This document gives a brief history of classical music (Western art music) in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a focus on recent events and developments from the beginning of the siege (1992) to the present. Further focus is placed on the effects of Sarajevo's cultural pluralism on the city's largest...
Since Ottorino Respighi included the recording of a nightingale in his Pini di Roma (1924), composers have used prerecorded nature sounds, or field recordings, to help establish a specific sense of place. The purpose of this project is to examine how modern composers utilize field recordings to create natural-world settings,...
Starting in the late 1950s, the advertising world rapidly became a fertile arena for experimentation in the realm of electronic music. Composers explored new forms, such as the sound logo; new technology, such as the Moog synthesizer; and new semiotic relationships between music, words, images and concepts, including attempts to...
Ever since Jean-Baptiste Lully welcomed the horn to the stage as an instrument capable of producing music suitable for indoors, a tradition of horn methodology and pedagogy has been developed and expanded over the centuries. Despite the volume and variety of pedagogical materials available to the horn student and pedagogue...
Chaya Czernowin’s opera 'Pnima…ins innere' is about the encounter between a young Israeli boy and his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor so traumatized by his past that he cannot speak. Fittingly, the opera does not contain any words: the four singers in the work instead sing phonemes and other non-verbal sounds....
Kaija Saariaho’s vocal music offers singers a rewarding challenge. Her works contain extended techniques and innovative performance practices, which allow her to create interesting and moving timbral effects. Her musical language has its foundation in her cultural identity, formed when she was a girl in the forests of Finland. The...
Beethoven’s late compositional style is known for bending conventions he learned as a young man. Many discussions of his late style concentrate on adherence to and deviations from the conventions of functional harmony, fugal techniques, and sonata form. This document sheds light on an additional, previously unexamined aspect of Beethoven’s...
Behind the Wallpaper was written for Julia Holter and Spektral Quartet in 2014–15, expanding on a four-song cycle of the same name from 2013. It was premiered on February 23, 2015 at Amsterdam Bar & Hall in St. Paul, MN, as part of the Liquid Music Series. The piece tells...
Since the standardization of the modern brass quintet in the middle of the twentieth century, extensive research has been dedicated to the history of the genre, ensembles which have promoted and advanced brass chamber music and the growing body of original brass quintet repertoire. Such scholarship has provided practical benefits...
Perhaps better suited for the mosh pit than the orchestra pit, David Lang’s 1991 tour-de-force for solo bass clarinet, Press Release, is a minimalist marvel. Comprised of seven “groove sections” that evolve in seemingly unpredictable ways, Lang cleverly employs monophony to tell a robust story of motivic and harmonic development....
Musicians have a responsibility to assess and perform new or extant music in order to present a larger body of repertoire to audiences. The purpose of this study is to introduce the euphonium music of the contemporary Belgian composer Frangois Glorieux to the tubaeuphonium community. With numerous works written for...
In the Western classical art music tradition, a high level of music performance is achieved at the intersection of a musician's emotional, cognitive, and physical processes. Expert classical musicians have both an aural imagining of the sound they intend to produce and the physical associations of what it feels like...
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the idea of building a Latin American musical discourse has returned to the artistic discussion, taking into account the peculiarities of cultural syncretism that manifest in the different countries of the region. From the most diverse aesthetics and through different musical media, a...
Anthony Braxton’s Trillium J, part of an ambitious planned “complex” of 36 one-act operas, premiered in 2014. Very little writing—anecdotal, journalistic, nor scholarly—exists on these works, so this research provides a critical introduction, contextualizing the operas within Braxton’s oeuvre and discussing the works’ fundamental musical materials and organization.
Examples from...