This dissertation presents an affect-centered approach to the analysis and interpretation of the experience of music and its attendant meaning in selected works of literature and cinema. Music’s interpretative mutability often charges it with meaning, though in infinite gradations of singularity rather than any universal sense. Rather than undertake a...
In this essay I examine George Aperghis’ process-based compositional thought in the score and performance practice of Retrouvailles, with a focus on the non-hierarchical and simultaneous use of interdisciplinary elements. I demonstrate how Aperghis sets up the complex dramaturgy of superimposed, suggestive narratives in this work as a case-study of...
This dissertation is an in-depth exploration of Clarke Distributions (for 10), an original musical composition based on the use of text to establish interrelational listening and performance patterns between performers, in place of any fixed musical material. Inspired by research into improvisation, cognition, aesthetics, and linguistics, these patterns manifest as...
Characterization is the musical creation of fictional characters, and it is particularly important for creating multi-dimensional, nuanced characters in opera. However, how do composers characterize roles if the opera does not feature a traditionally linear plot or story? Does opera need a narrative to create characterization? Some may view narrative...
Imagine sitting in a room listening to some friends play a song. Perhaps one friend is playing guitar, another playing bass, and a third is playing drums. The musical content in this scene is extraordinarily complex, yet it contains many types of structure that is easy for us to comprehend....
This paper discusses the role of the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer in Catherine Lamb’s composition Prisma Interius IX. This instrument is a MIDI keyboard that controls a computer program consisting of a bank of resonant band-pass filters, which are tuned to specific frequencies and can be opened or closed to varying...
This paper examines the vocal works of Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen in an effort to establish that, despite their technical difficulty and apparent complexity, these pieces are actually rooted in the Danish New Simplicity (Ny Enkelhed) aesthetic. It also provides biographical, historical, and cultural context for those who are interested in performing...
Scholars frequently use the term œhymn-like to describe passages of instrumental music but the precise meaning of the term remains elusive. This dissertation examines, through the lens of topic theory, the characteristics, origins, and communicative potential of such passages in the music of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. I define...
This multi-study dissertation investigates the nature of musical independence in the instrumental large ensemble and the instructional practices that are used to foster its development. The dissertation is comprised of three separate papers, each addressing different aspects or approaches to the practice of independent musicianship in large ensembles. While each...
This dissertation develops a framework to approach musical hybridity by considering style and genre interactions as an analytical layer of combinations of identities. It engages with the structural, contextual, and perceptual aspects of music by mixing perspectives from music studies with postcolonial studies, situated cognition, and genre studies. Hybridity is...
This dissertation uses several interrelated methods derived from corpus linguistics, statistics, and machine learning to infer a number of historically significant voice-leading schemas in a corpus of eighteenth-century Neapolitan solfeggi (exercises for voice with bass accompaniment). The goal of this work is to gain insights not only into the characteristics...
Whether in the Synagogue or the Greek Orthodox Church, worshippers are physically active throughout chanted prayer, exhibiting a variety of metrical interactions between their voices and bodily movements. Existing scholarship on rhythm and meter, embodied music experience, and ritual indicate that metrical synchronization is a fundamental mode of sonic and...
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...
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...