Browsing by Author "Jaffe, Stephen"

Barbeque Man Unleashed consists of two chapters. Chapter 1 is an original musical score, Barbeque Man Unleashed: The Greatest Professional Wrestling Work Of All Time. Chapter 2 is an article entitled "Prelude To a Fist" concerning the subject of musical depictions of morality in the practice of professional wrestling entrance themes.

Composers on the Decks is comprised of three related chapters: an original composition for amplified chamber ensemble and laptop DJ, Alleys Of Your Mind; an extended article entitled "Composers on the Decks: Hybridity of Place and Practice among Composer-DJs Gabriel Prokofiev, Mason Bates, Ari Benjamin Meyers and Brandt Brauer Frick"; and an archive of edited interviews of the four primary research subjects. Chapter 1 is the author's artistic contribution. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the emerging practices of "club classical" and what I am calling "instrumental-electronic dance music" in what may be the first academic study to examine the latter and its connections with the former.

Alleys of Your Mind is a work for seven wind instruments, soprano and laptop DJ composed as social dance music, intended to be performed in a nightclub. Its repetitive style, electronic dance beats and long-form instrumental writing create a musical hybrid of classical compositional techniques and electronic dance music (EDM). The work contains three movements: the first and longest movement is paced at a dance tempo of 124 beats-per-minute; the second movement at half of that speed, 62 beats-per-minute; and Movement 3 returns to the original tempo. The movements are performed without pause and leave generous space for the DJ to improvise with audio effects and an extended interlude in Movement 2. In addition, Alleys Of Your Mind has a documentary dimension: audio samples of medical machinery and voices, recorded by the composer during his recovery in a neuroscience intensive care unit, feature in the second and third movements.

Chapter 2 introduces the related practices of "club classical" and "instrumental-EDM," explaining the musical connections between contemporary classical and EDM and interpreting the hybrid social environments where this music lives. The first section deals with the club classical phenomenon in the practices of composer-DJs Gabriel Prokofiev and Mason Bates, and presenters such as Yellow Lounge. Prokofiev leads Nonclassical Records and hosts monthly club nights in London, during which live sets of recent classical works alternate with sets from Nonclassical's resident DJs. The label's releases adapt classical music to an EDM format, featuring new classical compositions and electronic remixes of these works. Bates presents Mercury Soul, a party in nightclubs that links DJ sets of EDM with live classical sets via composed, electro-acoustic interludes; these nights involve a director, conductor, and a chamber ensemble from a major symphony. Yellow Lounge situates older classical music in nightclubs and employs DJs who spin classical works between live sets. Ari Benjamin Meyers composes instrumental-EDM, music that features classically influenced composition with a dance focus, and has performed it with his Redux Orchestra in Berlin's late night dance clubs from 2005-2012. Brandt Brauer Frick, an EDM trio, formed an 11-piece ensemble of mostly classical instruments that plays their orchestrated techno-like tracks in clubs and concert halls.

Using social and performance analysis, the chapter describes these phenomena as musical and social hybridity. Club classical and instrumental-EDM evince a desire on the part of event planners and classically trained composers to connect on a more physical and social level with their audience. Many of the composers and presenters express a wish that through these practices, classical music can expand beyond the concert hall and potentially see a demographic change in its audience over time. The chapter also delves into the narrow demographics of the classical-EDM scene, the difficulties of instrumental-EDM, and situates the author's dissertation composition, Alleys Of Your Mind, and its presentation at the Duke Coffeehouse, within the greater practice of instrumental-EDM.

Chapter 3 presents edited versions of the author's interviews with the study's four primary research subjects. This documentation, and the dissertation as a whole, is paired with a website, composersonthedecks.org, which provides additional information, photographs, links, and audio and video of Alleys Of Your Mind.

This dissertation consists of three distinct components: (1) “Double Rainbow,” a notated composition for an acoustic ensemble of 10 instruments, ca. 36 minutes. (2) “Appalachiana”, a fixed-media composition for electro-acoustic music and video, ca. 30 minutes, and (3) “'The Invisible Mass': Exploring Compositional Technique in Alfred Schnittke’s Second Symphony”, an analytical article.

(1) Double Rainbow is a ca. 36 minute composition in four movements scored for 10 instruments: flute, Bb clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), tenor saxophone (doubling on alto saxophone), french horn, percussion (glockenspiel, vibraphone, wood block, 3 toms, snare drum, bass drum, suspended cymbal), piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass. Each of the four movements of the piece explore their own distinct character and set of compositional goals. The piece is presented as a musical score and as a recording, which was extensively treated in post-production.

(2) Appalachiana, is a ca. 30 minute fixed-media composition for music and video. The musical component was created as a vehicle to showcase several approaches to electro-acoustic music composition –fft re-synthesis for time manipulation effects, the use of a custom-built software instrument which implements generative approaches to creating rhythm and pitch patterns, using a recording of rain to create rhythmic triggers for software instruments, and recording additional components with acoustic instruments. The video component transforms footage of natural landscapes filmed at several locations in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia into a surreal narrative using a variety of color, lighting, distortion, and time-manipulation video effects.

(3) “‘The Invisible Mass:’ Exploring Compositional Technique in Alfred Schnittke’s Second Symphony” is an analytical article that focuses on Alfred Schnittke’s compositional technique as evidenced in the construction of his Second Symphony and discussed by the composer in a number of previously untranslated articles and interviews. Though this symphony is pivotal in the composer’s oeuvre, there are currently no scholarly articles that offer in-depth analyses of the piece. The article combines analyses of the harmony, form, and orchestration in the Second Symphony with relevant quotations from the composer, some from published and translated sources and others newly translated by the author from research at the Russian State Library in St. Petersburg. These offer a perspective on how Schnittke’s compositional technique combines systematic geometric design with keen musical intuition.

Fan Jing (Folk Images), an orchestral trilogy, is based on folk elements of the three main ethnic groups in Taiwan: Min-nan, Hakka and aboriginal. As each of these groups has its own spoken language, folk music and musical style, each movement of the trilogy has its own character. Furthermore, different aspects of folk elements are foregrounded in each movement. The first movement, Fantasy on Wang Bao Chuan, emphasizes Min-nan vocal music and is mainly based on the Taiwanese opera melody , Wang Bao Chuan. Melodic figures derived from the opera mix with original melodies. These melodies depict the tender quality of Min-nan vocal music with its characteristic bending pitches. By contrast, Hakka music, famous for its "mountain songs" which farmers sing to each other while picking tea leaves, is usually sung in a more unadorned manner. In this second movement of Fan Jing, the open and spacious atmosphere of mountain songs is evoked; in its harmonic sphere, minor triads, ubiquitous in the original melody, are juxtaposed with pentatonic chords. The elements in the third movement, Feng Nian Ji, are derived from the opening phrases of a harvest song of the Amis, an aboriginal tribe located mainly in the eastern Taiwan. The structure of this movement follows the events occurring during the harvest festival (豐年祭), including hunting, singing in the antiphonal style ("call and response"), dancing, and celebrating communally. The music evokes the mood of this wild carnival.

On a theoretical level, Fan Jing loosely adapts Chinese musical elements to concepts of twelve tone tonality and set theory. This approach builds on the work of Chinese composer, Chen Yi. In this work and related music, the composer has developed an idiom which is capable of giving voice to Chinese thematic elements and which employs western developmental techniques.

Fan Jing is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets in B-flat, bass clarinet in B-flat, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns in F, 3 trumpets in C, 2 tenor trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, 3 percussionists, harp, piano (doubling celesta), and strings. The work is approximately thirty minutes in duration.

ABSTRACT

Four Seasons for Ensemble of Chinese Instruments: Dizi, Suona, Gaoying Sheng, Zhongyin Sheng, Percussion, Pipa, Zheng, Erhu and Zhonghu was created in 2012-2012. Loosely inspired by Basho's haiku, Four Seasons comprises four movements.

The composition is characterized by the application of Asian principles of heterophony and single tone timbre with the context of Western contemporary music. I explore for the first time the application of Chou Wen-chung's variable modes theory. In addition, Four Seasons are suggested by twelve I Ching hexagrams corresponding to the twelve months.

Each movement of Four Seasons features one soloist or small groups of soloists, as in concerto grosso. Setting up different instrumental combinations in four movements, the piece also uses timbre and sonority to depict the vivid colors of the four seasons.

This dissertation contains two related documents: a piece of music entitled Hallmarks, Sigils & Colophons for three female singers and chamber orchestra setting excerpts from Christian Bök's Eunoia; and an article entitled "Reorganizing the Rock and Roll: U.S. Maple's Musical Deconstructions." These two chapters are linked by an engagement with the phonic materiality of speech and the polyvalent implications that arise from the intense musical study of that materiality.

Chapter 1, Hallmarks, Sigils & Colophons, is a six-movement work for soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, and chamber ensemble. Each movement sets excerpts from the individual chapters of Christian Bök's Eunoia, a collection of prose poems inspired by the avant-garde literary group Oulipo. As such, each chapter only uses single vowels: "Chapter A" uses only words with the letter a, "Chapter E" uses only e, and so on. The piece explores the sound worlds of each individual vowel, attempting to create unified musical ideas from each vowel's unique sonic character. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the limited range of vowel sounds changes the affect of a sonic space. I occasionally attempt to mimic (or at least reference) Bök's use of constraints, though I never allow constraint to override musical concerns. Despite using words, this piece tells no unified story, and each movement exists, on some levels, as self-contained wholes.

Chapter 2, "Reorganizing the Rock and Roll: U.S. Maple's Musical Deconstructions," discusses the relationship between the music of the rock group U.S. Maple and Derrida's theories of deconstruction. U.S. Maple's music is often described by critics and fans as "deconstructing" rock music, though the band dismisses the term for its pejorative implications. In this article, I argue that the band's music could, in fact, be read as expanding the Derridean concepts of différance and the "trace" into the realm of music. I describe how US Maple performs what Marcel Cobussen terms "deconstruction in music" to the case of conventional hard rock tropes. I focus particularly on the way in which singer Al Johnson creates a language out of paralinguistic utterances--singing in yelps, growls, grunts, groans, and garbled words--and thereby cultivates the multiplicity of sounds and significations that are typically relegated to subordinate status by other rock singers. I also use Richard Middleton's ideas about repetition in pop music to analyze how the band deconstructs the syntax of rock by imbuing their songs with the affect of improvisation.

Into the Bends of Time is a 40-minute work in seven movements for a large chamber orchestra with electronics, utilizing real-time computer-assisted processing of music performed by live musicians. The piece explores various combinations of interactive relationships between players and electronics, ranging from relatively basic processing effects to musical gestures achieved through stages of computer analysis, in which resulting sounds are crafted according to parameters of the incoming musical material. Additionally, some elements of interaction are multi-dimensional, in that they rely on the participation of two or more performers fulfilling distinct roles in the interactive process with the computer in order to generate musical material. Through processes of controlled randomness, several electronic effects induce elements of chance into their realization so that no two performances of this work are exactly alike. The piece gets its name from the notion that real-time computer-assisted processing, in which sound pressure waves are transduced into electrical energy, converted to digital data, artfully modified, converted back into electrical energy and transduced into sound waves, represents a “bending” of time.

The Bill Evans Trio featuring bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential piano trios in the history of jazz, lauded for its unparalleled level of group interaction. Most analyses of Bill Evans’ recordings, however, focus on his playing alone and fail to take group interaction into account. This paper examines one performance in particular, of Victor Young’s “My Foolish Heart” as recorded in a live performance by the Bill Evans Trio in 1961. In Part One, I discuss Steve Larson’s theory of musical forces (expanded by Robert S. Hatten) and its applicability to jazz performance. I examine other recordings of ballads by this same trio in order to draw observations about normative ballad performance practice. I discuss meter and phrase structure and show how the relationship between the two is fixed in a formal structure of repeated choruses. I then develop a model of perpetual motion based on the musical forces inherent in this structure. In Part Two, I offer a full transcription and close analysis of “My Foolish Heart,” showing how elements of group interaction work with and against the musical forces inherent in the model of perpetual motion to achieve an unconventional, dynamic use of double-time. I explore the concept of a unified agential persona and discuss its role in imparting the song’s inherent rhetorical tension to the instrumental musical discourse.

Abstract Les Cenelles is a (roughly) thirty-minute song cycle for soprano and bass baritone voices, flute, clarinet, trombone, percussion, and string orchestra. The composition sets music to selected poems from the historic anthology bearing the same name. First published in 1845, Les Cenelles stands as the United States’ first publication of poems by African Americans. Through musical borrowings, bluesy/jazzy harmonic inflections, swinging rhythms, and operatic arias and recitatives, the song cycle aims to pay homage to the poets, the city of New Orleans which birthed them, and New Orleans’ rich and extensive musical history.

No Turn Unstoned: Development, Deviation, and Dissolution in the Music of Luke Vibert attempts to provide theoretical tools to better analyze and conceptualize change upon various levels of loop organization within Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Through the music of pioneering producer Luke Vibert, the essay highlights fundamental levels of loop organizations: loops, loop phrases, loop rhymes, and loop sections. Moreover, the essay highlights fundamental components which comprise loops: e.g., drum, melodic, chordal, bassline, and riff loops. Lastly, the essay identifies four essential operations which lie at the heart of change within EDM’s array of genres: e.g., loop content layering, loop content varying, loop content blending, and loop content disrupting.

This dissertation contains two parts: an original album for voice, clarinet, electric guitar, hand percussion, and electronics; and an article analyzing ethical use of responsive technologies in art, music, and design.

Lilacs: Digital Songs and Poems for Voice, Clarinet, Percussion, Electric Guitar, and Electronics is a musical work in twelve sections inspired by the experience of losing a loved one to cancer. Themes of healing, hope, loss, and grieving appear in several of the songs and poems. The texts are original, except portions of “The Promise” which were excerpted from Isaiah 43:2-5. The musical sections comment on the ideas in the main poem, “the words that should not be said,” which is broken into four pieces. My music and text evoke an emotional process that is difficult to navigate: how to display a socially acceptable public face while privately grieving. Which words are “safe,” and which words should be “held close to [our hearts]”?

In some ways, my work is similar to a 19th-century song cycle, which usually involved solo or ensemble voices and instrumental accompaniment (especially the combination of voice and piano). Like song cycles in the 19th century, Lilacs is meant to be cohesive; the songs are meant to go together and comment on one another. In the context of this form, my choice to mix voice and choir is unusual, though there is a precedent in Schubert’s The Lady of the Lake. My choice to electronically overdub my own voice certainly departs from standard song cycles, which were most popular in a day where electronic manipulation was impossible.

Lilacs was conceived in an electronic format and is designed to be heard at home or on headphones, a listening experience which is not standard for song cycles or classical music as a whole, and relies on electronic devices as mediators of acoustic intimacy. The mix of styles, electronic format, and navigation of multiple music styles in Lilacs also suggest that this work is an avant-garde digital concept album in the same vein as The Beatles’ Revolver, but the fragmented narrative provided by my original poems are reminiscent of theatrical monologue. Taken together, the elements of my work suggest that Lilacs asserts its own genre. The final track, “Branches,” is submitted with the written dissertation, and can be heard at https://soundcloud.com/sacurzi/12-branches.

In my article, I analyze four case studies of interactive art to show that existing projects can inform the ethical design, use, and promotion of current responsive art and commercial projects. While responsive technologies incorporate fields as diverse as science, music, fashion, medicine, art, and textiles, critical discourse on the cultural meaning of wearable electronics and responsive textiles has been limited, with most literature and scholarship focusing on the technological advancements themselves. As a result, creators and consumers of wearable technology engage with increasingly “modern” garments but only rarely interrogate their use.

I analyze the interactive artwork of Yuri Suzuki, Anna Biró, Alyce Santoro, and Joanna Berzowska. First, I demonstrate the ways in which these artists disrupt dominant power dynamics of gender, ecology, disability and globalization; based on these analyses, I then develop a table of ethical considerations for the design and documentation of responsive textiles and haptic sound art. I intend this table be a practical tool for creators of responsive technologies in art, design, and commercial applications. I hope that my research will affect decision-making regarding photographic styles for the purposes of advertising or (in the case of artists) public documentation, which currently promotes thin, white, cisgender women. My work also has tangible benefits for commercial applications, where ethical sourcing and labor can protect companies from expensive lawsuits, loss of income from damaged brand image, consumer boycotts, and even embargos such as the United States suspension of trade with Bangladesh after the Rana Plaza factory collapse.

As Catherine Clément argues in her 1979 publication "L'Opéra ou la Défaite des Femmes" most female operatic characters befall a tragic ending: death, suicide, madness, murder. Building on Clément and observations of more recent feminist scholars (Carol Gilligan, Susan McClary, Marcia Citron), and on the compositional work of Paula Kimper and others, the current project strives to problematize opera's dominant paradigm, and to use my artistic work as a composer to present a different one. With a dearth of stories that highlight the relationship between a mother and a daughter, I have sought to create an artistic work with strong female leads featuring women whose lives carry on and, even, thrive. It was a propitious opportunity to have been approached by conductor Sara Jobin and feminist theorist and author Carol Gilligan (under the auspices of A Different Voice Opera Project) to develop such an opera based upon Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter". What better way to break free from a paradigm than to do so with a popular and well-loved novel? The present artistic foray seeks thus to depart from an accepted paradigm while remaining within the bounds of something fundamentally familiar and popular. In a separately available essay "Gender and Music: A Survey of Critical Study, 1988-2012", I explored a wide survey of scholarship on gender.

The feminist reinterpretation of "The Scarlet Letter" was first developed into a play, "The Scarlet Letter", work-shopped and staged at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, the Culture Project in New York City, the National Players, and the Primary Stage Theatre. It was ripe for development into a libretto for operatic presentation by a Different Voice Opera Project. As the selected composer, I began a long collaboration with Sara Jobin, Carol Gilligan, and poet Jonathan Gilligan (co-author of the libretto). Pearl, the opera, was presented in workshop versions by A Different Voice Opera Project at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, MA during the summers of 2012 and 2013. Subsequently, our collaborative efforts were expanded through the addition of Sandra Bernhard, a dramaturg and director for a community outreach program at the Houston Grand Opera. Through conversations with Sandra, the opera became more streamlined and I was able to give it a smoother dramatic flow. In particular, Sandra's advice informed much of the opera in terms of increasing the presence of the chorus to provide the medium through which Pearl understands her past. Musically, the chorus also becomes the third part of what I call "Dimmesdale's triangle of pressure" in which he is caught within a patriarchy and pulled by three separate forces: his love and family (Hester and Pearl), his responsibility as a minister (the townspeople represented by the Chorus), and a father figure and mentor (Reverend Wilson). The present work, extensively revised during 2013-2015, grew out of these experiences.

In Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", Pearl is a seven-year-old girl, born from the love affair of Hester Prynne and minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. The pregnancy of Hester immediately places her upon dangerous footing with her only preservation being silence. She is required to permanently wear a scarlet A upon her chest, whereas the minister, Dimmesdale, hides his identity as the father of the child both for himself and for the protection of his lover and child, also through silence. In the times of Puritan New England during the 17th century, a crime such as adultery (a term that is never mentioned in Hawthorne's novel) would have been punishable by death. Needless to say, the ability of Pearl and others to speak the truth within this story becomes much too perilous for the characters to voice. The silence surrounding the life of this little girl is the focus behind the development of our main character for the opera: Pearl as a grown adult, thus making this opera a sequel, of sorts, to "The Scarlet Letter". As quoted in Gilligan's 2003 publication, "The Birth of Pleasure": "At turning points in psychic life and also in cultural history - and I believe we are at one now - it is possible to hear with particular clarity the tension between a first-person voice, an "I" who speaks from human emotional experience, and a voice that overrides what we know and feel and experience, that tells us what we should see and feel know."

Pearl as a grown woman, reflects back upon her life as a child where she is both the main character and the narrator of the story, often breaking the fourth wall. In this sense, this opera is reminiscent of the term "memory play"; a term coined by Tennessee about his work, "The Glass Menagerie". In the opening of his play, Tom, the main character, begins with:

The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings. I am the narrator of the play, and also a character in it.

With the creation of Pearl, a new character, the opera is able to integrate the relationships that do not exist within Hawthorne's novel, providing the libretto fertile material through which to explore Carol Gilligan's psychological theories . (See page vi, Note 2). We now see the story through the lens of Pearl as she remembers her childhood with highlights upon her relationships with her mother (Hester Prynne), her father (Arthur Dimmesdale), her mother's husband (Roger Chillingworth, née Roger Prynne), the townspeople, her father's mentor, Reverend Wilson, and herself as a child, allowing for the creation of duets, trios, and ensembles to highlight these relationships. The most notable of these relationships is the one between Adult Pearl and her child self, Child Pearl. In this way, and reminiscent of Williams' "memory play", Pearl's memories and current life can now be juxtaposed, together in time, memorialized through the music that binds these events and memories together.

In life we can experience our past through memory. In film we can be provided with visual flashbacks to offer a retrospective. However, it is only within music where the relationship between two eras of self can be juxtaposed. Thus, the gambit of my opera is to find musical means where the audience may now experience the character of Pearl as a child, as an adult, and as both child and adult in duet, as an echo, as a memory, a reflection. This phenomenon is most effectively evoked within opera or musical theatre. While a libretto must fundamentally be created using fewer words than say a novel or a play - it takes longer to sing a line than it would to speak it - it falls to music to express that which cannot be extrapolated through words alone. This dilemma creates a most wonderful opportunity for music to soar with tension and emotion. It is the music that can bridge together certain characters and scenes through the creation of themes that represent (in the case of this opera) truth/honesty, a patriarchy, and love, among other themes as well as the representation of particular characters. The necessity for the score to embellish the drama through music's tools: melody, harmony, motivic development and orchestration, essentially enables the audience to draw closer to the story and the characters by means that only music can provide.

In creating Pearl, it was my hope to birth the first of many such operas that shift one operatic paradigm on its head. To create an opera where the main characters are women and where they both have independent voices and thrive. As I have written elsewhere: "Some, throughout history, have argued that music has been exhausted. That everything that can be said, particularly within the Western language of tonality, has already been said. However, I must wonder, did any of the authors of such statements consider that the female voice has yet to really sing? For, we are just beginning. And I cannot wait to hear what `she' has to say."

My dissertation comprises three original musical compositions informed by the literary works of Nathaniel Mackey and an analytical article on the music of French composer Pascal Dusapin. As a whole, the collection seeks to address the confluence of music and literature and to investigate how the interaction of these diverse art forms can affect the perception of meaning for the listener or reader.

Chapter 1, Red Wind, for soprano, narrator, bass clarinet, trumpet, trombone, contrabass, and percussion, sets to music excerpts of Nathaniel Mackey’s sixth collection of poems Blue Fasa. Mackey’s serial poems Song of the Andoumboulou and “mu,” which draw heavily upon non-Western traditions for inspiration, take “an Eastern turn” in Blue Fasa. Red Wind interprets selected verses from Blue Fasa in five movements that exhibit a wide variety of musical influences ranging from classical to blues, bossa nova, jazz, and ragtime. This interplay is intended to mirror the poet’s own penchant for signification. Addressing themes of migration, societal conflict, transit, and multiple identities found in Mackey’s poetry, the piece presents a window through which listeners may bring new meaning to this poetry. Mackey himself performed on a recording of Red Wind, available at https://soundcloud.com/sid-richardson/red-wind.

Chapter 2, Bass Cathedral, for clarinet solo and wind ensemble was inspired by the novel of the same name by Nathaniel Mackey, which is the fourth installment in his ongoing fictional series From a Broken Bottle, Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. The work investigates various methods of encoding text from the source material into the compositional parameters of the work, including phrase lengths, harmony, and gestural content. Bass Cathedral, first performed by Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s Wind Ensemble at Old South Church in Boston, also explores spatial relationships in the ensemble, which is divided in five separate groupings on stage.

Chapter 3, Red Wind (Desert Remix), is a reimagining of Red Wind in a generative media environment realized in the software program MAX/MSP. Selected excerpts of Red Wind are fragmented and reorganized by the algorithm in real time, out of which emerges upon each listening a new variation of the piece. The score is, in effect, a software application. Red Wind (Desert Remix) addresses computer music’s ability to reorganize and re-contextualize compositional materials in a way that elicits a plurality of possible meanings for the listener.

Chapter 4, “Form and Exhaustion in Pascal Dusapin’s Quad - In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze,” presents an analysis of Pascal Dusapin’s violin concertino Quad - In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze (1996). It focuses on the formal layout of the work and the interdisciplinary nature of the composer’s method. By examining these connections in detail, this study underlines the importance of these two luminary figures to Dusapin’s idiosyncratic musical philosophy. Drawing heavily upon the composer’s writings about his work and an in-person interview, this study sheds light on Dusapin’s compositional process that emphasizes form and the distribution of energy within a given work. Analytical concepts drawn from Beckett, Deleuze, and Dusapin are applied to the violin concertino to illustrate how the flow of the work is exhausted by the fusing of its rigorous formal processes with powerful emotional content.

This dissertation consists of three independent musical compositions that represent a diversity of my compositional interests. The first work is titled Song of the Morrígan and is written for chamber orchestra with piano and two percussionists. The Morrígan is a figure from Irish mythology, a goddess of battle, strife, and fertility. While the Morrígan has conflicting roles and forms in Irish mythology, the most common is that of a war goddess. In this role, like the Norse Valkyries, the Morrígan intervenes in battle to choose which warrior will live and which will die. The Morrígan often takes the form of a crow or a raven, whose presence can represent both as an omen or a curse. Musically, the concept for Song of the Morrígan was one of relentless rhythmic motion., driven by rhythm.

The second piece, entitled Cries of Revelations, is scored for SATB chorus, soloists, string orchestra, horn, and 6 channel electronics. This piece is framed about two apocalyptical texts; the first is Revelation, from the Christian Bible. The second text is taken from 19th century Scottish Christian mystic Margaret MacDonald, who wrote Christian visionary texts, reminiscent of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen. McDonald's text offers multi-layered thematic material and imagery with which to shape this musical work as a contemporary statement of relevance. I set this text in contrast with passages from the Book of Revelation, which occupy the first half of the piece. The Revelation text prepares the listener with vivid imagery of the second coming, which concludes with verses that call for preparation for the end times.

The Sacred Minimalist music of the 1970s and 80s, most specifically Arvo Pärt, has heavily influenced my choral compositions. Cries of Revelation similarly explores music of contemplation and diatonic and modal tonality, drawing on Renaissance polyphony and musical idioms such as hocket and Renaissance cadential and voice- leading procedures. The musical form of Cries of Revelation is dictated by the contrasting texts, which divides the work into two tonal centers. Each section takes on the character of the text, the first being violent, dramatic, and relatively dissonant. The second section is one of tonal resignation in the face of man's helplessness in the face of the unknown.

Finally, the third piece of this dissertation is a solo work entitled Fragments of a Dream, for 5.1 surround sound electronics with video by visual artist Christian Faur of Denison University. Fragments of a Dream exists in that place between awake and sleep, the

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hypnopomic state that leads us out of dreams. Consciousness bleeds into our dream state, colors and images of dreams and nightmares mix and clash with hints of awakeness. The concept of this work is framed around the transient, endless possibilities that dreams represent. In this place, imagination runs freely and seemingly unrelated events and images combine, contrast, and transition without boundaries. The primary sound engines in Fragments of a Dream synthesize hundreds of diverse found and sampled sounds through granular synthesis. Some of the samples used in this work include birdcalls, machinery, various animal sounds, water droplets, human vocalizations, singing bowls, and Tibetan singing bowls. Fragments of a Dream was assembled, mixed and mastered in Logic Pro. A video by visual artist Christian Faur of Denison University compliments the live performance.

I am interested, broadly, in the relationship of aesthetics to politics. More specifically, I am interested in the importance of aesthetics to leftist political organizing, particularly in regard to music. This interest reflects my goals as a composer and as an activist, or, I should say, as a composer/activist: the project is the same—musical composition is a large piece of a larger puzzle. SuperConductors explores the (structural) relationships between musical objects, their means of production, and the corresponding social formations. I am especially concerned with how formal aspects of a musical composition (which, for me, include the means of performance/consumption) reflect social relations, but more importantly also forge them. So: is there a way for me to write music that challenges dominant/hegemonic social relationships? Is there a way for me to write a more democratic music?

SuperConductors consists of three divisions. The introductory division discusses the theoretical background of the project and traces historical lineages of other music and art that have been influential to this project. The second division is comprised by a series of musical compositions devoted to exploring the political and aesthetic possibilities that arise from participatory music-making. The final division consists of an article examining the emergence of web-based interactive music, pieces sometimes dubbed “sound toys”, as well as a series of my own pieces in this genre.

As a result of my work on this project, I have developed a paradigm for the production of democratic musical works through the discerning implementation of dynamically configurable forms; these principles, designed to facilitate the composition of new works in this style, are codified in a section entitled, “Guidelines for a new democratic music”.

This dissertation consists of two parts: the artistic part is a dramatic cantata for Baritone, Chamber Ensemble, Male Choir and Electronics. The scholarly part is an article which inquires into compositional aspects of Luciano Berio’s choral and symphonic piece Coro.Chapter 1 presents The Pit and the Pendulum, a dramatic cantata, in full score. Using the enhanced sonic environment allowed by the superimposition of vocal and acoustic music with a fantastic landscape created by means of electronic sounds, my composition explores the themes of Poe’s story. The tale, full of powerful metaphoric images, could be seen as a description of the experience of imprisonment. The pendulum descending from the ceiling, beyond being a clear metaphor of the inexorable passing of time, was actually one of the tortures used by the Spanish Inquisition. The blazing walls directly recall instruments of torture used at the time, as well. Nonetheless, the pit, whose black abyss is a symbol of indeterminacy, seems to point us to the annihilation of our conscience, typical of the most brutal torture of every kind and era. Victims of torture normally succumb to delirium though isolation, starvation and the alternation of torture and respite. On the brink of the pit, faced with the blackness of death, the mind of the condemned is, in this case, pushed beyond its limits and, ironically, he becomes able to conceive things that otherwise would be beyond his intellective and emotional faculties. From this terrible experience, in Poe’s tale, the prisoner gains the intuition and the knowledge of a deeper inner reality. In this regard, The Pit and the Pendulum is a tale of salvation and growth, against all odds. Chapter 2 presents the theoretical part of the dissertation, “Formal Plan and Constructive Principles of the Heterophonic Textures in Berio’s Coro.” This analytic essay on the large choral/symphonic work Coro, written in 1976 by Luciano Berio, is based on my study of his manuscripts preserved at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. I was able to consult the archive in June 2019. The article explores Berio’s motives in his placement of the choir in relation to the orchestra onstage, its premises and its consequences from a compositional point of view. It also investigates the relation between Berio’s music and the work of the ethnomusicologist Simha Arom on central African music, which inspired the composition. Thanks to some sketches left by the composer, I have been able to reconstruct the motivation behind some of the most significant compositional choices of the piece as well as several compositional procedures used by the composer to present and develop his musical discourse. In Chapter 3 the aesthetic and scholarly conclusions of this dissertation are summarized.

This dissertation consists of three distinct parts. The first and second components are my original musical compositions: The Poetics for ten instrumentalists, and Rainy Days Vol. 1 for harpsichord and electronics. The third part is an article that discusses cultural identity through an exploration of musical meaning in Tan Dun’s Water Concerto. Chapter 1, The Poetics, is written for flute, saxophone, two percussion, two pianos, and string quartet. When writing this piece, I was particularly interested in Yuri Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere, which is a realization of a meta-cultural system characterized by heterogeneous communities that are constantly dynamic and asymmetrical; the internal boundaries of the semiosphere’s inner modules are being constantly negotiated, which creates a tension that drives forward the development of our world. I thought this notion to be particularly relevant to our society, which is a multilayered network consisting of small and large communities that are interconnected and in a constant and dynamic state of negotiation. The Poetics explores a musical realization of such a multilayered and tightly connected network. How the seven movements are musically connected will be illustrated in detail in the Introduction. Chapter 2, Rainy Days Vol. 1, is a set of pieces for harpsichord and electronics about rain and Durham North Carolina, where I completed my graduate training. In 2022, I registered a one-minute field recording on my porch of every rain heard from March to May and subsequently logged journal entries for each. Volume 1 of Rainy Days therefore concerns March 2022 and consists of five movements that memorialize and interpret four rains that occurred during the month. I premiered the piece on December 2, 2023 at Nelson Music Room, Duke University. Chapter 3 is an article entitled “An Exploration of Musical Meaning in Tan Dun’s Water Concerto: Expectations, Assumptions, and the Problem of ‘Chineseness’.” Through an examination of Tan’s Water Concerto, I propose that identity is a situated social action that is dynamic and emergent, and therefore never a fixed status. Furthermore, I advocate that as practitioners of Western art music and its theoretical discourse, we should, on the one hand, strive to study and understand the materials we use and avoid insensitive actions such as removing musical elements from their context. On the other hand, we should recognize that today’s world is a multicultural one, and that as the boundaries between different cultures are becoming increasingly blurry, trying to locate the “Asianness” that is synthesized in composers’ musical language is no longer a viable practice of critical inquiry.

Music reminds us that time is not a static entity of existence. It is a pervasive concept across eras, cultures and disciplines, yet it eludes simple definition. Time as an idea can mean many things.

The overall goal of Timepiece is to create a musical whole that addresses various aspects of time as experienced both musically and cognitively; in art and in life. The composition aims to highlight the multiple ways in which we understand and think about time as an abstract concept and as a part of human experience. Each of the four movements considers a specific approach to time while emphasizing the ways in which music is a temporal art.

Timepiece is scored for an amplified chamber ensemble consisting of nine players: oboe/english horn, bassoon/alto saxophone, electric guitar, electric bass/electric guitar, piano/midi keyboard, percussion (vibraphone, crotales, marimba and drumset), violin, viola and cello. The composition also features live electronics and digital processing.

Movement I, history becoming memory, explores time as it relates to change; the movement from past through present to future as represented by the changing states of ending, being and becoming as well as the role of history and memory as informing musical language. Movement II, circadian cycles maps an infant's sleep and feeding cycle on to musical parameters. Movement III, relative and noisy uses digitally processed sound samples of modeled cosmic events that would cause ripples in the fabric of space-time as the background to which the instrumentalists musically react. The final movement, second fastest land animal for short distances, explores ideas of speed and rapidity using elements, both composed and sequenced, of common "breakbeats" found in certain genres of electronic dance music.

As each instrument is amplified, musical temporalities distinguish themselves, highlighted by the distinct sounds produced both acoustically and electronically. Beyond the basic acoustical variance between the sound of the individual instruments locally and their sound projected through speakers, the amplified sound is manipulated through both sound mixing and digital processing. In many ways, as technology has given rise to musical ideas surrounding the complexity of time itself, so it serves to aid in the expression of the temporal multiplicity in this composition.