Musicology Commons^™

Friedenstag By Richard Strauss: An Exploration Of The Effect Of Nazi Propaganda On German Composers, Benjamin Swain

Musicology and Ethnomusicology: Student Scholarship

Richard Strauss was one of the most influential German composers in the first half of the 20^th century. His relationship with the Nazi Party has been a topic of debate among musicologists and historians for some time and the question of whether Strauss attempted to resist the regime through his work remains. Strauss’s opera Friedenstag has garnered much of this debate as it can be seen as either a piece of propaganda or a piece of pacifist resistance. Given the reach of the Nazi propaganda machine, there is little question that Strauss would have been influenced by it. This …

The New Golden Era: Annotated Bibliography, Josh Stocking

Musicology and Ethnomusicology: Student Scholarship

An annotated bibliography on Broadway musicals.

How Theories About Instrumental Practice Strategies In Western Music Evolved Since The 1700'S: A Select Annotated Bibliography, University Of Denver

Musicology and Ethnomusicology: Student Scholarship

As music teachers, we introduce our students to a variety of methods for learning their instrument. In addition, it is necessary to impart wisdom on how to practice those methods and strategic ways to approach the learning and preparing of pieces for performance.

This paper will endeavor to compare and contrast how those strategies and techniques have evolved over the past 300+ years to better understand what practice strategies are “tried and true”, which have been discarded over time, and what has been added to the pantheon of strategies and scientific studies as performance practice and our understanding of psychology …

Communication Through Conducting: The Effects Of Verbal And Nonverbal Gestures On A Musical Ensemble, Jordon Schultze

Musicology and Ethnomusicology: Student Scholarship

Conducting as an artform has drastically changed throughout music history. The modern conductor assumes the role of leader, educator, and coach for a given ensemble. Their duty as a leader is to be the vessel from the composer to the ensemble to the audience. This process can only be completed with practical communication skills. These skills involve verbal communication (CCVS, figurative language, and instructions) and nonverbal communication (gestures, CCVS, and rehearsal preparation). These skills make up the vital role and responsibility of a conductor. A conductor is also responsible for balancing the importance and use of verbal and nonverbal communication, …

“For The Orchestra Musicians: Conducting On The Beat Is Effective Or Too Late?”, University Of Denver

Musicology and Ethnomusicology: Student Scholarship

There are a lot of conductors, and every conductor is different. There are as many conducting techniques as well. But one of the most famous approaches in conducting an ensemble, whether a wind ensemble, orchestra, or chorus, is to deliver the beat and expecting the ensemble for an immediate ‘attack’ of the note. An instant reciprocation and reaction at the same exact time as the ‘ictus’ of the conductor. Basically, doing it exactly together. The other notion is that the conductor beating should be beating ahead of time (almost a beat ahead) to give the ensemble some time to prepare …

Enter Hallownest: How The Music Assists The Narrative In Hollow Knight, University Of Denver

Musicology and Ethnomusicology: Student Scholarship

Annotated bibliography exploring sources on how music communicates story within the context of video games.

Addressing Negative Conditions In A Voice Studio: How Could Mindfulness Be Used As A Pedagogical Method Of Voice Teaching In The Context Of The Master-Apprentice Relationship?, University Of Denver

Musicology and Ethnomusicology: Student Scholarship

The proposed research paper will evaluate the negative aspects of the master-apprentice model in voice studios. The master-apprentice relationship has been a traditional style of teaching since the bel canto school of Italy in the 16^th century and continues to be a foundation of voice teaching today. However, with the development of education and technology, vocal instruction/pedagogy has evolved tremendously. Offering new approaches and philosophies of teaching in the field of music. The teaching of mindfulness in the voice studio has become a popular topic in music education. Along with awareness, mindful practice has given students the opportunity to …

Més Enllà Dels Tòpics D’Espanya. Tete Montoliu En Context, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Benjamin Fraser, professor de la Universitat d’Arizona, publica Beyond Sketches of Spain, una biografia del jazzman Tete Montoliu, la identitat del qual s’explora a través d’una sèrie de prismes culturals com la ciutat, la catalanitat i la discapacitat.

Brian Boydell: Mosaics And Sketches, Cliona Doris, Denise Kelly, Ciaran O'Connell, David O'Doherty, Andreaa Banciu, Margaret Doris

Music recordings

Brian Boydell (1917-2000) Mosaics & Sketches: Chamber Music for Harp

Mosaics and Sketches explores the Irish composer Brian Boydell’s chamber music for harp written over two decades, 1960-1980. In this recording, Cliona Doris performs Boydell’s solo work for pedal harp, A Pack of Fancies for a Travelling Harper and is joined by TU Dublin Conservatoire colleagues in three chamber works: Four Sketches for Two Irish Harps, Five Mosaics for Violin and Harp, and Quintet for Flute, Harp and String Trio.

The recording was funded through a research grant from Technological University Dublin.

The support of RTÉ lyric fm and the …

Texts, Drugs, And Rock 'N' Roll: Easy Rider And The Compilation Soundtrack, Jonathan R. Lee

Creative Collaborations

Of all the New Hollywood films, Easy Rider (1969) perhaps most effectively demonstrates the potential complexity of the rock compilation soundtrack. Drawing on concepts from film studies, film musicology, and literary theory, this article discusses how Easy Rider demonstrates the compilation soundtrack’s potential to generate meanings both inter- and intratextually. The intertextual method of interpreting pop compilation soundtracks looks deeply into the intersection of image, sound, and narrative on a vertical axis, considering the relationship between dialogue/image/plot point and song lyrics/musical style, the ways that the songs on these soundtracks communicate to audiences the thematic or diegetic significance of a …

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Msc 3032 (Electronic Music), Ted Gordon

Open Educational Resources

This class surveys the musical practices, technological instruments, and scientific concepts associated with electronic music from the 19th century to the present in institutional, amateur, and commercial environments, drawing from a wide range of musical traditions and styles from around the world. It develops practical skills of recording, editing, listening to, analyzing, and writing about music with electronic instruments and media.

Qui Té Por Dels ‘Rosalía Studies’? Guia De Perplexos, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Molt a principis dels anys noranta del segle XX, quan jo començava a veure la possibilitat de doctorar-me, la musicologia era, si se’m permet una caricatura, una disciplina de capellans i arxivers. A l’Estat Espanyol, per exemple, la carrera oficial encara no existia, si bé hi havia estudis i tesis a algunes escoles de doctorat de filologia o història de l’art. El mot «musicologia», de fet, ni tan sols era acceptat o pràcticament acabava d’entrar en alguns diccionaris prescriptius. Sense estudis reglats, els aspirants a musicòlegs emulaven la feina, la metodologia i les temàtiques dels seus mestres.

Changing Stem To Steam: An Analyzation On The Effects Of Art Integration Up To The University Level, Elizabeth Richmond

Honors Projects

This Honors Project is a combination of an artistic, creative project and a research driven analysis. The focus of this project is to research and understand the effects the arts have on both general students and STEM students in particular, what benefits come from art education and art integration, and if STEM students benefit from art integration. This goal was accomplished through a literature review and annotated bibliography featuring 18 sources. Another goal of the project was to understand where I fit into the research. In my creative portion of the project, I explored and analyzed how the arts affected …

Hearing Tolkien In Vaughan Williams?, Keri Hui

Journal of Tolkien Research

In recent years, musicians and Tolkien readers alike have associated Ralph Vaughan Williams’ music, particularly Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), The Lark Ascending (1914), and Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934), with Tolkien’s fantasies. This article explores this tendency to hear Tolkien’s Middle-earth in Vaughan Williams’ musical fantasies, calling attention to the similarities in their shared devotion to the idea of English consciousness, interest in combining ecclesiastical and folk materials, and pastoral vision. A juxtaposition of their approach and philosophies not only helps explain the musical echoes, however, but also confirms an appealing mark of Tolkien’s craft is its …

"Cerulean Skies" By Maria Schneider: A Formal And Semiotic Analysis, Jonathan Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Expressivity, imagery, and narrativity have long been touted as hallmarks of big band composer Maria Schneider’s style. This perception is widely accepted by critics and casual commentators, but are these attributions merely metaphorical or do they speak to observable dimensions of Schneider’s compositional style? This dissertation aims to address the narrative and expressive dimensions of Schneider’s music by combining aspects of formal analysis with concepts from music semiotics. The centerpiece is an analysis of “Cerulean Skies” (2006), the longest work to date in Schneider’s oeuvre with a duration of approximately twenty-two minutes. “Cerulean Skies” is distinct in its expansiveness and …

An Analysis Of György Kurtág’S Officium Breve In Memoriam Andræ Szervánszky For String Quartet Op. 28, Matthew S. Sandahl

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides a movement-by-movement analysis of György Kurtág’s third string quartet, Officium breve in memoriam Andræ Szervánszky op. 28. While the work is widely celebrated for its wealth of extra-musical associations and allusions, this analysis is primarily oriented towards the music’s internal relationships, with the contention being that such an approach can help clarify and refine the role that reference and allusion plays in the piece. A close reading is given for each of the work’s fifteen movements.

“The Formation Of A Personality”: Shostakovich’S Fifth Symphony And The Politics Of Its Hermeneutic Reception, Ki Ki Leung

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides a new perspective on Shostakovich’s widely discussed Fifth Symphony by scrutinizing the formation of its Bildungsroman narrative and its transformation from a prototype of Soviet symphonism into an anti-Soviet statement. I begin by reaching back to 1930s Soviet Russia, when Soviet symphonism was formulated to comply with the official ideology of socialist realism. Building on Paul Bekker’s gemeinschaftsbildende Kraft (“community-building power”), key Soviet musicologists such as Ivan Sollertinsky advocated applying a model from the Western symphonic tradition to meet national propagandist needs. With music analysis, I show how Shostakovich’s Fifth fits into Boris Asafyev’s conception of Soviet …

The Music Of Sylvano Bussotti And Its Interpretation: Biopolitics, Intersubjectivity, And Modernist Canon Formation, Charles A. Rudig

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The music of Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti (1931–2021) presents intentional challenges to interpretation and canonization. These particular challenges and Bussotti’s reasoning for implementing them are interrogated in this dissertation by reading the score to Bussotti’s La Passion selon Sade (1966) through contemporaneous European social theory, philosophy, and political developments. La Passion selon Sade is a theatre piece for a chamber ensemble, with a primary vocal and dramatic role written for mezzo-soprano Catherine Berberian, with whom Bussotti frequently collaborated. Like much of Bussotti’s music from the 1950s and 1960s, the discourse surrounding the piece and its reception largely relates to its …

Haydn’S Schemata And Hexachords: Two Analytical Case Studies, Gilad Rabinovitch

HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America

Two analytical case studies, from Haydn’s minuet al roverso (from the Symphony Hob. I: 47) and the opening movement of the String Quartet Op. 50, no. 6, show the interaction of galant schemata (Gjerdingen 2007) and the hexachordal solmization of the solfeggio tradition (Baragwanath 2020). Haydn plays upon conventional galant schemata—presumably elements of style shared by listeners who are closely familiar with the idiom (even if they do not have explicit schema labels); he also plays upon a more esoteric element of his own training and that of many other musicians in the period: hexachordal solmization. By considering both schemata …

Listen To The River: Dolores, Ophelia, And Female Resistance In Opera, Daniel Aaron Barnidge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The music of female characters in the great masterpieces of opera often demonstrates resistance to and undermines the abuse they have historically received in opera plots. The Mexican folktale that my opera, The Tragedy of La Llorona, draws inspiration from plays on many of the same tropes historically found in female characters in opera including madness, sexuality, and lack of agency. This led to research into the portrayal of women in opera as part of my pre-compositional process and my desire to access this tale free from the traditional 'marianismo' and 'machismo' narratives it is associated with and which …

Music: Seeking Pleasure, Emotional Language, Ritualized Communication, Jillian N. Gerlach

Interdivisional Studies Summer Fellows

The impetus for my project was how I view listening to music as a spiritual or religious experience. Listening to music, instead of practicing religion, satisfies my inclination toward spirituality. In the introduction to my paper, I outlined how music exists in my life. I thought it was valuable to provide my unique experience to give context to my research. I created a diagram that delineates how I interact with music and the benefits I derive from listening to music. During this self-reflection, I realized listening to music functions like a ritual for me. I noticed my individual ritualized listening …

The Great Generalization: Organizational Adaptation Strategies As Entrepreneurship In Higher Music Education, Jacob Bruce Hertzog

Music Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study sought to measure how higher music education has evolved in response to the music industry’s digital revolution. I utilized a framework of organizational adaptation theory to synthesize five distinct organizational adaptation strategies: decentralization, generalization, specialization, formalization, and inaction. Music leaders were surveyed (n = 100) to assess adaptations across ten common domains in higher education. Higher music education was found to have undergone a great generalization through the expansion of activities in nearly every domain. Consistent with elements of organizational adaptation theory, and like individual musicians, higher music education has been entrepreneurial in response to the digital revolution.

'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 …

“800 Years We Have Been Down”: Rebel Songs And The Retrospective Reach Of The Irish Republican Narrative, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

From the glamorous, cross-dressing “Rebel, Rebel” of David Bowie, to the righteous Trenchtown “Soul Rebel” of Bob Marley and The Wailers, both varied and various musical articulations of cultural and socio-political rebellion have long enjoyed a ubiquitous presence across multiple soundscapes. As a musicological delineator in Ireland, however, ‘rebel’ conveys a specifically political dynamic due to its consistent deployment as an all-encompassing descriptor for songs detailing events and personalities from the Irish national struggle. This paper sets out to examine the specific musical delineator of “rebel song” from both musicological and politico-ideological perspectives with a view to interrogating its appropriateness …

Applications Of Tao Of Bass, Vol. I, In Orchestral And Solo Double Bass Repertoire, Santiago Zorrilla De San Martin

Dissertations

This dissertation is not only an exploration of left-hand techniques found in Tao of Bass, Vol. 1, but also an inside of the performance and didactic approach of Dr. Marcos Machado to organize and create its content. That said, one of the objectives of this dissertation is to focus on developing an awareness of the didactic strategies in Tao of Bass created to develop the utmost proficiency in double bass performance. I expect to prove this objective in my dissertation by acknowledging how Tao of Bass encompasses a didactic approach that is universal and academically relevant to prepare for …

2nd Funk Symposium: Selected Proceedings, 2021, Sharon Davis Gratto

Content Presented at the First and Second Dayton Funk Symposia

This is a printed proceedings of symposium presentations by authors who elected to submit them. They are available free for download, but printed volumes are available for $6 plus tax and shipping.

Danger: Wolf Crossing! Meantone Tuning And Froberger’S Keyboard Music, Stephen T. Ai

Student Theses

This thesis is an exploration of how tuning practices can influence compositional practice, focusing on the way temperament can provide new insights to a close reading of keyboard music by Johann Jakob Froberger (1616–67), a transitional figure between a predominantly meantone-oriented musical environment of the 17th century and the well temperament of the 18th century. Many scholars have pointed to Froberger’s characteristic chromaticism and experimentation with novel keys as indicative of his desire to compose beyond the restrictions of meantone tuning and towards well temperament. In an effort to move away from this oft-cited teleological narrative from unequal to equal, …

Betrayed By The Bibliographic Record: How Catalogs Construct Authorship And Constrain Their Own Authority, Rachel E. Scott

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This cautionary tale outlines how a librarian with an understanding of and respect for cataloging processes was the perfect candidate to be duped by a false attribution in a bibliographic record. In the process of compiling a list of compositions attributed to Alma Mahler for my dissertation, I encountered a handful of works not yet addressed in the scholarship on her compositional work. Despite numerous red flags, and much to my detriment, I invested a great deal in one of these unqualified and unsubstantiated attributions that turned out to be false. In the wake of this false attribution, I have …

The Feminine Harp As Feminist Tool: Early Professional Footing For Women In Mid-Twentieth-Century America, Chelsea Lane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1930s North America, women—for the first time—were accorded permanent principal positions in significant American orchestras. Edna Phillips, Alice Chalifoux, and Sylvia Meyer, all students of the legendary harp pedagogue Carlos Salzedo, have been celebrated as pioneers for the prestigious employment they obtained in the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, respectively, between 1930 and 1933. Despite the impressiveness of these accomplishments, however, the narrative of their “firstness” is not wholly accurate. In actuality, female harpists have occupied orchestral posts as acting principals, substitutes, and second harpists since the very inception of orchestras. The cause for their early …

Homage To Eleanora: A Musical Journey Through The Billie Holiday Songbook, Keith A. Dames

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Billie Holiday was a singer, songwriter, vocalist, bandleader and composer in the fields of music, black culture and more specifically the genre of jazz. The primary focus of this study is Billie Holiday’s discography, music, and compositions as treated in relation to the black culture of production. This study will explore a secondary content analysis of Billie Holiday’s music, musicianship, musicality and compositional skills within the American jazz mainstream, broader jazz audience and world at large. This project will take an analytical look at the structure and form of the compositions of Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday is credited with composing …