Musicology Commons^™

Chinese Folk Song Meets Western Compositional Technique—A Case Study Of Zhou Long’S The Partita For The Violin And The Piano, Bo Wu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the field of contemporary Chinese music, a large number of outstanding composers and works have emerged in China. As one of the most prominent Chinese American composers, Zhou Long has created many excellent pieces that combine Chinese national elements with world-class composition techniques. These contributions have helped promote Chinese music on the global stage. Zhou Long possesses profound creative skills, with a deep understanding of both Chinese national modes and Western composition techniques. By applying these skills and techniques to his works, he has developed a unique style that integrates Chinese national features with modern music concepts and techniques, …

'Space Is The Place:' Afrofuturism In Black Popular Music, Tamyka Jordon-Conlin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on developing a theory of Afrofuturist music. Afrofuturism is an umbrella term used to describe Black cultural productions that reflect on the African diasporic culture of the past while imagining potential futures, often while appropriating imagery of technology and science-fiction tropes. With the intent of redefining notions of blackness, Afrofuturist artists create alternative historical narratives and speculative future projections. These productions create space that allows the Afrofuturist to discorporately negotiate the limits of Black subjectivity. Poet, activist, and avant-garde musician Sun Ra is credited as the progenitor of Afrofuturism, and his model has since been adapted by …

The Early Lieder Of Josephine Lang: A Comparative Study, Rachel E. Cisneros

LSU Master's Theses

Josephine Lang's contribution to nineteenth-century song has been increasingly recognized in recent scholarship. This is largely because of Harald Krebs’s and Sharon Krebs's groundbreaking book, Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs (2007). In their book, Krebs and Krebs draw information about Lang’s life from two early biographies, the first written during Lang’s lifetime by Ferdinand Hiller and the second written after her death by her son Heinrich Adolf Köstlin. Primary sources fill in the gaps that these two nineteenth-century biographies left open. For example, the letters between Lang and her correspondents also reveal much about her social reputation, financial hardships, …

New Transcription For Cello And Piano Of The “Sonata For Violin And Piano” By Uruguayan Composer Hector Tosar, Including A Performance Edition, Analysis, And Biography, Jose Pedro Romero-Ottonello

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This paper accompanies my transcription for cello and piano of Héctor Alberto Tosar Herrecart’s Sonata for Violin and Piano. It presents a brief study of Tosar's life, documenting his study with various composers in Uruguay and elsewhere, influences on his evolving compositional style, and an analysis of the sonata itself. I examine the manuscripts of other works by Tosar to provide an understanding of his musical language, including his “Serie sinfónica: en cuatro movimientos,” “Sinfonía no. 2 para orquesta de cuerdas,” “Sonatina no. 2. Solitude,” and “Salmo CII: para coro y orquesta.” The purpose of this project is to document …

Using Distributed Techology To Make Music In The Time Of The Attention Economy, Tate Carson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Sounds Aware is a mobile web app that allows users to record soundwalks and share them so that other people can experience them. The creator of the soundwalk records their perceptions of the restorativeness of a specific place on the walk, these answers are then sonified for whoever experiences the walk later to hear. Sounds Aware aims to be a social app that is restorative to our attention. It does this by encouraging experience of nature and by using decentralized technology that exists outside of the attention economy.

The attention economy is discussed as a force that exists within much …

Viola Fragments: Contextualizing And Interpreting Selections From György Kurtág's Signs, Games And Messages, Mounir Nessim

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The viola came to prominence as a solo instrument relatively late compared to the violin and cello. As a result, the standard repertoire is more recent, consisting largely of twentieth century works. The standard repertoire continues to expand as new works are written and embraced by performers. One such work is the Hungarian composer György Kurtág's open ended collection of pieces for solo viola Signs, Games and Messages (1987-). Kurtág, born in 1926, is one of the most important composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His music is characterized by its brevity, fragmentation, ambiguity, and intertextuality. The painstaking scrutiny …

Emergent Formal Functions In Schubert's Piano Sonatas, Yiqing Ma

LSU Master's Theses

Drawing on the work of Janet Schmalfeldt and William Caplin, I explore the way in which emergent formal function determines our perception of form in four piano sonata movements by Schubert: D.840, D.845, D.850 and D.894. Janet Schmalfeldt adapts the notion of formal function to directly address the dialectic between “being” and “becoming,” approaching formal function from a phenomenological perspective. Building on her work, I define emergent formal function as a formal function that is conditioned by how the listener’s expectations change. It is an important analytical tool that helps us understand how and why Schubert’s sonata forms depart from …

A Survey Of French Cello Music Dating From The Baroque Era To The 20th Century, Chien-Hui Yang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research aims to examine how French music progressed from the Baroque era to the 20^th-century through the cello repertoire. This document will be a useful tool for people who are interested specifically in French cello compositions. The researcher will discuss fifteen composers and seventeen cello works. Through reading composers’ biographies and examining the selected cello compositions from these French composers, the researcher will better comprehend and attempt to describe the composers’ musical styles and their musical legacies within the canon of music for the cello.

From the Baroque era, François Couperin, Jean-Baptiste Barrière, and Martin Berteau are …

An Integration Of East And West: History, Analysis And Reception Of The Yellow River Piano Concerto, Lin Tao

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Yellow River Piano Concerto remains as one of a few representative and major instrumental compositions within the Chinese repertoire since it was composed in 1969. Thanks to the devoted work of Chinese pianists, the Yellow River Piano Concerto has disseminated around the world and has become a musical symbol of Chinese culture in recent years. This piano concerto serves as a tool for the cultural communication between China and the world. The Yellow River Piano Concerto has a unique ability to depict Chinese culture and history through the language of music. Its exotic pentatonic melodies and eastern orchestrations make …

Modeling Melodic Dictation, David John Baker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Melodic dictation is a cognitively demanding process that requires students to hear a melody, then without any access to an external reference, transcribe the melody within a limited time frame. Despite its ubiquity in curricula within School of Music settings, exactly how an individual learns a melody is not well understood. This dissertation aims to fill the gap in the literature between aural skills practitioners and music psychologists in order to reach conclusions that can be applied systematically in pedagogical contexts. In order to do this, I synthesize literature from music theory, music psychology, and music education in order to …

The Stanocola Refinery Band: Industry, Tradition, And Community, Katlin L. Harris

LSU Master's Theses

Following World War I, many American businesses began to sponsor musical ensembles to promote their commercial interests and boost the morale of their workers. Although these industry-sponsored ensembles were created to serve the needs of businesses, they often played vital roles in their communities. One such ensemble was a wind band in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, affiliated with the Standard Oil Company of Louisiana (known as “Stanocola”). The Stanocola Band (1919–1950) made its first public appearance in 1920. Under the auspices of the oil refinery in Baton Rouge, the band thrived throughout the Great Depression and World War II, only disbanding …

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 …

Epic Beginnings: A Symphonic Work And Aaron Copland (The American Stravinsky) Versus Igor Stravinsky, Terrell O. Jones

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The first part of my dissertation is the original music written for this dissertation, which consists of tonal music that describes my life’s journey. I wanted to write something dark, melodic, and very energetic that described my struggles and shows the road I have taken. It exhibits everything that I have learned from my time here at the university. One of the many things that makes my passion so strong is the desire to express myself through music written for ensembles and used in films. The piece is entitled “Epic Beginnings.” Originally, it was named “The Last Dance,” a …

John Adams Composing Through Others: Modeling, Innovation, And Recomposition, Michael Edward Palmese

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

John Adams has frequently embedded allusions to the music of others in his work while also drawing on more general stylistic conventions and sensibilities of others to inform his creative output. Although this dynamic has been widely acknowledged in Adams’s body of work by scholars and critics generally, it has received little sustained attention or explanation. I argue that much of his work involves “composing through others,” a process in which he adopts, in various ways, the aesthetic conventions, styles, and sensibilities of other composers. By unearthing traces of this creative approach through a focus on short, but significant, periods …

Diy In Early Live Electroacoustic Music: John Cage, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, And The Migration Of Live Electronics From The Studio To Performance, Lindsey Elizabeth Hartman

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research examines early live electronic works by Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, and John Cage—three influential American experimental music composers who designed, built, and recontextualized electronics for live performance—and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) aesthetic embodied by their instruments and the compositions written for them. This dissertation serves as a presentation of original research into the earliest composers of live electronic works and the necessary DIY approach used in building independent systems. Previous research on the DIY perspectives in music often touch on the grass-roots nature of contemporary electroacoustic systems but there is not yet research specific to the DIY approach taken …

Musical Introductions To Cavalleria Rusticana: Giuseppe Perrotta's "Bozzetto Sinfonico" And Pietro Mascagni's "Preludio", Ronaldo Augusto Teles Dos Santos

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Giovanni Verga’s Cavalleria rusticana has inspired a variety of musical works, among them Giuseppe Perrotta’s “Bozzetto sinfonico” (an overture to Verga’s play), and Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (a one-act opera based on a libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci). Each composition represents a genre on which scholarship is scarce: late nineteenth-century incidental music and the late nineteenth-century operatic prelude. Considering both Perrotta’s “Bozzetto sinfonico” and Mascagni’s “Preludio” as musical introductions to stage works, this study undertakes a complete hermeneutic analysis of both works (chapters 2 and 3). The analysis of Perrotta’s “Bozzetto sinfonico” is guided by a letter in …

The Handmaiden Of Gnosis: Music In Esoteric Societies, Justin Andrew Owen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Western esotericism, or the practice of trying to understand divinity through secret initiatic means, exists in several philosophical strains, which mystics through the ages have formalized into systems of teaching. One aspect that appears in many of the traditions is music. Music is a direct language of the consciousness within esoteric traditions because it does not rely on language to express higher concepts. Just as these societies teach truths mainly through symbolism, they use music, since it lends itself to interpretations beyond the connotation-laden nature of words. This dissertation focuses on three major strains of western esotericism: Rosicrucians, Theosophists, and …

Evolving Performance Practice Of Debussy's Piano Preludes, Vivian Buchanan

LSU Master's Theses

Between 1910 and 1912 Claude Debussy recorded twelve of his solo piano works for the player piano company Welte-Mignon. Although Debussy frequently instructed his students to play his music exactly as written, his own recordings are rife with artistic liberties and interpretive freedom. Interestingly, many of the interpretive gestures that Debussy employs in these recordings are consistent with playing techniques utilized by French Baroque keyboardists. This paper will situate Debussy’s own performance in this Baroque playing style. I will first discuss the recording technology used by Welte-Mignon to establish the reliability of these recordings. By studying harpsichord manuals, I will …

Homenajes: Finding Spanish Identity In Falla's Orchestral Suite, Leanny Munoz

LSU Master's Theses

Using biographical criticism, this thesis examines Manuel de Falla’s Homenajes (1939) as a reflection of the composer’s views of Spanish identity on regional, national, and international levels. Falla completed Homenajes—a four-movement orchestral suite dedicated to Enrique Fernández Arbós, Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas, and Felipe Pedrell—in Argentina. He began the work in Spain in 1938, during a period of great personal and political disturbance. In 1939, Manuel de Falla left Spain following the end of the Spanish Civil War, which cemented the regime of Francisco Franco. The Francoist regime notoriously aimed to homogenize Spanishness within the country, in part by …

A Rhythmic Transcription And Spectral Analysis Of Luciano Berio's Thema (Omaggio A Joyce), Christopher C. Mccardle

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Thema (Omaggio A Joyce), composed by Luciano Berio resides within a tempo of 80 beats per minute. The discovery of a constant tempo allowed for a precise rhythmic transcription to be created which found musical structures including large formal sections, subsections, phrases, rhythmic and melodic motives, layers, and dialogue. Analysis of the rhythmic phrases shows that electroacoustic music can have a controlled structure and that these structures earned Thema an enduring legacy of masterpiece. The transcription provides a road-map to compare and contrast different elements that reoccur throughout Thema. The work was composed with a well thought-out and …

Northern Music Culture In Antebellum New Orleans, Warren Keith Kimball

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the three decades before the Civil War, immigrants from the Northern United States flooded into New Orleans in search of new economic opportunities. These newcomers brought to the Southern city many elements of Northern life, such as Protestant churches, English-language newspapers, public schools, and distinct political views. They also brought with them musical practices specific to that region: Protestant church music, amateur choral societies, instrumental concerts, music publication, and English-language opera all flourished from the late 1830s until the late 1850s. This dissertation situates the musical practices of New Orleans during the decades preceding the Civil War within the …