therapy senior’s research. The three projects delve into very different, but important aspects of music therapy in our modern era. Sean Harty's Memory and Music delves into the impact of music on different parts of the aging brain in regards to memory recall. Music therapy is one avenue in order to assist this type of clientele. Victoria Kleeman's Synergy Should Tell the Story in Music Therapy explores the idea of creating synergy within the world of music therapy. Her discussion leads with the idea that the creation of synergy comes …

Volume 32, Various Authors

Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Villa-Lobos's Compositional Techniques And Treatment Of Folk Melodies In Cirandas For Piano, Gustavo Schafaschek

Dissertations

Despite his significance as the most important Latin American composer of the twentieth century, serious analytical studies on the music of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos are still few and far between. Recent scholarship has started to demystify the figure of Villa-Lobos as an intuitive composer with no technique, revealing an artist that strove to develop an idiosyncratic musical language. The present document aims to contribute to this new trend in Villa-Lobos’s scholarship by analyzing pieces from the piano cycle Cirandas, W220, considered one of the most important works from the composer’s mature style. Each of the sixteen pieces …

Sight-Singing Pedagogy : A Survey Of High School Choral Directors., Marissa Lee Pollock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to highlight effective sight-singing techniques used by successful choral directors in the state of Kentucky. The method used for this study was a non-experimental survey sent to thirty-four high school choral directors. Directors were selected to participate based on distinguished assessment scores received over the last five years (2011-2015). They were asked questions about their techniques, background in education, and placement of sight-singing in the curriculum. With a response rate of 65% the results indicated that the majority of directors had received or earned at least a master’s degree, had taught for at least …

Practical And Philosophical Reflections Regarding Aural Skills Assessment, Stanley V. Kleppinger

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Assessment in aural skills courses is a tricky intersection of instructors’ expectations, students’ skills in audiation, students’ perceptions and anxieties regarding assessment and performance, and the peculiarities of evaluative instruments. After several years in my teaching position at a large university, I became increasingly dissatisfied with assessment in the second-year aural skills program I coordinate. In short, I was displeased both with the nature of the student activities we evaluated and with the ways in which success on those activities was measured. Students’ and instructors’ frustrations convinced me of the need to make assessment more obviously relevant, less intimidating to …

Volume 31, Various Authors

Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Volume 30, Various Authors

Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Pitch Circles – From Music Theory To Computer-Based Learning Tool, Matt Smith

The ITB Journal

This paper describes how a music theory with explanatory power for expression of relationships between pitch classes, chords and tonal regions can be exploited as the foundations for a computer-based tool, called ‘Pitch Circles’, to support musical novices learn about and manipulate such musical concepts and relationships . The paper introduces this research with a brief review of the ‘direct manipulation’ principles for computer interaction design on which the computer-based learning tool has been based, and of the features of tonal theories which led to our choice of a particular theory, ‘Pitch Spaces’, as the basis for this work.

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.

Twelve-Tone Serialism: Exploring The Works Of Anton Webern, James P. Kinney

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Mathematics and Music are related and intertwined, and the invention of serialism in the 20th century highlights this fact. Serialism is a technique of music composition that uses mathematics to structure different elements of music, such as pitch and rhythm. For hundreds of years, music all over the Western world was tonal, which means there is a hierarchy of some pitches being more important than others. Serialism is a form of atonality, which is the composition of music that attempts to use all twelve pitch-classes equally. I examine twelve-tone serialism, which was created by Arnold Schoenberg and developed by his …

Sonatas, Rondos, And Cupcakes: The Efficacy Of Collaborative Learning In Undergraduate Music Theory Courses, Kyle Gullings

Music Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper examines the efficacy of collaborative and creative learning models in undergraduate music theory courses, using as comparative case studies group projects I assigned in three consecutive Form and Analysis classes from 2011 through 2014. I make the case that creative group projects, when executed correctly, have a net benefit for students, and that we as educators should make more effective use of them in our courses.

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.

Volume 29, Various Authors

Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Metamorphosis And Persona In Ned Rorem's Poems Of Love And The Rain, Jacob Boca

Senior Independent Study Theses

Ned Rorem’s 1963 song cycle for mezzo-soprano, Poems of Love and the Rain, presents settings of texts by eight American authors loosely centered on the subject of unrequited love. The cycle’s formal structure is particularly unique given that each text is set twice, with contrasting settings placed directly opposite each other along the cycle’s temporal plane. That is, the sequential ordering of texts, one to nine then back to one, yields an overarching pyramidal or mirror form. The following study examines text-music relationships, both at various moments within the cycle and between contrasting settings, with the ultimate goal of …