Browsing by Author "Rupprecht, Philip"

This dissertation develops a "politics of ambiguity" through case studies of affect in contemporary works by European, American and Singaporean composers. While studies of intercultural music have focused on narratives of power relations (e.g. orientalism, postcolonial ambivalence), a new method of interpretation can be based on the affective ambiguity that arises from intercultural encounters, indicating a less than totalitarian power and thus forming a basis for political struggle. The focus is on three pieces of music by American-born John Sharpley, Belgium-born Robert Casteels, and Singaporean Joyce Koh, who hail from across the globe and incorporate Asian musics, arts, and philosophies into a variety of modernist, neo-romantic, and postmodern musical idioms. Modalities of ambiguity include: perceptual focus on musicalized Chinese calligraphy strokes, versus perceptual liminality arising from modernist technique; the musical embodiment of Buddhist disembodiment; and, ambiguous relationality of intercultural sounds. Liminality, disembodiment, and relationality mark the cessation of identity politics in favor of a form of cultural hermeneutics that pays heed to the complex interaction between society, sonic media and the neurophysiology of listening.

This dissertation examines diegetic music as a rationale for the juxtaposition of traditional and modern idioms in operas by Giacomo Puccini. Through this perspective, I consider the resulting unevenness of style in Puccini’s works as an expression of the music’s dramatic function, rather than a consequence of any compositional shortcoming. Originally proposed in relation to film, diegetic music identifies music that exists within a portrayed world and is therefore recognized by fictional characters as music. In these pages, I argue that Puccini regularly steps into the world of his operas, adopting the persona of a fictional entity to compose in an old-fashioned Classical style that is distinct from his usual late Romantic idiom. I also propose and employ a tripartite analytical methodology for identifying and assessing diegetic music in opera, complete with a new definition for diegetic music that is specific to this genre. Approached in stages, this methodology first considers textual analysis of the words characters sing and the stage directions published in the score to establish a hypothesis for the presence or absence of diegetic music in specific passages. Musical analysis then aims to confirm or refute this supposition through clearly defined Classical forms that are otherwise absent in Puccini’s musical texture. Finally, dramatic analysis seeks to resolve any discrepancies between the textual and musical evidence, as well as assess the music’s contribution toward the plot and/or themes of the opera.

This dissertation examines the function of syntactic discontinuity in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s symphonies. After establishing a given syntax— defined by the replicated interactions within and between parameters—Vaughan Williams introduces discontinuity through transformations in pitch language, rhythmic character, phrase organization, or timbral profile. Shifts in the features of an established discourse articulate formal boundaries at local and larger levels. The four works examined here—A London Symphony (1912), the Pastoral Symphony (1922), Symphony No. 4 (1934), and Symphony No. 6 (1947)—present especially clear cases of discontinuity, though similar processes occur in all nine of the composer’s symphonies. A London Symphony employs abrupt changes in pitch language and reordered themes to evoke the fractured temporality of urban soundscapes. Discontinuities in the Pastoral Symphony typically assume a static character. Gestural pauses reflect the sonic backdrop of warfare against which Vaughan Williams conceived the symphony: the steady bombardment on the Great War’s Western Front and the occasional reprieves that telegraphed safety. Rhythmic and metric disjunctions pervade Symphonies Nos. 4 and 6. In Symphony No. 4, coexisting autonomous gestures create stratified disjunctions that position the work between symphonic and fugal traditions. Symphony No. 6 is similarly active in rhythmic and pitch language. Adopting Harold Krebs’s analytic framework for grouping and displacement dissonances, the analysis charts irrepressible—and structural—challenges to notated meters. Through sustained analytic readings, this study documents the centrality of disjunction in Vaughan Williams’s symphonic practice as well as the varied means by which it is constructed. Despite their starkly different compositional vocabularies, the selected works retain discontinuity as a central syntactic feature and formal-expressive resource.

This dissertation seeks to reevaluate French repertoire for the organ in the broader context of French music and society in the years between the two world wars. I argue that leading composers for the instrument were not cloistered between the musically conservative walls of the church but were rather fully engaged in cultural and musical shifts occurring across the Parisian musical scene. By analyzing music of Louis Vierne, Jehan Alain, and Olivier Messiaen, I address different ways in which these composers wrote for the organ in the early twentieth century as well as ways in which these composers engaged the world around them. Louis Vierne – older than Alain and Messiaen by forty years – represents an older generation rooted in late nineteenth- century romanticism. The way in which he composed for the organ was not only influenced by composers around him but also in the links to French musical heritage of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alain and Messiaen – born three years apart – were colleagues who shared similar interests and were inspired by influences beyond the borders of the church and the state. For these composers, the organ was not an instrument tethered to conservative styles of composition but rather one that was fully able to engage with contemporary musical styles and absorb outside influence just as much as music of other genres and for other instruments.

This dissertation critically examines the ways in which British composers wrote large choral works for festival audiences combining liturgical and sacred texts with poetry to expand multi-text meanings beyond a strictly religious sphere. Processes of anthologizing are considered in the present study as a textual and poetic practice in music by Vaughan Williams, and a later generation of British composers. Analyzing the use of multiple text sources in choral music with orchestral accompaniment, this dissertation addresses the moral, gender, and nationalistic values that composers inscribed in sacred compositions, expanding the traditional understanding of the liturgical and biblical texts. Analytic readings will focus on textual and musical choices used by these composers, and on readings of the texts themselves. This is an analysis of a twentieth-century genre of sacred choral music in Britain emphasizing wider themes in the culture—nationalism, grief, Welsh linguistic history, and feminism—as they interact with religious and liturgical tradition.

The text sources in these works draw from multiple languages, time periods, and textual genres. For example, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis pacem (1936) combines Walt Whitman poetry from Leaves of Grass with liturgical and biblical texts to create an anti-war message. Herbert Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi (1950) expands the liturgy of the Requiem Mass to include sacred texts to mourn the death of his son, Grace Williams adds Welsh texts to her Missa Cambrensis (1971) to represent the strength of the Welsh language during a linguistic movement in Wales. Finally, Elizabeth Maconchy proposes feminist perspective in the libretto of her dramatic cantata, Héloïse and Abelard (1979), using liturgical texts and sacred hymns to situate the medieval love story in the setting of the cloister at Notre Dame. In analyzing these works, I reveal a pattern of choral composition responding to the religious interests of the Church of England, while acknowledging the secularizing forces in British culture. Through their music, these composers spoke directly to their audiences, while imbuing traditional sacred forms with identifiably modern cultural attitudes and concerns.

During the post-World War II decades (circa 1945 to circa 1980), the expression of a collective national identity was a primary concern in South Korea. The central question of my dissertation is how the awareness of a national identity, which preoccupied the public discourse in Korea during its post-WWII cultural rebuilding, was manifested in the musical works and careers of Korean composers who engaged with modern art music of the West. In exploring this question, my dissertation presents a cultural history of the translation of twentieth-century European musical modernism into the Korean musical scene; the postcolonial national identity formation remains a central theme. I investigate five Korean composers whose lives and works embody the country’s process of modernization and westernization: Isang Yun (1917–1995), Nam June Paik (1932–2006), Sukhi Kang (b. 1934), Byung-dong Paik (b. 1936), and Unsuk Chin (b. 1961). These composers were the proponents of Western musical modernism; their musical styles varied from the theoretical rigor of the 1950s and the 1960s to the radicalism of the Fluxus movement to the incorporation of technology. Each composer has understood and utilized contemporary European musical practices in a highly individualized manner but with a common consciousness of national identity.

My research employs close readings of scores by these composers and archival research conducted in Germany, Korea, and the US; musical and historical analyses are framed by cultural theories of postcolonialism, globalization, and nationalism. Unveiling the convoluted and multifaceted evolution of national identities, I reveal that there is a general progression from an overt emphasis on national identity toward more individual and universalist approaches to music across the three generations of Korean composers. This study contributes to the growing musicological efforts to place works by East Asian composers in the larger history of Western art music. The composers investigated here have not been treated in depth in Anglophone musicology, and I see my research as one of the first initiatives in including Korean composers in the discussion of modern Western art music. More than just introducing their music, my study also encourages nuanced readings of the works by these composers, beyond the familiar framework of the East-West binary.

Through an extended case study of the American composer Samuel Barber (1910–81), this dissertation freshly develops a perspective in music criticism and analysis: that of the “composer as synthesizer.” This flexible concept highlights the ways in which a composer engages in deliberate dialogue with music of the past, entailing analytical methods that draw upon topic theory, semiotic theory, and concepts of genre and intertextuality. In Barber’s First Symphony (Chapter 2), investigation reveals a sophisticated intertextual dialogue with Brahms’s symphonies and other historical musics. A close consideration of the Capricorn Concerto (Chapter 3) shows a composer slyly and strategically assimilating Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassical style into his synthesis even while musically critiquing aspects of that style. Chapter 4 draws upon semiotic theory to unpack how Barber’s Vanessa uses conventions of nineteenth-century ballroom dance music to capture something like Nietzsche’s “death of God,” offering critical comment on modernity through the character of Erika. Finally, Chapter 5’s consideration of works for voice and orchestra (Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and The Lovers) emphasizes Barber’s interpretation of texts through the mixing and matching of genre conventions. Collectively, the analyses suggest an intellectually viable alternative to modernist critical frameworks, promising not only fresh examination of music by composers previously derided as “outmoded,” “derivative,” or “eclectic” but an opportunity for fruitful new readings of such avant-garde figures as Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky.

Lee Edelman notes that “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.” This statement reinforces a particular view of queerness: one that suggests that it is, first and foremost, an action, and secondly, that it is an action that is meant to challenge already existing structures. And while the act of disruption itself is not always queer, queering-as-action emphasizes the destabilization of entrenched ideas, norms, and binaries.

My dissertation examines the music, productions, and subsequent reception of four operas by Britten at the time of their premieres — Billy Budd (1951), Gloriana (1953), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), and Owen Wingrave (1971) — focusing on how these operas each present various ways of queering and forms of queer disruption. On a musical level, these works subvert a largely nineteenth-century heteronormative model of opera that dictated voice types within certain roles, the power and relationship dynamic between male and female characters, and portrayals and performances of gender. On a social level, these four operas tell stories that engage with and disrupt ideas of wartime-era constructions of nation and empire at a time when the desire to depict British strength and relevance competed with the rise of new global superpowers.

Britten’s operas fit within a timeline that runs alongside the postwar era in Britain. In a period shaped by World War II and its aftermath, postwar Britain encapsulated significant political and cultural shifts that includes the dissolution of the British Empire, student and youth protest movements, and the decriminalization of homosexuality. How these works were reviewed and discussed by critics as well as citizens will show how these operas (and their disruptions) relate to, reinforce, and reject these social shifts. Through the perusal of press reviews and archival materials, I explain how these disturbances are realized by those experiencing these operas at the moment of their premieres. These primary sources also reveal how Britten’s postwar operas run counter to and engage with large cultural and societal changes in postwar Britain.

Fundamentalist Christians loosely affiliated with Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC) teach that music influences listeners’ faith and moral characters for both good and evil, expounding their views since the evangelical Worship Wars began in the 1960s over the use of popular music styles in church services. In their dichotomous moral view, good music reveals God’s nature, allowing born-again listeners to draw closer to God and witness their salvation to unbelievers, and bad music pulls listeners away from God by promoting immorality and false worship. Fundamentalists also prioritize mental engagement with music over emotional and physical responses to it because they believe that people more directly relate to God through their conscious minds and only indirectly with their bodies, as when fundamentalist musicians make music with their bodies, an activity that they believe glorifies God. Considering their discourse and practices from ethnographic and theological perspectives, I argue that these reveal a view that all musical sound is dangerous in its insistent entrance into listeners’ bodies: music is like fire—useful under control but devastating if unrestrained.

I examine the outworkings of their beliefs in three primary areas: recorded music, congregational singing (both aloud and silent as congregants practice inner singing while listening to instrumental hymn arrangements), and solo and soloistic vocal music. Musicians’ invisibility on recordings underscores how fundamentalists’ beliefs are primarily about musical sound, not performers’ movements or appearances. Robust congregational singing reflects believers’ “joy of salvation,” but their collective emotional affects are limited, and they are physically constrained to small movements that almost never bloom into something fuller. Finally, although fundamentalist leaders consider classical music and its associated performance practice to be “excellent,” even this musical style must be restrained for classically trained vocalists to minister in their churches. These arguments are based on my fieldwork and my analyses of fundamentalists’ extensive written and recorded discourse on music.