Musicology Commons^™

David Maslanka's Desert Roads, Four Songs For Clarinet And Wind Ensemble: An Analysis And Performer's Guide, Joshua R. Mietz

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

Known primarily as a composer for the wind band, few American composers have received the notoriety and widespread acclaim that David Maslanka has since 1970. His works for wind ensemble are now considered standard repertoire and are played frequently by high school, college-level, and professional ensembles alike. Additionally, his works for chamber groups and soloists have continued to gain in popularity.  As of the writing of this document, Maslanka has composed concertos for saxophone, euphonium, flute, marimba, trombone, and piano.  Early in 2005, he completed his first large-scale work for solo clarinet with wind ensemble accompaniment:  Desert Roads.  Desert …

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 …

Innovation And Tradition In Lisan Wang’S Piano Suite Other Hill, Rongjie Xu

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

Lisan Wang is one of the most celebrated musical figures in China. His five-movement piano suite Other Hill (1980) is the composer’s response to the “New Wave”, a compositional trend generated in China after the 1977 Cultural Revolution. Gaining fame as a piano composition for showing the application of multiculturalism and syncretism to music, Other Hill is regarded as a prime example of cross-cultural piano composition in China. Wang challenges Chinese traditional piano composition with different artistic media—philosophy, calligraphy, poems, and various folk elements in Other Hill. This document proposes an interdisciplinary study of Lisan Wang’s musical fusion of …

The Contributions Of Axel Jørgensen To The Solo Trombone Repertoire Of Denmark In The Twentieth Century, Andrew H. Converse

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

Axel Jørgensen is one of a few Danish composers who has contributed compositions to the solo trombone repertoire that gained an international and lasting reputation in the twentieth century. Jørgensen, like many Danish composers from the first part of the twentieth century, is often overlooked due to the imposing figure of Carl Nielsen. Jørgensen’s compositions, while not overly patriotic, give the trombonist a sense of the Danish Nationalistic Romantic style of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Jørgensen was one of the first composers to write for the emerging slide trombone idiom in Denmark at the beginning of the …

Review Of To Live's To Fly: The Ballad Of The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt. By John Kruth A Deeper Blue: The Life And Music Of Townes Van Zandt By Robert Earl Hardy, Chuck Vollan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Townes Van Zandt was a founding member of the modern Texas singer-songwriter tradition and influenced or played with everyone from Bob Dylan to Norah Jones. His spare, evocative lyrics, coupled with his beautiful, articulate guitar playing, developed a particularly loyal and eclectic fan base. His songs have been covered most famously by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Emmylou Harris, but also by a host of great and lesser-known performers. He was a major influence on the "Outlaw" Country movement.

Van Zandt wrestled with inner demons. His eccentricities, mental illness, and the resulting heavy substance abuse, combined with often poorly produced …