Browsing by Subject "Music history"

Brother Is a Street Musician – Viewing the Landscape of Modernity Through Popular Songs by Zhang Eujeong was originally published in Korean in 2006. Described as a “fascinating journey upstream into the past to understand where the current will bring the future of Korean pop music,” (Busan Ilbo Review, 2009) Brother Is a Street Musician does not deal with contemporary K-Pop; rather, it visits the first chapter of Korea’s popular music history, which coincided with Japanese colonization in the first half of the 20th century. Combining archival research with a critical analysis of the earliest popular songs, the early recording industry, the first modern era musicians and composers, and the first formation of the consumer masses, Zhang’s book seeks to address the essential question – how did a colonized people construct their own, unique form of popular culture? Today, popular music from Korea has established itself as a formidable, global cultural phenomenon, garnering the interest of not only the power players in the global music industry, but also scholars in many cross-disciplinary fields. As an academic inquiry into the first moment in the history of popular music from Korea, an English translation of this book will be an essential resource in today’s lively conversations around the emerging field of Korean popular music. Furthermore, as a companion to more books coming from Korea to meet the growing demand for resources with diverse perspectives in the study of popular music and culture from the periphery, this book can spur on thoughtful discussions about how dialogue between English academia and the academia of host-language countries/regions, facilitated by translation, can progressively enrich the way we expand knowledge about transnational phenomena as they flow across time, borders, and languages.

Since the late 1940s, Praise and Worship has emerged as a new mode of liturgical expression out of North American Pentecostalism. Despite a variety of conflicts that have marked its adoption, it has found a home in a wide swath of global Protestant churches and it is estimated that nearly a quarter of the world’s Christians practice some form of Praise and Worship today. Praise and Worship today is known primarily by the expectation that participants will encounter God’s presence through music.This dissertation presents a historical case study of the International Worship Symposium (IWS) as a lens into Praise and Worship history. The IWS was an annual Praise and Worship teaching event that began in 1977 and peaked in the late 1980s. The theology and practice of IWS worship was built on the central claim that God “inhabits” or “is enthroned upon” the praises of God’s people (from Psalm 22:3)—an insight first popularized by Latter Rain theologian and pastoral leader Reg Layzell. I begin with the background of the Latter Rain Revival of 1948 and the impact of Reg Layzell’s theology on the churches and individuals that birthed the IWS. Through conference teaching materials, personal interviews, and other primary sources, I explore how IWS teachers expanded on this theology by the 1980s and used the Tabernacle of David as typological prism for understanding worshipers’ special access to God through Praise and Worship, especially music. My argument concludes with a case study of the critical, early influence that the IWS had on the theology and music of a major—though little-researched—player in the worship music industry: Integrity’s Hosanna! Music. Through its influence both on the thousands of individual conference participants and on the leadership of this one major company, the IWS had a central role in the dissemination or Praise and Worship’s practices and theology. In summary, I suggest that it is precisely the biblically-derived theological and liturgical understandings of the IWS that were central to the development of Praise and Worship (and its music) in the 1980s. Despite its importance, liturgical studies scholarship has largely ignored the role of Latter Rain Pentecostals and the IWS. Instead, scholars have constructed a music-industrial history of Praise and Worship that focuses primarily on musical style and attributes Praise and Worship’s origins to the Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. I argue that is actually Pentecostals affiliated with the Latter Rain Revival of 1948, including those who originated and led the IWS, who were most critical to the construction and mainstream dissemination of Praise and Worship during the critical period of development, which was the 1980s. In addition to focusing on the wrong people and the wrong time period, scholars have often overlooked the underlying liturgical theology of Praise and Worship, which is, I suggest, the most critical element in its historical development. Thus, the dissertation offers liturgical history as a productive frame for engaging musicological and ethnomusicological research on present-day sites while expanding the scholarship of liturgical history on the Latter Rain stream of Pentecostal worship that has contributed to contemporary transformations in global Protestant worship today.

Since the late 1940s, Praise and Worship has emerged as a new mode of liturgical expression out of North American Pentecostalism. Despite a variety of conflicts that have marked its adoption, it has found a home in a wide swath of global Protestant churches and it is estimated that nearly a quarter of the world’s Christians practice some form of Praise and Worship today. Praise and Worship today is known primarily by the expectation that participants will encounter God’s presence through music.This dissertation presents a historical case study of the International Worship Symposium (IWS) as a lens into Praise and Worship history. The IWS was an annual Praise and Worship teaching event that began in 1977 and peaked in the late 1980s. The theology and practice of IWS worship was built on the central claim that God “inhabits” or “is enthroned upon” the praises of God’s people (from Psalm 22:3)—an insight first popularized by Latter Rain theologian and pastoral leader Reg Layzell. I begin with the background of the Latter Rain Revival of 1948 and the impact of Reg Layzell’s theology on the churches and individuals that birthed the IWS. Through conference teaching materials, personal interviews, and other primary sources, I explore how IWS teachers expanded on this theology by the 1980s and used the Tabernacle of David as typological prism for understanding worshipers’ special access to God through Praise and Worship, especially music. My argument concludes with a case study of the critical, early influence that the IWS had on the theology and music of a major—though little-researched—player in the worship music industry: Integrity’s Hosanna! Music. Through its influence both on the thousands of individual conference participants and on the leadership of this one major company, the IWS had a central role in the dissemination or Praise and Worship’s practices and theology. In summary, I suggest that it is precisely the biblically-derived theological and liturgical understandings of the IWS that were central to the development of Praise and Worship (and its music) in the 1980s. Despite its importance, liturgical studies scholarship has largely ignored the role of Latter Rain Pentecostals and the IWS. Instead, scholars have constructed a music-industrial history of Praise and Worship that focuses primarily on musical style and attributes Praise and Worship’s origins to the Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. I argue that is actually Pentecostals affiliated with the Latter Rain Revival of 1948, including those who originated and led the IWS, who were most critical to the construction and mainstream dissemination of Praise and Worship during the critical period of development, which was the 1980s. In addition to focusing on the wrong people and the wrong time period, scholars have often overlooked the underlying liturgical theology of Praise and Worship, which is, I suggest, the most critical element in its historical development. Thus, the dissertation offers liturgical history as a productive frame for engaging musicological and ethnomusicological research on present-day sites while expanding the scholarship of liturgical history on the Latter Rain stream of Pentecostal worship that has contributed to contemporary transformations in global Protestant worship today.

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 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.

Gendering Anti-Francoism reinterprets Spain’s tradition of protest music, offering the first monographic study of Iberian female singer-songwriters (cantautoras). Implementing an interdisciplinary methodology—based on the combination of textual and sonic close readings, oral history interviews, criminal records, and extensive archival research—this dissertation demonstrates that cantautoras played a major role both in the anti-Franco struggle and in the second-wave feminist movement, between 1952 and 1986. Songs were crucial for community-building, for bearing witness to different forms of violence, and for steering feminist progress. They soon became instrumental in raising individual and collective consciousness. Existing scholarship has mainly examined the lives and work of white, heterosexual, male singer-songwriters, from Paco Ibáñez’s first recordings (1956) until Franco’s death in 1975; and it has also organized cantautores by territories, e.g., studying all Catalan singers together, in isolation from their counterparts elsewhere. My periodization foregrounds a new-found group of over 70 female performers playing since the ‘50s; it extends through 1986 to include a decade of feminist activism previously overlooked. Furthermore, my analyses offer a new Iberian multilingual, multicultural, and intersectional approach, placing minoritized languages among other interconnected identity struggles involving gender, sexuality, and class. Adopting a cultural-historical perspective, I demonstrate how cantautoras confronted together the status quo, i.e., the far-reaching effects of the ultra-Catholic, sexist, and nationalist ideology of Francoism. I track how performers endured state repression and music censorship in several multi-artist tours in the 1970s. Meanwhile, concert-goers protested concert cancellations, as well as fines, arrests, and incarcerations that targeted singers. I further argue that most cantautoras put forward a feminist way of thinking that qualified and sought to inflect the priorities of left-wing political parties during the years of clandestine activism, and later, during Spain’s Transition to democracy. Thus, cantautoras performed for the left-leaning political parties and the feminist movement, pushing forward multiple struggles. During the Transition, many cantautoras sang to denounce all discrimination against women remaining from Francoist legislation. I also investigate collaborations between cantautoras, writers, and other female artists; the potential of ambiguous love songs for the LGTBIQ+ community; and the political ideas that cantautoras conveyed through children’s music.

The Credo is a liturgical and musical outlier among the movements of the mass ordinary. It is the longest text of the ordinary, was the latest addition to the mass, and is the locus of several odd musical phenomena, such as the proliferation of dozens of new monophonic settings of the creed between the years 1300 and 1500. These musical and liturgical phenomena have been noted but little studied; furthermore, the reasons underlying these changes have not been explained or studied. This dissertation analyzes the musical features of the Credo in monophony and polyphony, and sets the music within a broader late medieval cultural background.The research herein is multidisciplinary, using the primary sources of the music—much of which remains unedited in manuscripts—as well as the works of medieval writers, theologians, liturgists, clergy, canon lawyers, and laypeople. The overarching goal is to contextualize the musical Credo by examining the Credo’s place in late medieval religious and devotional culture. The argument and conclusion of this dissertation is that the odd musical phenomena surrounding the late medieval Credo can be illuminated and explained by placing it within its context. Specifically, the Credo is a major aspect of catechism, devotion, and liturgy, and musical, literary, and theological treatments of the Credo text within each of those categories help to explain its musical status.

This study explores Luciano Berio’s search for a utopian relationship between music and language. This utopian vision of pursuing the “eternal path between sound and sense” led him to initiate a series of “linguistic projects.” I illustrate Berio’s investigation of the relations between music and our cognitive ability, or “universality of experience,” in three areas: the analysis of music, its generation process and its perception.

Although the utopian search was left inconclusive, it allowed Berio to develop what he called a “music of musics” or a “language of languages” in music. I argue that Berio’s “meta-music” generates a signification system similar to artificial intelligence that is able to identify, analyze and produce music elements. The system is based on a hybrid of structuralist discourses addressing human’s linguistic capacity. My study discusses the earlier model of this system established in the electronic work Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1957‒58), its perfecting in the two symphonic works Sinfonia (1968) and Coro (1974), and its expansion onto the theatrical works La vera storia, (1982) and Un Re in ascolto (1984). I show that Lacanian psychoanalysis strongly informs La vera storia as well as its dramatic elements and provides a theoretical basis for the connection between signification and the unconscious. Concerning the perception of music, by deconstructing the hierarchy of a series of oppositions (e.g. sound-silence, Self-Others) in Un Re, I suggest that Berio introduced us to “deconstructionist listening” in relation to the human’s “universality of experience.”

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.

The “Hans Zimmer-effect” has become shorthand in both popular and academic discourses to describe a dominant mode of composing for Hollywood films that relies on digital tools to produce highly repetitive blockbuster scores. Likewise, pop-inflected soundtracks and hagiographic musical biopics have become ubiquitous to the point of parody, suggesting an overreliance on simple nostalgia and a formulaic approach to musical storytelling. The low cost of digital production tools has led to a drastically condensed production model and a reliance on temp tracks in the editing booth, leading to prognostications about film music’s fading relevance within an increasingly digitized audiovisual culture.

In contrast to these concerns and the factors that have engendered them, I submit that Hollywood’s digital era has proven to be more acoustically diverse than was once feared, reveling in the interplay between the sound and music of disparate eras. Through the lens of “hauntology” as coined by Jacques Derrida and developed by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, this dissertation considers how the persistence of analog devices and practices within a digital mediascape invites consideration of cinematic music as something caught between the folds of time itself, reflective of a dynamic and ever-changing relationship to past modes of representation.

Reinterpretations of classic film genres make use of the gray area between music and sound design to distort time itself, relaying epistemological confusion through means that transcend the digital-analog binary. Likewise, scores that foreground instrumental timbres usher in a new relationality between the vibrations of material sound and the embodied experiences of character and spectator alike. In auteur-driven cinema, the use of anachronistic music plays an active role in historical revisionism, problematizing the perceived value of “historical fidelity” in Hollywood practice. And finally, the tensions between live and recorded performances staged in music-centric historical films reflects the uneasy conflation of historic recordings and the historical “record.” The diversity and breadth of these examples give way to a paradox: the material foundations of cinematic music were never completely certain, and yet, they remain more powerful than ever.

The media texts explored include Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019), Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2018), Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2016), Inglourious Basters & Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2009 & 2012), Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2014), and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe, 2020).

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.

Roger Griffin notes that “there can be no term in the political lexicon which has generated more conflicting theories about its basic definition than ‘fascism’.” The difficulty articulating a singular definition of fascism is indicative of its complexities and ideological changes over time. This dissertation offers fascist performativity as a theoretical lens to better understand how Italian composers interacted with fascism through sustained, performative acts while leaving space to account for the slipperiness of fascist identities.

Although opera thrived in fascist Italy (1922-1943), extant scholarship on this period of music history remains scant, promoting a misleading narrative of operatic decline in the twentieth century. This dissertation examines the positions of four Italian opera composers within fascist culture by focusing on the premieres of four operas during the Italian fascist period: Pietro Mascagni’s Nerone (1935), Gian Francesco Malipiero’s Giulio Cesare (1936), Ottorino Respighi’s Lucrezia (1937), and Ennio Porrino’s Gli Orazi (1941). These musical settings of romanità (Roman-ness) were part of Mussolini’s efforts to glorify ancient Rome, a central tenet of fascist ideology.

In fascist Italy, a political society that extolled masculinity and musical composition, experiences of difference were often hidden beneath a guise of hypermasculine rhetoric. Opera composers associated with the fascist regime were almost exclusively men and in a patriarchal society with prescribed gender norms, they performed gender. I situate each composer through an investigation of their relationship with the regime, through musical analysis, and an account of the reception of their operas. While not all the composers included in this dissertation were outspoken fascists, or even confirmed members of the National Fascist Party, they nevertheless performed fascism to obtain favor with Mussolini and the fascist regime.

Arnold Schoenberg’s theory of Klangfarbenmelodie (timbre-melody) is one of the most important yet least understood compositional innovations of the twentieth century. Critical reexaminations of his writings reveal that it is a textural principle, a way to combine the homophonic and polyphonic forms of presentation. In other words, Klangfarbenmelodie is another means to accomplish what Schoenberg eventually realized in composition with twelve tones—a way forward for new music.

In many respects, the twentieth century was the era of chromaphony: timbre-based music. In addition to chronicling the emancipation of timbre, this dissertation emancipates timbre in scholarly discourse by offering a new analytical method with the flexibility to be a powerful tool for all musical parameters—planal analysis. In conjunction with auditory scene analysis and music cognition, planal analysis enables new ways of studying musical elements by placing them in separate analytical planes.

Direct precedents of Klangfarbenmelodie can be traced to Gustav Mahler, whose music had a profound influence on Schoenberg. Clarity of musical line in Mahler’s massive orchestras was often accomplished through his refined control of timbre. In his music, we begin to see timbre treated as part of the thematic material—that is, timbre developed in similar ways as pitch content. While Mahler’s practice is still pitch-oriented, his functional orchestration represents a type of proto Klangfarbenmelodie.

Schoenberg’s “Farben,” the third of the Fünf Orchesterstücke, Op. 16 (1909), predates his discussion of Klangfarbenmelodie in Theory of Harmony. Nonetheless, this music is rightfully considered a seminal moment in the development of the technique. Through close analysis and sketch studies, timbral processes are revealed as part of the musical logic alongside pitch processes.

Anton Webern took up the mantle of Klangfarbenmelodie after Schoenberg’s early experiments with it. Contrary to popular reception, Schoenberg and Webern had similar approaches to this new way of composing music with timbre. In 1911, Webern elevated Schoenberg’s theoretical declaration of timbre’s independence to a fully realized practice in his compositions. Through analyses of Webern’s Opp. 9 and 10, this dissertation shows that Webern’s aphoristic works are governed by well-formed and logical timbral processes. His chromaphonic works of 1911 display fully formed Klangfarbenmelodie in both of its definitions: (1) a timbre-melody and (2) a textural style of presentation.

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.

“Sounding Reconstruction at St Paul’s Cathedral, 1660–1714” is a study of the sonic and musical history of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. It examines how musical and sonic signification played a role in the rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1666, led by architect Christopher Wren (1632–1723). During reconstruction the monarchy, the Church of England, and Parliament were able to implicate sounds produced both within and outside London’s St Paul’s into a narrative of institutional power. Relationships between the cathedral, the monarchy, the Anglican Church, and the people of London were redrawn, reinterpreted, and affected by sonic parameters; through noise pollution, acoustical construction, and sung liturgy, sounds at St Paul’s came to signify progress, excellence, and divine authority for London’s institutions, to the detriment of the Capital’s own citizens. I argue that sound is analogous to power within the cathedral, and that those sounds represent a microcosm of the social networks, overlapping authorities, and architectural spaces in Restoration London. This project thus contributes to a paradigmatic shift in understanding the rich complexities of sound and its broad impact on culture in the early modern period.

This study thus contributes to a paradigmatic shift in understanding the rich complexities of sound and its broad impact on culture in the early modern period. Interpreting St Paul’s as a monument, a symbol, and a metaphor is essential to clarifying its complex relationship with soundscapes, the nation’s capital, and its authoritative, political institutions.

Early jazz suggests a plethora of distinct timbres and textures: the steady pulse of the trap set and banjo, the growling cornet, the wailing clarinet, the sliding trombone, and an array of interlocking melodies. These sounds refer to one city in particular: New Orleans. New Orleans musicians such as King Oliver, Kid Ory, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet spread these sounds through their travels on tour in the South and in Europe and through their migrations to the North and the West. In turn, many Northern musicians adopted new sounds by mimicking the styles and tones of their New Orleans peers. One musician who followed suit was Duke Ellington, who started his career in the 1920s. While subsequent generations of jazz musicians tended to dismiss the sounds of New Orleans, Ellington continued to rely on both the sounds and the authority of New Orleans in his works throughout his lifetime. From a Black musician’s standpoint, jazz from New Orleans during the 1920s brought both power and black authenticity to his playing. While the early adoption of these sounds was an initial way for Ellington to imitate the trends of other band leaders, it would later follow him throughout his career as an indicator of his own musical authenticity among his audiences. Ellington was indebted to New Orleans for its indicative tones and rhythms, its rich history and culture, and its position as an epicenter of both jazz and Black history. He reinterpreted the styles and histories of New Orleans subtly into his own musical language and expressions — so much so that it is difficult to determine if the sound he crafted is New Orleanian or merely Ellingtonian. The New Orleanian style of clarinet-playing carried a firm tradition and distinctive sound, which helped to shape Ellington’s own musical style. The evocation of New Orleans through the clarinet was first brought to him by one musician: Sidney Bechet. To breakdown the influence of the Creole of Color clarinet sound, I use a tripartite structure. First, I will explore the role of New Orleans clarinet-playing in early jazz history. In early jazz ensembles, the Creoles of Color were predominantly the champions of the clarinet; this culture possessed a vibrant community of clarinetists, which included Bechet, Jimmie Noone, Achille Baquet, George Baquet, and Barney Bigard. I will then contextualize the involvement of the Creole of Color community of clarinetists in the exportation of jazz. Their influence on Northern musicians during the early 1920s was substantial, establishing their tradition in Chicago and New York City. Lastly, I will discuss Ellington’s continuing interactions with New Orleans through his band members and repertoire. The inclusion of Bechet’s pupil, Johnny Hodges, and New Orleans clarinetist, Barney Bigard, in his band recalled Bechet’s exceptional soprano saxophone playing and the distinct clarinet tradition of New Orleans, respectively. Ellington also continued the legacy introduced to him by Bechet in pieces centered around New Orleans such as A Drum is A Woman and New Orleans Suite. Together, these three parts will reveal the rich history and culture that started for Ellington with his first exposure to Bechet’s playing in 1923 with the show How Come at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., but began centuries earlier with the Creole of Color community. My research highlights a powerful and consistent feature of Ellington’s incredibly rich musical legacy, which features sounds characteristic of American music, and more importantly, Black music.

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.

The Whole Booke of Psalmes, first published in 1562, was not only the English Reformation’s primary hymnal, but also by far the most popular printed music book published in England in the sixteenth century. This dissertation argues that in addition to its identities as scriptural text and monophonic musical score, the WBP functioned as a music instructional book, intended by its publishers to improve popular music education in Elizabethan England. Motivated by Protestant ideology, the WBP promoted musical literacy for the common people. This dissertation further demonstrates that the WBP made a hitherto unrecognized contribution to music theory in early modern England, introducing the fixed-scale solmization system thought to originate at the end of the sixteenth century. Drawing upon musicology, book history, and the study of Reformation theology, this dissertation makes a contribution to post-revisionist English Reformation scholarship, arguing that the WBP and its music-educational materials formed part of the process of widespread conversion from Roman Catholicism to English Protestantism.

John Day’s highly successful claim to monarchical authorization and religious authority for the WBP made the book the most prominent guide to a Protestant musical aesthetic for the common people. According to the WBP, the English Protestant musical identity was characterized by several features: communal singing of easy monophonic melodies, particularly by the laity rather than clergy and musical professionals; a broad selection of appropriate texts that encompassed Scripture (particularly the psalms), liturgical canticles, and catechetical texts; regular singing both devotionally as a household and as a congregation in church settings; and performance with instrumental accompaniment. Musical literacy was an imperative: if being a Protestant meant becoming an active part of musical worship, then it was crucial to teach all the laity to sing well, enabling them to fully inhabit that identity.

For this reason, many of the 143 known editions published from 1562 to 1603 contained one of two features intended to teach basic musical literacy: a letter to the reader which served as an introductory music theory treatise, and a special font that assigned solmization syllables to individual pitches for ease of sight-reading, which was accompanied by its own single-page explanatory preface. These prefaces made the WBP unique among the music-theoretical works produced in sixteenth-century England, the prefaces being neither the sort of introductory essays found in instrumental instruction books nor freestanding music theory textbooks. Their content was simple and accessible, with the goal of educating their common readers in the musical skills necessary for the singing of psalms (but not improvisation or composition, critical topics in other sixteenth-century English music theory treatises), and both prefaces employed religious language that gave sacred meaning to music education. The WBP’s simplified solmization system made an important advance in the history of music theory, one that has up until now been thought to originate thirty years later with music theorists Thomas Morley and William Bathe.

Yet as we know from early Jacobean documents and practices, the average early seventeenth-century churchgoer remained unable to read music and was therefore unable to utilize the WBP as a musical score. I contend that the failure of the WBP’s didactic content was due to music printing errors that significantly hindered the psalter’s capacity to improve musical literacy. Despite John Day’s introduction of the music preface and printed solmization syllables and the general policy of his successors to maintain Day’s general structure, content, and Protestant message, the usefulness of the WBP in promoting musical literacy and Protestant musical devotion was severely hampered by seemingly musically-illiterate compositors and a lack of editorial oversight.

In music both popular and classical since the nineteenth century, one finds everywhere chord progressions that alternate between two harmonies in ways that deviate from conventional “textbook” tonality. This thesis aims to answer the following questions: are there meaningful generalizations to be made about these progressions? What is their role in music history? Why have they been so popular with composers of the past two centuries? And how do they operate in specific pieces by particular composers? To answer these questions, I use methods such as Roman-numeral analysis, voice-leading diagrams showing how harmonic phenomena emerge from linear counterpoint, and multi-level readings of entire works. The study has four foci: Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius, Stephen Sondheim, and modern pop music. I discover that modality has a symbiotic relationship with harmonic oscillation; that neighbor chords constituted important sites of innovation in nineteenth-century harmony; that transcendental oscillations can govern entire works in manifold ways; that the theatrical device known as “vamping” saturates Sondheim’s scores and produces transcendental oscillations; and that correspondences exist between styles that otherwise have little to do with one another, such as Impressionism and rap. This study explores the harmonic theory and analysis of music that is neither traditionally tonal nor atonal.