Browsing by Subject "Music"

How did rock and roll, the best music for worshipping the devil, become the finest music for worshipping God? This study narrates the import of rock music into church sanctuaries across America via the rise of contemporary worship music (CWM). While white evangelicals derided rock n' roll as the "devil's music" in the 1950s, it slowly made its way into their churches and beyond over the next fifty years, emerging as a multi-million dollar industry by the twenty-first century.

This study is a cultural history of CWM, chronicling the rise of rock music in the worship life of American Christians. Pulling from several different primary and secondary sources, I argue that three main motivations fueled the rise of CWM in America: the desire to reach the lost, to commune in emotional intimacy with God, and to grow the flock. These three motivations evolved among different actors and movements at different times. In the 1970s, the Jesus People movement anchored in Southern California, adopted the music of the counterculture to attract hippies to church. In the early 1980s, the Vineyard Fellowship combined rock forms with lyrics that spoke of God in the second person in order to facilitate intimate worship with the divine. In the late 1980s, the church growth movement embraced CWM as a tool to attract disaffected baby boomers back to church. By the 1990s, these three motivations had begun to energize an entire industry built around the merger between rock and worship.

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.

This dissertation attempts to shed explanatory light on the work of Johann Sebastian Bach by situating it within the broader framework of Lutheran theological aesthetics. Although Bach has long been considered one of the most influential musicians in European history, he wrote very little about himself and the personal convictions that inspired his music. This vacuum has prompted theologians and musicologists to explore – and speculate about – the nature of those convictions and the historical sources that shaped them. Here I argue that Bach was a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics, who used music to make the beauty of Christ’s cosmic redemption more audible to his listeners.In order to defend this thesis, I adopt the following methodology: in chapter one, I present a conception of Bachian aesthetics from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In chapter two, I open up a historical vantage point for understanding that aesthetic conception: the thought of Martin Luther and his followers. Although Luther has typically been considered an anti-aesthetic figure, I follow the recent Luther scholarship of Mark C. Mattes and Miikka E. Anttila, who argue that Luther held to a radically Christocentric conception of beauty. After presenting my condensed rendering of Lutheran aesthetics, in chapter three I seek to situate music within that theo-dramatic framework. For Luther, music is one of the most beautiful gifts of God, which was created through Christ and can help Christians gain a foretaste of the heavenly beauty achieved by Christ’s crucifixion. In chapter four, then, I re-read chapter one in light of chapters two and three, with the goal of presenting Bach as a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics. In chapter five, I pivot to consider the implications of this study for the modern academy and church, two locales that are critical for both Bach and this dissertation. In particular, I suggest that neither the modern academy nor the modern church offer an entirely hospitable locale for studying and understanding Bach’s music. The dissertation closes by offering several alternative cultural locales for understanding Bachian aesthetics, to which both the contemporary academy and church should pay more attention.

This dissertation attempts to shed explanatory light on the work of Johann Sebastian Bach by situating it within the broader framework of Lutheran theological aesthetics. Although Bach has long been considered one of the most influential musicians in European history, he wrote very little about himself and the personal convictions that inspired his music. This vacuum has prompted theologians and musicologists to explore – and speculate about – the nature of those convictions and the historical sources that shaped them. Here I argue that Bach was a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics, who used music to make the beauty of Christ’s cosmic redemption more audible to his listeners.In order to defend this thesis, I adopt the following methodology: in chapter one, I present a conception of Bachian aesthetics from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In chapter two, I open up a historical vantage point for understanding that aesthetic conception: the thought of Martin Luther and his followers. Although Luther has typically been considered an anti-aesthetic figure, I follow the recent Luther scholarship of Mark C. Mattes and Miikka E. Anttila, who argue that Luther held to a radically Christocentric conception of beauty. After presenting my condensed rendering of Lutheran aesthetics, in chapter three I seek to situate music within that theo-dramatic framework. For Luther, music is one of the most beautiful gifts of God, which was created through Christ and can help Christians gain a foretaste of the heavenly beauty achieved by Christ’s crucifixion. In chapter four, then, I re-read chapter one in light of chapters two and three, with the goal of presenting Bach as a sophisticated interpreter of Lutheran aesthetics. In chapter five, I pivot to consider the implications of this study for the modern academy and church, two locales that are critical for both Bach and this dissertation. In particular, I suggest that neither the modern academy nor the modern church offer an entirely hospitable locale for studying and understanding Bach’s music. The dissertation closes by offering several alternative cultural locales for understanding Bachian aesthetics, to which both the contemporary academy and church should pay more attention.

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.

Hidden Markov Models are a widely used class of probabilistic models for sequential data that have found particular success in areas such as speech recognition.

Algorithmic composition of music has a long history and with the development of powerful deep learning methods, there has recently been increased interest in exploring algorithms and models to create art. To this end, we explore the utility of Hidden Markov Models in composing classical music. Specifically, we train various Hidden Markov Models on piano pieces from the Romantic era and consider the models' ability to generate new pieces that sound like they were composed by a human. We evaluate the compositions based on several quantitative metrics that measure the originality, harmonic qualities and temporal structure of the generated piece. We additionally conduct listening evaluations with listeners of varying levels of musical background to assess the generated musical pieces. We find that Hidden Markov Models are fairly successful at generating new pieces that have largely consonant harmonies, especially when trained on original pieces with simple harmonic structure. However, we conclude that the major limitation in using Hidden Markov Models to generate music that sounds like it was composed by a human is the lack of global structure and melodic progression in the composed pieces.

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

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

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

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

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

This dissertation 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 is a history of cosmopolitanism in the francophone, musical, and Islamic intellectual traditions of western Niger from 1958 to 1974. It builds on scholarship that seeks to counter conventional nationalist narratives of African decolonization by viewing it through an anti-teleological lens. While most of this literature focuses on the alternatives to the nation proposed by African leaders prior to independence, framing them as lost futures, this project argues that cosmopolitanism constituted a core state project of Niger’s francophone elite even after independence. Its account begins with this official cosmopolitanism of the PPN-RDA regime, most thoroughly articulated by Boubou Hama in the language of the civilization of the universal derived from Negritude. Drawing on sound studies and a wide variety of audio recordings in addition to period newspapers, films, and other primary sources, it also demonstrates the ways that this utopian cosmopolitanism in a repressive, one-party state was contested and undermined by intellectuals operating from both inside and outside the machinery of the state as well as the exuberant, unruly cosmopolitanism embedded in the radio soundscapes and film screens of Niger. From the traditional Sahelian cosmopolitanism transmitted in the epics of Zarma griots to the unworldly worldliness of vernacular Muslim poets and preachers, the dissertation paints a dynamic portrait of cosmopolitan imagination in modern Niger.

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.