Browsing by Subject "Music theory"

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

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

This dissertation 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.

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.

My dissertation comprises three original musical compositions informed by the literary works of Nathaniel Mackey and an analytical article on the music of French composer Pascal Dusapin. As a whole, the collection seeks to address the confluence of music and literature and to investigate how the interaction of these diverse art forms can affect the perception of meaning for the listener or reader.

Chapter 1, Red Wind, for soprano, narrator, bass clarinet, trumpet, trombone, contrabass, and percussion, sets to music excerpts of Nathaniel Mackey’s sixth collection of poems Blue Fasa. Mackey’s serial poems Song of the Andoumboulou and “mu,” which draw heavily upon non-Western traditions for inspiration, take “an Eastern turn” in Blue Fasa. Red Wind interprets selected verses from Blue Fasa in five movements that exhibit a wide variety of musical influences ranging from classical to blues, bossa nova, jazz, and ragtime. This interplay is intended to mirror the poet’s own penchant for signification. Addressing themes of migration, societal conflict, transit, and multiple identities found in Mackey’s poetry, the piece presents a window through which listeners may bring new meaning to this poetry. Mackey himself performed on a recording of Red Wind, available at https://soundcloud.com/sid-richardson/red-wind.

Chapter 2, Bass Cathedral, for clarinet solo and wind ensemble was inspired by the novel of the same name by Nathaniel Mackey, which is the fourth installment in his ongoing fictional series From a Broken Bottle, Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. The work investigates various methods of encoding text from the source material into the compositional parameters of the work, including phrase lengths, harmony, and gestural content. Bass Cathedral, first performed by Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s Wind Ensemble at Old South Church in Boston, also explores spatial relationships in the ensemble, which is divided in five separate groupings on stage.

Chapter 3, Red Wind (Desert Remix), is a reimagining of Red Wind in a generative media environment realized in the software program MAX/MSP. Selected excerpts of Red Wind are fragmented and reorganized by the algorithm in real time, out of which emerges upon each listening a new variation of the piece. The score is, in effect, a software application. Red Wind (Desert Remix) addresses computer music’s ability to reorganize and re-contextualize compositional materials in a way that elicits a plurality of possible meanings for the listener.

Chapter 4, “Form and Exhaustion in Pascal Dusapin’s Quad - In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze,” presents an analysis of Pascal Dusapin’s violin concertino Quad - In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze (1996). It focuses on the formal layout of the work and the interdisciplinary nature of the composer’s method. By examining these connections in detail, this study underlines the importance of these two luminary figures to Dusapin’s idiosyncratic musical philosophy. Drawing heavily upon the composer’s writings about his work and an in-person interview, this study sheds light on Dusapin’s compositional process that emphasizes form and the distribution of energy within a given work. Analytical concepts drawn from Beckett, Deleuze, and Dusapin are applied to the violin concertino to illustrate how the flow of the work is exhausted by the fusing of its rigorous formal processes with powerful emotional content.

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.

A semiminim is typically defined as a note value worth half a minim, usually drawn as a flagged or colored minim. That definition is one according to which generations of scholars have constructed chronologies and provenances for fourteenth- and fifteenth-century music and the people who created it. `Semiminims' that do not match this definition are often portrayed in modern scholarship as anomalous, or early prototypes, or evidence of poor education, or as peculiarities of individual preference. My intensive survey of the extant theoretical literature from the earliest days of the Ars Nova through c. 1440 reveals how the conceptualization and codification of notation occurred in different places according to different fundamental principles, resulting not in one semiminim but a plethora of related small note values. These phenomena were dynamic and unstable, and a close study of them helps to clarify a range of historical issues. Localized traditions have often been strictly bounded in scholarly literature; references to French, Italian, and English notation are commonplace. I explain notational preferences in Italy, England, central Europe, and the rest of western Europe with regard to these small note values but demonstrate that theorists educated in each of these places routinely incorporated portions of other traditions. This process began long before the `ars subtilior,' dating at least to the time of Franco of Cologne. Rarely were regional traditions truly isolated; the various aspects of semiminim-family note values were debated and adapted for decades across these cultural and geographical boundaries. The central theme of my research is to show how and why the theoretical conceptualization of these myriad small note values is key to understanding the continual merging of these local preferences into a more amalgamated style of notation by the mid-fifteenth century.

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.