Within the world of art music, composers have employed a variety of techniques to infuse popular music elements into their writing. This document is an examination of specific instances of this trend in twenty-first century wind ensemble repertoire. The study is limited to twenty-first century wind ensemble works by living...
Distance learning has increased its presence in academia, and there is a growing trend among higher education music schools to utilize distance learning in tandem with a traditional curriculum. Many instrumental pedagogues do not understand the benefits even though distance learning has been used for close to twenty years in...
From 2008 to 2019, a range of new interactive and immersive digital formats that present new possibilities for musical and artistic expression have become available. In order to begin the work of uncovering what new compositional and experiential possibilities are now possible, this document will examine each format’s core concepts...
The saxophone has long been an instrument at the forefront of new music. Since its invention, supporters of the saxophone have tirelessly pushed to create a repertoire, which has resulted today in an impressive body of work for the yet relatively new instrument. The saxophone has found itself on...
The villancico de negro is a Baroque paraliturgical subgenre that rose to popularity in the 17th and 18th centuries on the Iberian Peninsula. Colonialism promoted the spread of Spanish practices in the Americas, and the villancico de negro developed in both Spain and New Spain. This genre capitalized on misrepresentational...
This document will examine the influence of sacred, Latin, polyphonic, Tudor, choral composition on the compositional style of contemporary British composer, Gabriel Jackson. This examination will lead to an acknowledgement and discussion of the larger trend in 21st-century choral music to incorporate older compositional models into new works.
The impetus...
When considering his pioneering and innovative role in broadening the tonal palette of the piano, as well as his tireless efforts to promote his own and other composers’ music, it is not surprising that a large percentage of Franz Liszt’s compositional output for that instrument is made up of transcriptions....
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...