Das Jahr is considered Fanny Hensel's most impressive accomplishment of piano solo work. However, the only modern edition that is extant includes many additional editorial markings. By further analyzing the sections that are technically challenging or musically demanding from an interpretive standpoint, pianists wishing to perform the work will have to find workable fingerings and pedal markings to learn this piano cycle. For this reason, this dissertation will not only provide readers with an original text of Das Jahr, but also assist pianists in finding practical solutions that can help them to interpret this distinctive work successfully on the modern piano.

Contemporary repertoire is not commonly taught or explored by teachers during the intermediate level, when a student's musical training is transitioning to an advanced level. Nonetheless, it is important for piano instructors to be open-minded about contemporary music and have some perspective on the development of music repertoire in the future. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a performance and pedagogical guide to Stephen Chatman's (b. 1950) Fantasies, from both technical and artistic viewpoints. The collection, which consists of eleven pieces, features a wide variety of contemporary idioms, styles, and means of notation. For instance, there are jazz-like syncopated rhythms, asymmetrical accents reminiscent of Primitivism, and Impressionistic or dissonant sonorities. Fantasies is not only a valuable tool for students to explore new sounds and improve their performing techniques while executing nontraditional notations and contemporary idioms, it is also a great teaching resource for instructors to promote students' musicality through hearing, seeing, and thinking. In this study, I provide individual, detailed descriptions for each of the pieces in the score, adding examples on how to address the difficulties they present to the performer. As a result, instructors can better understand how to help students prepare to perform this collection …

Amparo Davila's writing style is characterized by circumventing the boundaries between the real and the fantastic and between the known and the unknown. The author creates a narrative that evokes horror in the reader by mixing the uncanny of the unknown with the reality of the world. This study proposes that the sinister in Davila's stories are created by abandonment. This abandonment is the peremptory element of Davilian narrative and can be seen and examined throughout the author's literary work. The abandonment wields a mechanism of loneliness, madness, hopelessness and chaos that eventually provokes the sinister. The element of abandonment disturbs the main character of the story and makes him fall into an abyss from which he or she cannot escape. This abandonment is not always obvious, since most of the time the abandonment is veil by a halo of gothic and fantastic elements. The present thesis has the task of breaking down the different types of abandonment that are presented throughout this narrative, its sinister function and the theoretical and historical interpretation of the various abandonments both personal and collective that Amparo Davila presents. The route of abandonment proposed in this thesis is explained in the following three stories: …