Browsing by Author "Lindroth, Scott"

This dissertation consists of two parts: a chamber opera and an article on the work of Claude Vivier.

"Cardano" is a new chamber opera by composer Bryan Christian about the work and tragic life of the Renaissance polymath Gerolamo Cardano (1501-1576). Scored for three vocal soloists, an actor, and an eleven-part ensemble, "Cardano" represents a coalescence of Christian's interests in medieval and Renaissance sources, mathematics, and intensely dramatic vocal music. Christian constructed the libretto from fragmented excerpts of primary sources written by Cardano and his rival Niccolo Tartaglia. The opera reinvigorates Cardano's 16th-century scientific and philosophical models by sonifying and mapping these models to salient musical and dramatic features. These models prominently include Cardano's solution to the cubic equation and his horoscope of Jesus Christ, which was deemed so scandalous in the 16th century that it ultimately led to Cardano's imprisonment under the Roman Inquisition in 1570 - the opera's tragic conclusion. Presenting these ideas in opera allows them to resound beyond the music itself and project through the characters and drama on stage. In this way, the historical documents and theories - revealing Cardano's unique understanding of the world and his contributions to society - are given new life as they tell his tragic story.

Claude Vivier's homophonic treatment of combination tones--what he called les couleurs--demands an extension of traditional methods of harmonic and spectral analysis. Incomplete explanations of this technique throughout the secondary literature further demand a revised and cohesive definition. To analyze all variations of les couleurs, I developed the analytical concept of combination-tone classes (CTCs) and built upon Angela Lohri's (2010) combination tone matrix to create a dynamic CTC matrix, from which CTC sets may be extracted. Intensive CTC set analysis reveals a definitive correlation between CTC set and formal sections in Vivier's composition "Bouchara." Although formally adjacent CTC sets are often markedly varied, all sets share a subset of lower-order CTCs, aiding in perception of spectral cohesion across formal boundaries. This analysis illuminates the interrelationships of CTC sets to their parent dyads, their orchestration, their playing technique, and form in "Bouchara." CTC set analysis is compared with Vivier's sketches for "Bouchara," which suggest that les couleurs were intended as integral components of the work's musical structure.

This dissertation is in two parts: a music composition titled "Dark Holler" for large chamber ensemble; and an article on how Cape Breton traditional fiddlers manipulate tempo in performance.

1. Dark Holler

Dark Holler is a 45-minute work in six movements for large chamber ensemble. The piece incorporates a number of styles of American roots music including fiddle tunes, African American fife and drum music from the Mississippi delta, Appalachian ballad singing, and banjo songs. I weave these musical references and quotations with my own musical language and place the source material in new contexts for each movement. In my use of the folk material I am more concerned with the performance of the tunes than with the melodies themselves. The piece gets it's name from a line from the tune used in the final movement: "When I wake I have no rest / every moment seems an hour / all the pain rolls through my breast / I'd rather be in some dark holler."

2. That Driving Sound: Use of Tempo in Traditional Cape Breton Fiddle Performance

In performances of the "Scottish Set," Cape Breton fiddlers create a coherent large-scale structure by executing a continuous tempo acceleration that lasts the length of the March, Strathspey, and Reel set. This command of tempo is extraordinary. Performers use tempo acceleration to transition between tune types and propel the music forward by accelerating by as little as one beat per minute. Considering the music's roots in the dance halls of Cape Breton, where does this unusual practice come from? I look closely at step dancing as registered in the approach to rhythm, pacing, structure, and tempo. The intimate relationship between fiddle and feet yields smooth transitions from one tune type to another in order to facilitate the dance steps. In this paper I demonstrate how fiddlers exaggerate this tempo manipulation in performances where dancing does not occur. Through analysis, I measure tempo fluctuations as they correspond to the progression of tunes to explain the large-scale and continuous tempo acceleration that shapes the exciting performance practice.

EVOLUTIONARY SKETCHES is a three-movement sextet composition for flute, clarinet in Bb, percussion, piano, viola, and cello. The idea of the piece is based on the study of applying scientific evolutionary theories to compositional techniques. The first movement reflects my attempt to realize the generic process of development from one generation to the next by natural selection, crossover, or mutation. In the second movement, I conceive an image of evolution in which changes take place through battles among different evolutionary factors over progress. The structure of the third movement explores the extensive use of cellular automata.

"Indirect Reflections" is a four-channel electro-acoustic composition. I explore in it the advantages that electronic composition offers to the music for dance. Specifically, I have been focusing on the possibility of "fixed freedom" in the treatment of meter and rhythm, and on the use of sound spatialization. With respect to the latter, I have employed the gradual shift of location of individual sound sources as well as relocation between discrete points.

The reference score presented here was prepared after the piece was complete. It reflects the music events, but does not define them. The audio version is the primary source. Due to the nature of electronic composition, and to the flexible treatment of the meter and rhythm, standard notation would not be adequate. I chose notational style appropriate for each movement. Rhythmic values are sometimes unspecified, in other cases there may be approximate and not to scale.

This dissertation is comprised of two parts: two compositions titled Lü and Extrication, and an article discussing Qigang Chen’s Reflet d’un temps disparu and Luan Tan.

Lü is a twenty-five minute string quartet that consists of four movements. The title “lü” means “journey” in Chinese, which suggests that the music traces a large scale expressive arc over the four movements. The music shifts from the use of chromaticism at the beginning to the incorporation of pentatonicism in the last movement. The melody that is varied and developed in all movements plays an important role in establishing musical coherence. The first two movements are based on dissonant intervals — seconds, sevenths and tritone. In the third movement, the music starts to include more consonant intervals — thirds, perfect fourths and perfect fifths – which prepare the listener for the employment of pentatonicism in the last movement. The last movement shows a coexistence between pentatonicism and dissonance, where the music mainly focuses on the pentatonic collections horizontally, while the harmonies are extracted from pentatonic collections with dissonant intervals.

The second composition Extrication is written for clarinet, percussion, violin and cello. The main melody is inspired by the music from one of the oldest forms of Chinese musical theater — Kunqu opera. The main melody recurs in varied forms from one section to another. This piece intentionally incorporates pentatonicism and influences from traditional Chinese music, such as rhythmic gestures played by woodblocks and Chinese cymbals that can be found everywhere in traditional Chinese operas.

In the article, I discuss Qignag Chen’s approach to pentatonicism in both Reflet d’un temps disparu and Luan Tan. Even though the two pieces differ in musical styles, they both use pentatonicism extensively. In Reflet d’un temps disparu, Chen explores the maximally-intersecting and non-intersecting relationships between pentatonic scales, following his former teacher Luo Zhongrong’s footsteps. According to analytical methods developed by Luo Zhongrong, and Nancy Rao, a pair of pentatonic scales that are related by a perfect fourth shares four common tones. In contrast, a pair of pentatonic scales that are separated by a semitone or a tritone share no common tones. Unlike in Reflet d’un temps disparu in which Chen creates pentatonic-derived harmonies and lush orchestral textures, the music in Luan Tan focuses on pentatonic motives that develop horizontally. In Luan Tan, Chen employs different relationships between a pair of pentatonic scales other than the maximally-intersecting and non-overlapping relationships. My analysis makes use of vectors described in John Rahn’s Basic Atonal Theory to examine the relationships between pentatonic collections in Luan Tan.

This dissertation is in two parts: a composition for mixed chamber ensemble and electronics and an article on Frank Zappa’s album, Lumpy Gravy.

The composition, Everything, is in three movements (Ether, Ecstatic, and Deviant) and is scored for a mixed chamber ensemble of Flute/Piccolo, Bass Clarinet, Bassoon, Trumpet, Trombone, Violin, Double Bass, and two Percussionists. Electronic interludes are placed between the movements that provide a sonic backdrop for the onstage movement of chairs and instrumentation changes. The piece is 25 minutes in duration and is a summation of my musical interests over the past several years.

The article is concerned with Frank Zappa’s 1968 album Lumpy Gravy. In 1967 Frank Zappa was approached by Capitol Records to produce an album of his music. Although Zappa was under contract with MGM as a performer, the offer from Capitol allowed to serve as music arranger and conductor for a project that would result in one of his most interesting and enigmatic albums, Lumpy Gravy. The litigation pursued by MGM following Lumpy Gravy’s creation prompted Zappa to re-imagine and remix the music recorded for Capitol to create a new recording for MGM. The result is a mixture of high classical and popular music, interspersed with staged conversations by musicians in the band covering a bizarre range of subject matter and which serve to create a parodic tone. The correspondences and divergences between the original Capitol recording and the final MGM release reveal much about the central role of parody and satire in Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy, not to mention the tremendous scope of Zappa’s musical tastes and ambition.

1. nowhere landscape, for clarinets, trombones, percussion, violins, and electronics

nowhere landscape is an eighty-minute work for nine performers, composed of acoustic and electronic sounds. Its fifteen movements invoke a variety of listening strategies, using slow change, stasis, layering, coincidence, and silence to draw attention to the sonic effects of the environment—inside the concert hall as well as the world outside of it. The work incorporates a unique stage set-up: the audience sits in close proximity to the instruments, facing in one of four different directions, while the musicians play from a number of constantly-shifting locations, including in front of, next to, and behind the audience.

Much of nowhere landscape’s material is derived from a collection of field recordings

made by the composer during a road trip from Springfield, MA to Douglas, WY along US- 20, a cross-country route made effectively obsolete by the completion of I-90 in the mid- 20th century. In an homage to artist Ed Ruscha’s 1963 book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, the composer made twenty-six recordings at gas stations along US-20. Many of the movements of nowhere landscape examine the musical potential of these captured soundscapes: familiar and anonymous, yet filled with poignancy and poetic possibility.

2. “The Map and the Territory: Documenting David Dunn’s Sky Drift”

In 1977, David Dunn recruited twenty-six musicians to play his work Sky Drift in the

Anza-Borrego Desert in Southern California. This outdoor performance was documented with photos and recorded with four stationary microphones to tape. A year later, Dunn presented the work in New York City as a “performance/documentation,” playing back the audio recording and projecting slides. In this paper I examine the consequences of this kind of act: what does it mean for a recording of an outdoor work to be shared at an indoor concert event? Can such a complex and interactive experience be successfully flattened into some kind of re-playable documentation? What can a recording capture and what must it exclude?

This paper engages with these questions as they relate to David Dunn’s Sky Drift and to similar works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Luther Adams. These case-studies demonstrate different solutions to the difficulty of documenting outdoor performances. Because this music is often heard from a variety of equally-valid perspectives—and because any single microphone only captures sound from one of these perspectives—the physical set-up of these kind of pieces complicate what it means to even “hear the music” at all. To this end, I discuss issues around the “work itself” and “aura” as well as “transparency” and “liveness” in recorded sound, bringing in thoughts and ideas from Walter Benjamin, Howard Becker, Joshua Glasgow, and others. In addition, the artist Robert Irwin and the composer Barry Truax have written about the conceptual distinctions between “the work” and “not- the-work”; these distinctions are complicated by documentation and recording. Without the context, the being-there, the music is stripped of much of its ability to communicate meaning.

This dissertation consists of two independent musical compositions and an article detailing the process of the design and assembly of an electric guitar with particular emphasis on the carefully curated suite of embedded effects.

The first piece, 'Phase Locked Loop and Modulo Games' is scored for electric guitar and a single echo of equal volume less than a beat away. One could think of the piece as a 15 minute canon at the unison at the dotted eighth note (or at times the quarter or triplet-quarter), however the compositional motivation is more about weaving a composite texture between the guitar and its echo that is, while in theory extremely contrapuntal, in actuality is simply a single [superhuman] melodic line.

The second piece, 'The Dogma Loops' picks up a few compositional threads left by ‘Phase Locked Loop’ and weaves them into an entirely new tapestry. 'Phase Locked Loop' is motivated by the creation of a complex musical composite that is for the most part electronically transparent. 'The Dogma Loops' questions that same notion of composite electronic complexity by essentially asking a question: "what are the inputs to an interactive electronic system that create the most complex outputs via the simplest musical means possible?"

'The Dogma Loops' is scored for Electric Guitar (doubling on Ukulele), Violin and Violoncello. All of the principal instruments require an electronic pickup (except the Uke). The work is in three sections played attacca; [Automation Games], [Point of Origin] and [Cloning Vectors].

The third and final component of the document is the article 'Finding Ibrida.' This article details the process of the design and assembly of an electric guitar with integrated effects, while also providing the deeper context (conceptual and technical) which motivated the efforts and informed the challenges to hybridize the various technologies (tubes, transistors, digital effects and a microcontroller subsystem). The project was motivated by a desire for rigorous technical and hands-on engagement with analog signal processing as applied to the electric guitar. ‘Finding Ibrida’ explores sound, some myths and lore of guitar tech and the history of electric guitar distortion and its culture of sonic exploration.

This dissertation consists of two independent chapters: "Studies of Algorithmic Music Generation" and “Folksong Enthusiasm in Post-Cultural Revolution China.”

The chapter "Studies of Algorithmic Music Generation" investigates algorithms for creating "long-term structure" in music. The chapter starts by defining the concept of "long-term structure" and underscoring its significance in automated music generation through a review of historical literature and musical examples. The chapter then introduces two algorithmic techniques to realize this concept: one called "long-term structure sampling" and another applying the image generation technique known as the conditional Generative Adversarial Network. Experiments with these techniques yielded two musical pieces—an electronic piano piece and a string quartet—both of which are included in the chapter and deemed to meet professional compositional standards. The chapter concludes by discussing the aesthetic implications of this study and the broader technical and disciplinary challenges surrounding algorithmic music generation.

The chapter "Folksong Enthusiasm in Post-Cultural Revolution China" delves into the document Guangxi Folksong Selection (1980), an unpublished record of a field recording trip to Guangxi Province in 1979 by the Class of 1978 Chinese composers. These composers are recognized for their fusion of Western and Chinese musical styles; our understanding of the Chinese elements in their music, however, has primarily been based on the composers’ personal accounts. This chapter offers a more nuanced historical perspective on the composers’ musical “Chineseness” by examining the folksong enthusiasm in post-Cultural Revolution China through a cultural contextualization of the Guangxi Folksong Selection.

Tentative Embrace is a composition in five movements for flute, clarinet, saxophone quartet, vibraphone, piano, string quartet and tape track. The tape track features spoken text and soundscape recordings gathered in and around the Sonoran desert of the Southwestern United States. The text and the soundscape recordings, along with the composed music, are all my own work.

This piece embodies my efforts to interpret and translate the complicated sensation of being a human alone in nature - of wanting to belong, realizing I do belong, but also not quite belonging. The Sonoran desert, the site of inspiration for this work, is an especially revelatory space that heightens these simultaneous sensations of connection and disconnection; it draws attention to the biological points of contact between human beings and their natural surroundings, but it also emphasizes those cultural and material differences that we carry with us into such a space. Through the combination of the music, the text and the soundscapes, I work to convey the ever-shifting boundaries between the self and everything else.

For the music, I find formal inspiration in the slow and cyclical pace of the desert itself; musical ideas unfold gradually through ever-varying repetitions. Each movement is devoted to a particular phenomenon experienced in the desert, and while the text and the soundscapes work to articulate the specifics of these phenomena, the music gives form to their structural and sensual suggestion. I move back and forth between specifics and abstractions; as such, some of my translations of this space will be more audible than others, but each of them demonstrate this attempt at forging an artistic point of connection with this environment.

The Persistence of Smoke is a documentary opera. The libretto is based on interviews with various individuals related to the former Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company headquarters in Durham, North Carolina.

The cigarette industry once dominated Durham, but saw its decline in the 1990s as the link between cancer and smoking became increasingly clear. The American Tobacco Company and the Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company were once the biggest cigarette manufacturers in the city. As these companies left Durham, their factories and tobacco warehouses first sat vacant, but were gradually preserved and transformed into new spaces for offices, apartments and restaurants.

This project focused on the former Liggett and Myers headquarters along Main Street, a collection of buildings now known as "West Village". I interviewed current and former Durham residents who had a connection with these buildings, including local business representatives, community leaders, former Liggett employees, historians, current residents in the downtown area, municipal urban planners, journalists, and an architect. These interviews were given to local playwright John Justice, who created a libretto based on the themes that emerged.

The opera's story focuses on Kevin, an architect about to unveil his visionary master plan for redeveloping several defunct cigarette factories in an unnamed city. As Kevin leaves his newly renovated apartment for the press conference, he is confronted by his estranged father Curtis, a former cigarette worker who desperately wants to reconcile and reconnect, deliriously recalling the glory days of tobacco and the money that followed.

The Yellow Wallpaper is a one-act opera (in three scenes) for dramatic soprano and chamber orchestra (eleven instruments). The libretto is a free adaptation by the composer of the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The instrumentation required is: flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling english horn), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet and E-flat clarinet), bassoon, horn, soprano, piano (doubling celesta), violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and contrabass. The approximate duration is one hour. The work is dedicated to soprano Aimee Marcoux.

Third-Millennium Heart is a fifty-minute composition for soprano and ten instruments. The work takes its name from the text’s source material, Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s book of poetry, translated into English by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. Set for soprano, flute, oboe, clarinet, two percussionists, two pianos, violin, viola, and cello, the fifty-minute composition navigates its way through Andkjær Olsen’s words using song, speech, and instrumental movements that illustrate images from the poetry.“Constructing Postmodern Objects: Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s New Simplicity” is an article on the Danish composer Gudmundsen-Holmgreen and his unique version of New Simplicity, an artistic movement that emerged in Denmark in the 1960s. I situate Gudmundsen-Holmgreen in the postmodernist movement, and explore the use of “objects” in his compositions. I focus on Symphony, Antiphony, and the sonic objects present in that orchestral work to better understand Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s sui generis musical style and to suggest parallels found in other artforms.

This dissertation consists of two parts: a composition for chamber ensemble and an article discussing musical signification in Thomas Adès’s opera, The Tempest.

Through the Mangrove Tunnels is a forty-five minute composition inspired by my experiences growing up in the swamps and bayous of Florida. Its eight movements for string quartet, piano, and drum set are drawn from my memories as well as the colorful history of Weedon Island, a nature preserve in St. Petersburg that I spent much of my childhood exploring. The island’s many legends include ceremonial gatherings of Native Americans, landings by Spanish conquistadors, burned-down speakeasies, shootouts, bootlegging, a failed movie studio, plane crashes, and an axe-murder. Despite the island’s long history of encounters with humans, to the newcomer it appears to be a pristine natural landscape. Though they have been almost fully reclaimed by nature, traces of its history remain: the line in the dirt of a long-forgotten runway, an ancient sea-faring canoe buried in the mud. The piece evokes this history in impressionistic fashion alongside my personal memories of canoeing through the island’s mangrove tunnels. In combining these stories the continuum of past and present are collapsed, resulting in an exploration of the relationships between memory, history, place, home, and the natural world.

In the article I demonstrate how a complex hierarchy of associative musical ideas are used to represent specific characters and ideas in Thomas Adès’s Shakespearean opera The Tempest (2004). At the top of this hierarchy are two interval cycles, the dyadic cycle and the <2,3,4> aligned cycle, which together inform the majority of both melodic and harmonic material in the opera. The dyadic cycle is primarily associated with Prospero, the artifice of his magic, and his plan for vengeance. Consisting of a repeated sequence of three descending dyads (P5, P5, M6) pivoting around a connective half step, it generates the storm music that opens the opera as well as much of the music surrounding both Prospero and Caliban. The <2,3,4> aligned cycle is associated with the love between Miranda and Ferdinand, accompanying both characters’ introductions. It consists of three vertically stacked, concurrent interval cycles of two, three, and four half steps. At the bottom of the hierarchy of musical materials, and with the most associative specificity, are four leitmotifs that are responsible for creating dramatic meaning in the music: Prospero’s Revenge, Miranda’s Defiance, Nature, and Reconciliation. As these leitmotifs combine and develop, they generate a narrative in which Prospero’s grand plans for retribution are thwarted by Miranda and Ferdinand’s love, leading instead to reconciliation and freedom from his magical control.

I begin the article by defining "leitmotif" within the analytic framework introduced in Matthew Bribitzer-Stull's book Understanding the Leitmotif, justifying the use of the term in my analysis. Next, I offer critical analysis of scholars’ readings of he harmonic language of and signification in the opera, focusing on prior analytical works by Emma Gallon, Hélène Cao, John Roeder, and Philip Stoecker, reviews, and Adès's own words (including both published interviews and my private conversations with the composer). After a brief exploration of the opera’s historical precedent in Berg’s Lulu, I outline my hierarchical system of associative musical material in The Tempest, followed by my reading of the opera.

The structure of this dissertation comprises an introduction and four chapters, which contain three original musical compositions and one article. The first composition is a piece for wind symphony, the second one works with a string quartet, and the third explores the bass clarinet and electronics combination. The article comprises research on musical composition creativity and its pedagogical possibilities.

Chapter 1, “To Pernambuco with Love for Wind Symphony,” is a three-movement composition written as a tribute to the people of Pernambuco, one of the most musical and creative Brazilian states. During its 18 minutes, the piece explores some regional genres, such as the traditional Frevo and Maracatú, as well as the contemporary Maguebeat style. The first movement addresses the historical development of Frevo “Fanfarras” and “Orquestras,” which are musical ensemble sculpted in the roots of Pernambucan culture. The second movement still deals with Frevo. It starts with a percussion interlude, very common during frevo parades, followed by another particular manifestation of this genre: the clash of the bands. Different bands start to parade at different places in Pernambuco, in particular in its capital, Recife, and a surrounding city, Olinda. Eventually, some of those bands cross each other and start a beautiful sound battle to entice the people who were following the other band. Finally, the third movement expresses my personal admiration for Maracatú and Manguebeat. The former, a genre strongly connected with its Afro-Brazilian roots with a very characteristic complex percussive pattern. The latter, a genre born in the 1990s which expresses very well how people in Brazil cope with cultural globalization: they adjust any international cultural commodity to Brazilian unique flavors and roots.

The chapter 2, “String Quartet No. 1,” is a 19-minute piece that explores the traditional instrumentation of this ensemble with non-traditional musical material. Thus, the sonic result of the use of the digital delay effect inspires the first movement of this piece. Although there was no used resource other than the traditional instruments, the piece intends to emulate this and other effects acoustically. It works as a kind of stylized canon, with different dynamic layers. The second movement explores the sonorities derived from the amplitude modulation and frequency modulation synthesis. The complex harmonic result of such manipulations leads the group to represent it in complex chords with quarter-tone intervals. The last movement explores a Brazilian marginalized urban musical genre called Funk Carioca. It is inspired by the rhythmic and overall sonic quality of the genre, which encompasses some characteristic sounds provided by analogic drum machines that are represented by the string quartet instruments.

Chapter 3 presents the piece “Maco Light,” a piece for bass clarinet and prerecorded electronics that lasts exactly 7 minutes and 41 seconds. This piece is named after a North Carolinian legend originated in 1867. The railroad conductor Joe Baldwin died in a tragic train accident. Few weeks after this event people started to see apparitions of mysterious lights close to where the accident happened, the Maco station. This phenomenon, real or not, was reported dozens of times until the 1970s when Maco station was closed. Thus, this piece explores this story and uses the electronics to manipulate train sounds that engage in constant dialogue with the bass clarinet and with the story behind the music.

In chapter 4, the article “Educating for Composition Creativity” exposes how musical improvisation skills can be beneficial to the development of creative compositional strategies. It argues that improvisation should be part of the composition curriculum for college students and a particular subject in composition textbooks. Through an intense literature review in the fields of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Composition Pedagogy, this chapter makes evident that improvisation can allow different kinds of insights to happen during the compositional task. In particular, we used a framework that establishes three different modes of cognitive processing for creativity: deliberate, spontaneous, and flow mode. The neuroscientific evidence is thus interpreted over this framework which allowed the proposition of different strategies in coping creativity, depending on how well-defined or not the objective of a compositional work is.