Browsing by Department "Music"

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 how un(der)employed South Korean young adults maintain optimism in their pursuit of a “good life” that itself is contingent on regular employment. Based on fieldwork about everyday economic insecurity in neoliberal Seoul, I propose that the labor invested to keep their employability viable includes a labor of the voice. I examine how my informants cultivate the aesthetic, poetic, and communicative qualities of their voice in order to get ahead in a world in which quantitative assessments, communicative labor exchange, and technological mediation—the “digitalities of neoliberalism”—confer value on particular kinds of voice. I attend to the shifting demands that inform what one’s voice can do or should be (or not) to be aurally recognized as an employable subject, arguing for how this conceptual instability keeps Koreans’ aspirational pursuits continuously unfinished, and their social mobility largely horizonal. Listening durationally to how my informants’ vocal articulations register this potential, this dissertation critiques the teleological orientations of neoliberal (im)possibility that aurally implicates their voice and limits their futurity otherwise. Terming this specific process “analog optimism,” I propose that laboring (over the voice) is a process which continuously hints at the qualitative capaciousness of more life, both in the future and the meantime, even as the rationalized logics of a knowledge economy compresses the vitality of life, reduces time for pleasure, incites exhaustion, and complicates their status as a liberal human.

1. At the Conflux

At the Conflux is a three part musically driven time-lapse film that tours Japan by road and rail. It is an exploration of its sprawling nocturnal cityscapes crisscrossed by thruways, its urban grid illuminated by fiery-hued highways pulsing through the city like arteries circulating blood, its towering skyscrapers watching over all, unmoved—soaring sentinels of steel and glass, its patterns of people rhythmically engaging with the machinery of modern life. A spacious Japanese flavored soundscape contrasts with the frenetic energy of the imagery. Piano, violin, trumpet, trombone and upright bass lines are decorated with snippets of field recordings captured in Tokyo and Osaka.

2. Craft and Expression Entwined in the Music of Martin Bresnick

The music of Martin Bresnick is filled with allusions to literature, history, politics, and music of the past. These extramusical references are often combined with complex musical structures. Symmetries and serial operations are staples of his craft. These two aspects of his work often exist in different conceptual realms. However, from the early 1990s onwards, there is a trend in Bresnick’s music in which technical elements entwine with expressive aims. This short article explores the relationship between compositional technique and referentiality through two exemplary works, the String Quartet No. 2, Bucephalus (1984) and The Bucket Rider (1995) with a brief exploration of the aesthetic of Arte Povera, an avant-garde art movement of the 1960s and 1970s Bresnick used as the title of the set of pieces to which The Bucket Rider belongs.

At the Vanguard of Vinyl investigates the jazz industry's adoption of the long-playing record (LP), 1948-1960. The technological advancements of the LP, along with the incipient use of magnetic tape recording, made it feasible to commercially issue recordings running beyond the three-minute restrictions of the 78-rpm record. LPs began to feature extended improvisations, musical mistakes, musicians' voices, and other moments of informal music making, revolutionizing the standard recording and production methods of the previous recording era. As the visual and sonic modes of representation shifted, so too did jazz's relationship to white mainstream culture, Western European musical aesthetics, US political structures, and streams of Afro-modernism. Jazz, as an African American social and musical practice, became a form of resistance against the violent structures of institutional racism within the United States in the 1950s.

Using the records of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Cannonball Adderley, this study outlines the diverse approaches to record making that characterized the transitional years as the LP became the standard recording format. Through archival research, close listening, and detailed discographical analyses of the era's most influential record labels, I show how jazz practices and musical "mistakes" caught on record provided opportunities for recording experimentation. I examine choices made during the record production process, such as tape edits, microphone placement, overdubbing, and other sound processing effects, connecting such choices to the visual and tactile attributes of these discs. Drawing on scholarship that considers how sound reproduction technologies mediate constructions of race and ethnicity, I argue that the history of jazz in the 1950s is one of social engagement by means of and through technology. At the Vanguard of Vinyl is a cultural history of the jazz LP that underscores the ways in which record making is a vital process to music and its circulation.

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.

This dissertation seeks to position the music of American arranger-orchestrator-composer Conrad Salinger (1901-62) as one of the key factors in creating the larger camp aesthetic movement in MGM film musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. The investigation primarily examines Salinger's arranging and orchestrating practices in transcriptions and conductor's scores of musical numbers from MGM films, though some scores from Broadway shows are also considered. Additionally, Salinger's style is frequently compared to other arrangers, so as to establish the unique qualities of his music that set it apart from his contemporaries from both a technical and an aesthetic standpoint and that made it desirable as an object of imitation. By inquiring into his musical practices' relationship to his subjectivity as a gay person in the era of "the closet," this analysis both proposes and confirms Salinger's importance to the MGM camp aesthetic. With the concept of "musical camp" thus established, the dissertation subsequently demonstrates its capacity to produce new readings of the politics of national belonging and gender that manifest in various musical numbers.

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.

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.

Art music and folk music are all too often perceived as opposing concepts. The educated, elite practitioners of a notated art seem to have little in common with musically illiterate commoners who weave an oral tradition. However, these two modes have much to say to each other when brought together in dialogue. This dissertation traces the use of Swedish folk themes in nineteenth-century art music—the era of a widespread interest in folk culture that quickly enthralled much of Europe, thanks to Johann Gottfried von Herder’s many disciples such as the Brothers Grimm—and provides a framework through which to understand the musical expression of a culture that has thus far been rendered largely invisible to non-Swedish-speaking scholars.

Though Sweden’s modern sovereignty dates back to 1523, the kingdom’s boundaries shifted dramatically early in the 1800s, as the eastern territory of Finland was lost to Russia in 1809 and the western land of Norway became linked with Sweden via union in 1814. Correspondingly, the question of what it meant to be “Swedish” demanded reevaluation. One response was to transcribe, edit, and publish collections of traditional songs and instrumental tunes as supposed treasure troves of cultural history. These arrangements, which were filtered through musical notation and given newly composed harmonic accompaniments, say more about educated perceptions of folk music and expectations of acceptable performance than they do about actual folk performance practices. Through the medium of print, these “cleaned-up” songs found wide circulation in print and formed the basis for many later compositions. I take a genre-based approach and analyze stages of development of the use of folk melodies in piano-vocal arrangements, male choral settings, theatrical works, piano literature, and chamber and orchestral music.

The political scientist Benedict Anderson writes of “imagined communities,” in which people who never meet nevertheless imagine themselves as part of a single group due to a deep sense of innate comradeship. I argue that, in Sweden, shared knowledge of the most popular traditional songs, and the recognition of the use of these songs in other compositions, helped facilitate the “re-imagination” of the Swedish nation-community during a time when cultural and political allegiances were in flux.

Similar phenomena have been widely observed with respect to other European countries, but Swedish music has not yet been studied in equal depth, likely because there was no figurehead composer of national and international prominence. To date, no systematic investigation of compositions based on Swedish folksong has been carried out. This dissertation draws on extensive research of little-known archival sources, including manuscript and rare published scores, letters, and contemporary newspaper reviews. In addition, it contributes to the field by entering into dialogue with existing Swedish-language scholarship, which has hitherto been inaccessible to most scholars outside Scandinavia. With this dissertation, I join a scholarly community spanning both sides of the Atlantic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fanny Hensel wrote much of Felix Mendelssohn's music. Or so goes the popular misconception. It is true that Felix did publish six of his sister's Lieder under his own name, in his Op. 8 and Op. 9, but there is no evidence that anything else he published was actually by Fanny. The perpetuation of this idea is by no means new to our century; even during her lifetime, Fanny received letters alluding to the possibility that some of her music was masquerading as Felix's. But how could this supposition even be possible?

Complicating our reception of Hensel's works and our knowledge of her influence over him, and perpetuating our misconception (and perhaps hopes) that some of Felix's music was by Fanny was the unavailability of her music to the general public. For most of the twentieth century, she was known mostly by her eleven published opera (five of which were released posthumously). Before she was able to plan and accomplish any sort of systematic publication of her works, she died suddenly, at the age of 41, leaving behind upwards of 450 unrevised, unpublished works.

Clearly, we need to reconsider the term "Mendelssohnian," and bring Hensel to the foreground as an equal partner in forming the Mendelssohns' common style. I examine the roots of the "Mendelssohnian" style in their parallel musical educations, their shared enthusiasm for the music of Bach, and their simultaneous collision with Beethoven's music (and the diverse ways each responded to his influence). I explore in detail the relationship between Fanny, Felix, and her fiancé Wilhelm Hensel through the methodology of kinship studies, to contextualize what some have viewed as a quasi-incestuous sibling relationship within the norms for sibling communication in the nineteenth century. Finally, I discuss how deeply their separation after 1829 affected both Fanny and Felix, and how Fanny negotiated her changing life roles and ambitions as a composer and performer.

One work that Fanny never released, and, indeed, one work that has remained a mystery, is the Ostersonate (Easter Sonata). Believed lost since it was first mentioned in correspondence in 1829, the sonata resurfaced in the twentieth century, when it was recorded and attributed to Felix, and then disappeared again without a trace. In the absence of any identifiable manuscript, it had been impossible to definitively challenge this attribution. My research represents a major breakthrough: I traced the manuscript to a private owner and positively identified it as the work of Fanny Mendelssohn.

Lurking behind the popular misconception is a broader truth: Fanny Hensel can be heard in much of Felix Mendelssohn's music. In other words, what audiences have recognized as Felix Mendelssohn's music for nearly two hundred years would not have existed as such without the influence of Fanny Hensel. This idea in itself is hardly new, but by revising this line of reasoning, we see that it is equally possible that much of Fanny Hensel can be heard in Felix Mendelssohn's music. In the end, neither composer could have existed as we know them today without the other, and their shared musical style stands as a lasting testament to their shared identity as Mendelssohns.

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.

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.

Group songs with direct political messages rose to enormous popularity during the interwar period (1918-1939), particularly in recently-defeated Germany and in the newly-established Soviet Union. This dissertation explores the musical relationship between these two troubled countries and aims to explain the similarities and differences in their approaches to collective singing. The discussion of the very complex and problematic relationship between the German left and the Soviet government sets the framework for the analysis of music. Beginning in late 1920s, as a result of Stalin's abandonment of the international revolutionary cause, the divergences between the policies of the Soviet government and utopian aims of the German communist party can be traced in the musical propaganda of both countries.

There currently exists no scholarly literature providing a wide-ranging view of the German and Soviet musical exchange during the 1920s and 30s. The paucity of comprehensive studies is especially apparent in the English-language scholarship on German and Russian mass music, also known as "music for the people." Even though scholars have produced works devoted to the Soviet and Weimar mass music movements in isolation, they rarely explore the musical connections between the two countries. The lack of scholarship exploring the musical exchanges between the Soviet Union and Germany suggests that scholars have not yet fully examined the influences that the Soviet and German mass songs and their proponents had on each other during the 1920s and 1930s. Exposing these musical influences provides a valuable perspective on the broader differences and similarities between the Soviet and German communist parties. The connections between Soviet and German songs went beyond straightforward translations of propaganda texts from one language to another; the musical and textual transformations--such as word changes, differences in the instrumental arrangements, and distinct approaches to performance--allow for a more nuanced comparison of the philosophical, ideological, and political aspects of Soviet and the German communist movements. In my dissertation, I consider the musical roots of collective singing in Germany as opposed to Russia, evaluate the musical exchanges and borrowings between the early Soviet communists and their counterparts in the Weimar Republic, and explore the effects of musical propaganda on the working classes of both countries. I see my research as a mediation of existing Soviet and Weimar music scholarship.

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.