Browsing by Subject "Musical composition"

Abstract Les Cenelles is a (roughly) thirty-minute song cycle for soprano and bass baritone voices, flute, clarinet, trombone, percussion, and string orchestra. The composition sets music to selected poems from the historic anthology bearing the same name. First published in 1845, Les Cenelles stands as the United States’ first publication of poems by African Americans. Through musical borrowings, bluesy/jazzy harmonic inflections, swinging rhythms, and operatic arias and recitatives, the song cycle aims to pay homage to the poets, the city of New Orleans which birthed them, and New Orleans’ rich and extensive musical history.

No Turn Unstoned: Development, Deviation, and Dissolution in the Music of Luke Vibert attempts to provide theoretical tools to better analyze and conceptualize change upon various levels of loop organization within Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Through the music of pioneering producer Luke Vibert, the essay highlights fundamental levels of loop organizations: loops, loop phrases, loop rhymes, and loop sections. Moreover, the essay highlights fundamental components which comprise loops: e.g., drum, melodic, chordal, bassline, and riff loops. Lastly, the essay identifies four essential operations which lie at the heart of change within EDM’s array of genres: e.g., loop content layering, loop content varying, loop content blending, and loop content disrupting.

This dissertation contains two parts: an original album for voice, clarinet, electric guitar, hand percussion, and electronics; and an article analyzing ethical use of responsive technologies in art, music, and design.

Lilacs: Digital Songs and Poems for Voice, Clarinet, Percussion, Electric Guitar, and Electronics is a musical work in twelve sections inspired by the experience of losing a loved one to cancer. Themes of healing, hope, loss, and grieving appear in several of the songs and poems. The texts are original, except portions of “The Promise” which were excerpted from Isaiah 43:2-5. The musical sections comment on the ideas in the main poem, “the words that should not be said,” which is broken into four pieces. My music and text evoke an emotional process that is difficult to navigate: how to display a socially acceptable public face while privately grieving. Which words are “safe,” and which words should be “held close to [our hearts]”?

In some ways, my work is similar to a 19th-century song cycle, which usually involved solo or ensemble voices and instrumental accompaniment (especially the combination of voice and piano). Like song cycles in the 19th century, Lilacs is meant to be cohesive; the songs are meant to go together and comment on one another. In the context of this form, my choice to mix voice and choir is unusual, though there is a precedent in Schubert’s The Lady of the Lake. My choice to electronically overdub my own voice certainly departs from standard song cycles, which were most popular in a day where electronic manipulation was impossible.

Lilacs was conceived in an electronic format and is designed to be heard at home or on headphones, a listening experience which is not standard for song cycles or classical music as a whole, and relies on electronic devices as mediators of acoustic intimacy. The mix of styles, electronic format, and navigation of multiple music styles in Lilacs also suggest that this work is an avant-garde digital concept album in the same vein as The Beatles’ Revolver, but the fragmented narrative provided by my original poems are reminiscent of theatrical monologue. Taken together, the elements of my work suggest that Lilacs asserts its own genre. The final track, “Branches,” is submitted with the written dissertation, and can be heard at https://soundcloud.com/sacurzi/12-branches.

In my article, I analyze four case studies of interactive art to show that existing projects can inform the ethical design, use, and promotion of current responsive art and commercial projects. While responsive technologies incorporate fields as diverse as science, music, fashion, medicine, art, and textiles, critical discourse on the cultural meaning of wearable electronics and responsive textiles has been limited, with most literature and scholarship focusing on the technological advancements themselves. As a result, creators and consumers of wearable technology engage with increasingly “modern” garments but only rarely interrogate their use.

I analyze the interactive artwork of Yuri Suzuki, Anna Biró, Alyce Santoro, and Joanna Berzowska. First, I demonstrate the ways in which these artists disrupt dominant power dynamics of gender, ecology, disability and globalization; based on these analyses, I then develop a table of ethical considerations for the design and documentation of responsive textiles and haptic sound art. I intend this table be a practical tool for creators of responsive technologies in art, design, and commercial applications. I hope that my research will affect decision-making regarding photographic styles for the purposes of advertising or (in the case of artists) public documentation, which currently promotes thin, white, cisgender women. My work also has tangible benefits for commercial applications, where ethical sourcing and labor can protect companies from expensive lawsuits, loss of income from damaged brand image, consumer boycotts, and even embargos such as the United States suspension of trade with Bangladesh after the Rana Plaza factory collapse.

This dissertation is comprised of two parts: two compositions titled Lü and Extrication, and an article discussing Qigang Chen’s Reflet d’un temps disparu and Luan Tan.

Lü is a twenty-five minute string quartet that consists of four movements. The title “lü” means “journey” in Chinese, which suggests that the music traces a large scale expressive arc over the four movements. The music shifts from the use of chromaticism at the beginning to the incorporation of pentatonicism in the last movement. The melody that is varied and developed in all movements plays an important role in establishing musical coherence. The first two movements are based on dissonant intervals — seconds, sevenths and tritone. In the third movement, the music starts to include more consonant intervals — thirds, perfect fourths and perfect fifths – which prepare the listener for the employment of pentatonicism in the last movement. The last movement shows a coexistence between pentatonicism and dissonance, where the music mainly focuses on the pentatonic collections horizontally, while the harmonies are extracted from pentatonic collections with dissonant intervals.

The second composition Extrication is written for clarinet, percussion, violin and cello. The main melody is inspired by the music from one of the oldest forms of Chinese musical theater — Kunqu opera. The main melody recurs in varied forms from one section to another. This piece intentionally incorporates pentatonicism and influences from traditional Chinese music, such as rhythmic gestures played by woodblocks and Chinese cymbals that can be found everywhere in traditional Chinese operas.

In the article, I discuss Qignag Chen’s approach to pentatonicism in both Reflet d’un temps disparu and Luan Tan. Even though the two pieces differ in musical styles, they both use pentatonicism extensively. In Reflet d’un temps disparu, Chen explores the maximally-intersecting and non-intersecting relationships between pentatonic scales, following his former teacher Luo Zhongrong’s footsteps. According to analytical methods developed by Luo Zhongrong, and Nancy Rao, a pair of pentatonic scales that are related by a perfect fourth shares four common tones. In contrast, a pair of pentatonic scales that are separated by a semitone or a tritone share no common tones. Unlike in Reflet d’un temps disparu in which Chen creates pentatonic-derived harmonies and lush orchestral textures, the music in Luan Tan focuses on pentatonic motives that develop horizontally. In Luan Tan, Chen employs different relationships between a pair of pentatonic scales other than the maximally-intersecting and non-overlapping relationships. My analysis makes use of vectors described in John Rahn’s Basic Atonal Theory to examine the relationships between pentatonic collections in Luan Tan.

This dissertation is in two parts: a composition for mixed chamber ensemble and electronics and an article on Frank Zappa’s album, Lumpy Gravy.

The composition, Everything, is in three movements (Ether, Ecstatic, and Deviant) and is scored for a mixed chamber ensemble of Flute/Piccolo, Bass Clarinet, Bassoon, Trumpet, Trombone, Violin, Double Bass, and two Percussionists. Electronic interludes are placed between the movements that provide a sonic backdrop for the onstage movement of chairs and instrumentation changes. The piece is 25 minutes in duration and is a summation of my musical interests over the past several years.

The article is concerned with Frank Zappa’s 1968 album Lumpy Gravy. In 1967 Frank Zappa was approached by Capitol Records to produce an album of his music. Although Zappa was under contract with MGM as a performer, the offer from Capitol allowed to serve as music arranger and conductor for a project that would result in one of his most interesting and enigmatic albums, Lumpy Gravy. The litigation pursued by MGM following Lumpy Gravy’s creation prompted Zappa to re-imagine and remix the music recorded for Capitol to create a new recording for MGM. The result is a mixture of high classical and popular music, interspersed with staged conversations by musicians in the band covering a bizarre range of subject matter and which serve to create a parodic tone. The correspondences and divergences between the original Capitol recording and the final MGM release reveal much about the central role of parody and satire in Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy, not to mention the tremendous scope of Zappa’s musical tastes and ambition.

The dissertation consists of an original musical composition, Nobilette, for orchestra, an original musical composition, Rouge, for chamber ensemble and electronics, and an essay, “On Simplicity in Music.”  The essay examines three composers, Erik Satie (1866-1925), John Cage (1912-1992), and Alvin Lucier (1931-2021), and their relationship to musical simplicity.  These composers use unconventional constraints, and in doing so, offer a unique foundation from which to appreciate musical simplicity.  I use these cases as a three-part frame to structure the essay.  The three parts focus on (1) the simplicity of the perceptible attributes of Satie's music; (2) the simplicity of Cage's articulatable concepts; and (3) the simplicity of both perceptible attributes and articulatable concepts in Lucier's work.  Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies, Quatre Ogives, Vexations, and Musique d’ameublement, exhibit simplicity primarily through perceptible constraints, chiefly in their audible forms, prevalent use of repetition, and specific musical attributes related to melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture.  Cage’s Music of Changes exhibits a simplification of his pre-compositional process, yet the perceptible qualities of Music of Changes are complex. To the contrary, Cage’s 4’33’’, exhibits simpler perceptible qualities, but the underlying rationale for Cage’s “silence” is complicated. Simplicity in Music of Changes and 4’33’’ is found in either the conceptual framework or the perceptible qualities, but not in both. Lucier’s compositions I am Sitting in a Room and Music for Solo Performer, however, exhibit simplicity in both the perceptible qualities and their underlying conceptual frame. In examining these cases, a definition of simplicity begins to emerge: a unity of concept, or constraints concerning the perceptible attributes of the composition that come from a limited selection of materials and their transformation through stasis, repetition, or other audible procedures. 

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.

Quilt is an album made from sounds sourced from my mother's quilting practice and from recording sessions held with the piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire. For Quilt, my mother and I designed a quilt based on the Quartered Stripes Quilt pattern. The sounds of my mother ironing and cutting the fabric then piecing the fabric into the quilt were sampled and processed. The recording sessions with Yarn/Wire included them recording musical passages I had written them, as well as structured group improvisations, and free-form experimentations. Quilt joins the two sources into one sonic world.

Instrumental Objects is a three-episode podcast series about the creative practice of Baltimore-based avant-electronic duo Matmos. The podcast uses the multiple definitions of the word "object" as lenses to examine Matmos' approach to music making. Starting with objects reimagined as instruments, then move to Pierre Schaeffer's idea of sonic objects, then end with the contemporary ideas of Object-Oriented Ontology. Presented as a podcast, my research is able present deconstructions of Matmos' works, interviews I conducted with them, and fly-on-the-wall excerpts of them creating material for the album The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form.

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.

This dissertation is made up of two parts. The first is an original composition for chamber ensemble, and the second is an analytical article about memory in Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Unremembered.The original composition is entitled Abstract music for an imaginary film: nos. 1-9 and is scored for two pianists and two percussionists. The piece is an attempt to translate imagined visual imagery into an auditory experience. The individual movements could each be interpreted as musical representations of imaginary minimalist paintings in a gallery or as a series of imaginary short films consisting of gradually shifting swathes of color. While the formal aspect of the piece is entirely organic and intuitive, the rhythmic devices and layering are derived from calculated mathematical sequences and patterns. Overall the piece should conjure the image of slowly evolving abstract shapes that morph with the gradually shifting patterns in the music. The article, entitled “Composing Memory: Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Unremembered”, examines the thirteen-movement song cycle and how it relates to various aspects of memory. Text painting is a central focus of the analysis, specifically in regard to recurring melodies used to represent memory and the use of large-scale formal devices across movements. Snider’s use of vocal canons and heterophony are also examined, specifically how certain vocal textures connect to the idea of memory. These compositional elements deeply connect the music to Nathaniel Bellows’ poems which serve as the text of the piece. By emphasizing the value of closely studying a relatively new work by a prominent composer within the NYC indie-classical scene, I hope to shed light on some of the noteworthy compositional techniques used to enhance the piece.

This dissertation consists of two parts: the artistic part is a dramatic cantata for Baritone, Chamber Ensemble, Male Choir and Electronics. The scholarly part is an article which inquires into compositional aspects of Luciano Berio’s choral and symphonic piece Coro.Chapter 1 presents The Pit and the Pendulum, a dramatic cantata, in full score. Using the enhanced sonic environment allowed by the superimposition of vocal and acoustic music with a fantastic landscape created by means of electronic sounds, my composition explores the themes of Poe’s story. The tale, full of powerful metaphoric images, could be seen as a description of the experience of imprisonment. The pendulum descending from the ceiling, beyond being a clear metaphor of the inexorable passing of time, was actually one of the tortures used by the Spanish Inquisition. The blazing walls directly recall instruments of torture used at the time, as well. Nonetheless, the pit, whose black abyss is a symbol of indeterminacy, seems to point us to the annihilation of our conscience, typical of the most brutal torture of every kind and era. Victims of torture normally succumb to delirium though isolation, starvation and the alternation of torture and respite. On the brink of the pit, faced with the blackness of death, the mind of the condemned is, in this case, pushed beyond its limits and, ironically, he becomes able to conceive things that otherwise would be beyond his intellective and emotional faculties. From this terrible experience, in Poe’s tale, the prisoner gains the intuition and the knowledge of a deeper inner reality. In this regard, The Pit and the Pendulum is a tale of salvation and growth, against all odds. Chapter 2 presents the theoretical part of the dissertation, “Formal Plan and Constructive Principles of the Heterophonic Textures in Berio’s Coro.” This analytic essay on the large choral/symphonic work Coro, written in 1976 by Luciano Berio, is based on my study of his manuscripts preserved at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. I was able to consult the archive in June 2019. The article explores Berio’s motives in his placement of the choir in relation to the orchestra onstage, its premises and its consequences from a compositional point of view. It also investigates the relation between Berio’s music and the work of the ethnomusicologist Simha Arom on central African music, which inspired the composition. Thanks to some sketches left by the composer, I have been able to reconstruct the motivation behind some of the most significant compositional choices of the piece as well as several compositional procedures used by the composer to present and develop his musical discourse. In Chapter 3 the aesthetic and scholarly conclusions of this dissertation are summarized.

This dissertation consists of three distinct parts. The first and second components are my original musical compositions: The Poetics for ten instrumentalists, and Rainy Days Vol. 1 for harpsichord and electronics. The third part is an article that discusses cultural identity through an exploration of musical meaning in Tan Dun’s Water Concerto. Chapter 1, The Poetics, is written for flute, saxophone, two percussion, two pianos, and string quartet. When writing this piece, I was particularly interested in Yuri Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere, which is a realization of a meta-cultural system characterized by heterogeneous communities that are constantly dynamic and asymmetrical; the internal boundaries of the semiosphere’s inner modules are being constantly negotiated, which creates a tension that drives forward the development of our world. I thought this notion to be particularly relevant to our society, which is a multilayered network consisting of small and large communities that are interconnected and in a constant and dynamic state of negotiation. The Poetics explores a musical realization of such a multilayered and tightly connected network. How the seven movements are musically connected will be illustrated in detail in the Introduction. Chapter 2, Rainy Days Vol. 1, is a set of pieces for harpsichord and electronics about rain and Durham North Carolina, where I completed my graduate training. In 2022, I registered a one-minute field recording on my porch of every rain heard from March to May and subsequently logged journal entries for each. Volume 1 of Rainy Days therefore concerns March 2022 and consists of five movements that memorialize and interpret four rains that occurred during the month. I premiered the piece on December 2, 2023 at Nelson Music Room, Duke University. Chapter 3 is an article entitled “An Exploration of Musical Meaning in Tan Dun’s Water Concerto: Expectations, Assumptions, and the Problem of ‘Chineseness’.” Through an examination of Tan’s Water Concerto, I propose that identity is a situated social action that is dynamic and emergent, and therefore never a fixed status. Furthermore, I advocate that as practitioners of Western art music and its theoretical discourse, we should, on the one hand, strive to study and understand the materials we use and avoid insensitive actions such as removing musical elements from their context. On the other hand, we should recognize that today’s world is a multicultural one, and that as the boundaries between different cultures are becoming increasingly blurry, trying to locate the “Asianness” that is synthesized in composers’ musical language is no longer a viable practice of critical inquiry.

Third-Millennium Heart is a fifty-minute composition for soprano and ten instruments. The work takes its name from the text’s source material, Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s book of poetry, translated into English by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. Set for soprano, flute, oboe, clarinet, two percussionists, two pianos, violin, viola, and cello, the fifty-minute composition navigates its way through Andkjær Olsen’s words using song, speech, and instrumental movements that illustrate images from the poetry.“Constructing Postmodern Objects: Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s New Simplicity” is an article on the Danish composer Gudmundsen-Holmgreen and his unique version of New Simplicity, an artistic movement that emerged in Denmark in the 1960s. I situate Gudmundsen-Holmgreen in the postmodernist movement, and explore the use of “objects” in his compositions. I focus on Symphony, Antiphony, and the sonic objects present in that orchestral work to better understand Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s sui generis musical style and to suggest parallels found in other artforms.

This dissertation consists of two parts: a composition for chamber ensemble and an article discussing musical signification in Thomas Adès’s opera, The Tempest.

Through the Mangrove Tunnels is a forty-five minute composition inspired by my experiences growing up in the swamps and bayous of Florida. Its eight movements for string quartet, piano, and drum set are drawn from my memories as well as the colorful history of Weedon Island, a nature preserve in St. Petersburg that I spent much of my childhood exploring. The island’s many legends include ceremonial gatherings of Native Americans, landings by Spanish conquistadors, burned-down speakeasies, shootouts, bootlegging, a failed movie studio, plane crashes, and an axe-murder. Despite the island’s long history of encounters with humans, to the newcomer it appears to be a pristine natural landscape. Though they have been almost fully reclaimed by nature, traces of its history remain: the line in the dirt of a long-forgotten runway, an ancient sea-faring canoe buried in the mud. The piece evokes this history in impressionistic fashion alongside my personal memories of canoeing through the island’s mangrove tunnels. In combining these stories the continuum of past and present are collapsed, resulting in an exploration of the relationships between memory, history, place, home, and the natural world.

In the article I demonstrate how a complex hierarchy of associative musical ideas are used to represent specific characters and ideas in Thomas Adès’s Shakespearean opera The Tempest (2004). At the top of this hierarchy are two interval cycles, the dyadic cycle and the <2,3,4> aligned cycle, which together inform the majority of both melodic and harmonic material in the opera. The dyadic cycle is primarily associated with Prospero, the artifice of his magic, and his plan for vengeance. Consisting of a repeated sequence of three descending dyads (P5, P5, M6) pivoting around a connective half step, it generates the storm music that opens the opera as well as much of the music surrounding both Prospero and Caliban. The <2,3,4> aligned cycle is associated with the love between Miranda and Ferdinand, accompanying both characters’ introductions. It consists of three vertically stacked, concurrent interval cycles of two, three, and four half steps. At the bottom of the hierarchy of musical materials, and with the most associative specificity, are four leitmotifs that are responsible for creating dramatic meaning in the music: Prospero’s Revenge, Miranda’s Defiance, Nature, and Reconciliation. As these leitmotifs combine and develop, they generate a narrative in which Prospero’s grand plans for retribution are thwarted by Miranda and Ferdinand’s love, leading instead to reconciliation and freedom from his magical control.

I begin the article by defining "leitmotif" within the analytic framework introduced in Matthew Bribitzer-Stull's book Understanding the Leitmotif, justifying the use of the term in my analysis. Next, I offer critical analysis of scholars’ readings of he harmonic language of and signification in the opera, focusing on prior analytical works by Emma Gallon, Hélène Cao, John Roeder, and Philip Stoecker, reviews, and Adès's own words (including both published interviews and my private conversations with the composer). After a brief exploration of the opera’s historical precedent in Berg’s Lulu, I outline my hierarchical system of associative musical material in The Tempest, followed by my reading of the opera.

The structure of this dissertation comprises an introduction and four chapters, which contain three original musical compositions and one article. The first composition is a piece for wind symphony, the second one works with a string quartet, and the third explores the bass clarinet and electronics combination. The article comprises research on musical composition creativity and its pedagogical possibilities.

Chapter 1, “To Pernambuco with Love for Wind Symphony,” is a three-movement composition written as a tribute to the people of Pernambuco, one of the most musical and creative Brazilian states. During its 18 minutes, the piece explores some regional genres, such as the traditional Frevo and Maracatú, as well as the contemporary Maguebeat style. The first movement addresses the historical development of Frevo “Fanfarras” and “Orquestras,” which are musical ensemble sculpted in the roots of Pernambucan culture. The second movement still deals with Frevo. It starts with a percussion interlude, very common during frevo parades, followed by another particular manifestation of this genre: the clash of the bands. Different bands start to parade at different places in Pernambuco, in particular in its capital, Recife, and a surrounding city, Olinda. Eventually, some of those bands cross each other and start a beautiful sound battle to entice the people who were following the other band. Finally, the third movement expresses my personal admiration for Maracatú and Manguebeat. The former, a genre strongly connected with its Afro-Brazilian roots with a very characteristic complex percussive pattern. The latter, a genre born in the 1990s which expresses very well how people in Brazil cope with cultural globalization: they adjust any international cultural commodity to Brazilian unique flavors and roots.

The chapter 2, “String Quartet No. 1,” is a 19-minute piece that explores the traditional instrumentation of this ensemble with non-traditional musical material. Thus, the sonic result of the use of the digital delay effect inspires the first movement of this piece. Although there was no used resource other than the traditional instruments, the piece intends to emulate this and other effects acoustically. It works as a kind of stylized canon, with different dynamic layers. The second movement explores the sonorities derived from the amplitude modulation and frequency modulation synthesis. The complex harmonic result of such manipulations leads the group to represent it in complex chords with quarter-tone intervals. The last movement explores a Brazilian marginalized urban musical genre called Funk Carioca. It is inspired by the rhythmic and overall sonic quality of the genre, which encompasses some characteristic sounds provided by analogic drum machines that are represented by the string quartet instruments.

Chapter 3 presents the piece “Maco Light,” a piece for bass clarinet and prerecorded electronics that lasts exactly 7 minutes and 41 seconds. This piece is named after a North Carolinian legend originated in 1867. The railroad conductor Joe Baldwin died in a tragic train accident. Few weeks after this event people started to see apparitions of mysterious lights close to where the accident happened, the Maco station. This phenomenon, real or not, was reported dozens of times until the 1970s when Maco station was closed. Thus, this piece explores this story and uses the electronics to manipulate train sounds that engage in constant dialogue with the bass clarinet and with the story behind the music.

In chapter 4, the article “Educating for Composition Creativity” exposes how musical improvisation skills can be beneficial to the development of creative compositional strategies. It argues that improvisation should be part of the composition curriculum for college students and a particular subject in composition textbooks. Through an intense literature review in the fields of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Composition Pedagogy, this chapter makes evident that improvisation can allow different kinds of insights to happen during the compositional task. In particular, we used a framework that establishes three different modes of cognitive processing for creativity: deliberate, spontaneous, and flow mode. The neuroscientific evidence is thus interpreted over this framework which allowed the proposition of different strategies in coping creativity, depending on how well-defined or not the objective of a compositional work is.