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...
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...