Browsing by Subject "Chamber ensemble"

This dissertation consists of two distinct parts. The first is an original music composition. The second is an analytical article about Joan Tower’s musical language through the lens of musical borrowing in three works.Chapter 1, Of My Own, is composed for woodwind quintet (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, French horn) and string quartet (violin I, violin II, viola, cello). This composition experiments with minimalistic repetition, ambiguous harmonic motion, sectional juxtapositions of form, and motivic transformation, while maintaining an accessible style through clear narrative development. Inspired by current events surrounding women’s rights, Of My Own, focuses its narrative on three coming-of-age stories from the perspectives of a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter. Over the course of twenty minutes, each of the three movements functions individually but also includes overlapping musical themes and other structural similarities. Chapter 2, “Constructing a Compositional Language Through Musical Borrowing: Joan Tower’s Homage to Beethoven, Steps, and Made in America,” attempts to discover the ways in which American composer Joan Tower developed a compositional language through musical borrowing. Over Tower’s long career, many of her compositions have been dedicated to friends and performers; however, a subset pays homage to influential composers and historically important works, while still exhibiting the personal compositional language characteristic of Tower’s pieces from the second half of her career. This group of works features borrowings from the music of Beethoven, Carter, Copland, Debussy, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Samuel A. Ward. As a self-described “intuitive” composer, Tower insists that her music is only reactive to local musical events and that her work must be experienced contextually as a whole because pitch, rhythm, register, dynamics, etc. cannot mean anything in isolation; she maintains that each element is “dependent on its environment for its identification.” Despite her stature as an important American composer, Tower’s compositional methods and musical language have been insufficiently studied by contemporary scholars. Previous research and interviews with the composer contain contradictory information about Tower’s intuitive approach and various compositional processes. Furthermore, her use of pre-existing material, revisions, and pre-compositional plans complicate an understanding of her musical language in the context of her intuitive process. Through a comparative and teleological study of Joan Tower’s musical borrowings, this article offers insight into Tower’s compositional language through an examination of three pieces: Concerto for Piano (Homage to Beethoven), Steps, and Made in America.

This dissertation consists of two parts: a composition for ensemble and electronics, and an analytical article on jazz improvisers’ modern approaches to the Twelve-Bar Blues form.

Chapter 1, Pareidolia, for clarinet/tenor saxophone, percussion/drum set, piano/synthesizers, string quartet, and electronics, is born out of my interest in auditory illusions and the spontaneous perceptions of meaningfulness known as apophenia and pareidolia. The composition combines prepared electronics comprised of field recordings of various machine noises and pre-recorded musical material with live manipulation of the ensemble’s sound, uncovering hidden harmonies and rhythms lurking in the recorded noise materials. The two main machine noises are the Duke University’s Biddle Music Building’s elevator and the washing machine at my house. Pareidolia is in seven sections, lasts about twenty-five minutes, and weaves together disparate musical ideas and genre influences with mindful transitions.

Chapter 2, “Implied Reharmonizations in Postbop Improvisations over the Twelve-Bar Blues,” constitutes an effort to illuminate the process jazz improvisers go through when they decide to diverge from lead-sheet harmony. The vast majority of the scholarship on jazz harmony is concerned with the lead-sheet versions of jazz tunes. Jazz improvisers have been manipulating chord progressions found on lead-sheets for decades. Most of the contemporary techniques employed by jazz performers during improvisations are unknown to, or misunderstood by classical music audiences and scholars. The Twelve-Bar Blues has been a vehicle for jazz improvisers to expand on the jazz language from the very beginnings of the idiom, to bebop, to postbop, and more recently jazz-fusion. With the use of chromatic approach tones and superimposition of non-diatonic scales and upper structure triads, the vocabulary of jazz improvisation expanded the tonal scope of solos. Within the context of the Twelve-Bar Blues, improvisers tonicize distant key areas and imply complex harmonic structures.

Secondly, it aims to form a bridge between the distinct languages of jazz performers, and theorists in academia. Scholars like Paul Berliner, Steven Strunk, Keith Waters, Dariusz Terefenko, and Garth Alper have helped establish jazz scholarship with their research on the expansion of tonality in jazz and the invariant properties of the idiom. Yet a disconnect has persisted between jazz vocabulary and common practice terminology due to the improvisational nature of jazz. To remedy the discrepancy between jazz vocabulary and common practice terminology, this article aims to present its findings in a manner which is accessible to scholars of both worlds.

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.