The study sought to determine the relationships of preference responses to grade, gender, familiarity, musical training, peers'/parents' listening habits, music media use, and listening contexts. Grade six through nine Hong Kong students (N = 310) completed the audio preference test followed by verbal responses to training, peers'/parents' preferences, leisure/music media involvement, and listening context. Results indicated: The preferred genres, in descending order, were Western pop/rock, Cantopop/rock, Western classical; the disliked genres were jazz, Chinese, and non- Western/non-Chinese. Preference correlated strongly with genre familiarity. Pop genres were the most familiar to all adolescents. The students' preference toward Western pop/rock and Cantopop/rock associated with several listening contexts: solitary listening, having great freedom to choose one's desired music for listening, listening to music in one's room, and listening to music as background activity. The adolescents expressed that their leisure activities were spent with their family and friends. However, they made it clear that music listening was a personal activity that very likely was listened to alone. On all listening occasions, the girls exhibited a more positive response than the boys did. With four to five hours daily leisure time, the adolescents watched TV for three to four hours while spending less than two …

This thesis surveys a variety of songs and arias for high soprano which feature the nightingale; examines the musical elements that symbolize, refer to, or imitate the nightingale; and compares these musical elements with transcriptions of the nightingale's song. The first chapter reviews the symbolic development of the nightingale and its role in poetry and literature. The interior chapters address a selection of musical compositions that feature the nightingale and its song. The final chapter establishes a relationship between the sound of the actual sound of the nightingale and the musical gestures created by composers to imitate the nightingale.

Chen Yi's music is well accepted and recognized nationally and internationally through an increasing number of commissions and performances. Major symphony orchestras, choruses, institutions and companies request her compositions on many occasions in order to increase understanding and exploration of Chinese influences on western classical idioms. This study provides the first detailed discussion of her compositional mastery and her fusion of Chinese music with the language of western choral traditions. Chen Yi's reputation as a prominent orchestral composer does not restrain her passion to apply instrumental techniques and materials to her quality choral compositions. This study focuses on (1) how hardship and various life experiences during the ten-year Cultural Revolution shaped Chen Yi's musical inspirations; (2) how the influences of major musical genres, such as traditional Chinese folksong, jingju, model play, 19th-20th century nationalism, impressionism, and serialism are consolidated in her kaleidoscopic compositional techniques; and (3) the application of Chinese languages, pedagogical concepts, and extra-musical elements, such as Chinese poems, paintings, and calligraphies, revealed in her original, intelligent and resourceful choral creations.

An examination of the influences on twentieth-century wind music would be incomplete without the consideration of composer, organist, pianist, conductor, teacher, and critic Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979). Students from the United States began studying with Boulanger between World War I and World War II, and continued to travel to study with her for over fifty years. The respect awarded this legendary French woman was gained as a result of her effectiveness as a teacher, her influence on the development of each student's unique compositional style, and her guidance of an emerging American musical style. The correlation between the teacher's lessons and the compositional output of her students must be explored. Boulanger did not compose specifically for winds, and she did not encourage her students to compose for the wind symphony. However, this document will outline the influence that this powerful pedagogue exerted over the creation of repertoire by her students by providing insight into the pedagogical style and philosophical foundations of Boulanger as reflected in the literature and by the writings, comments, and compositions of three successful students who composed literature for the wind symphony: Aaron Copland (1900-1990), Leslie Bassett (b. 1923), and Donald Grantham (b. 1947). Three significant works for …

Wind studies concert performed at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall.

Doctoral recital presented at UNT College of Music Recital Hall.

Recital presented at the UNT College of Music Voertman Hall in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree.

Concert performed at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall, as well as recitals presented in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree for both Charlotte Botha (conducting the UNT Women's Chorus) and Gideon Burrows (conducting the UNT Men's Chorus).

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 …

Giovanni Legrenzi was a prolific composer of vocal music and maestro di cappella at the Basilica di San Marco but his vocal works are not often studied as a part of the Venetian lineage with composers such as Willaert, de Rore, Zarlino, Monteverdi, Cavalli, and Vivaldi. Despite his being a prolific composer who had significant influence on the work of other musicians in the traditional canon, references to Legrenzi in standard music publications (Grout, Taruskin, Grove Music Online, etc.) are at best sparse, and largely biographical. This dissertation is one step to correct that pattern by creating a performance edition of Sacri e festivi concenti, Opera nona, one of Legrenzi's significant works near the beginning of his Venetian period. This collection of sacred music was published on 12 June 1667 in Venice though Legrenzi's exact whereabouts at the time remain uncertain. This phase of his career can be defined by his having sought more prestigious and lucrative employment. Having lived and worked in rural Lombardy and Ferrara, he made unsuccessful overtures in places such as Milan, Bologna, Vienna, and Paris. A full score has been produced by transcribing from the part books of the Bologna Museo copy, which will allow …

Choir concert performed at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall, as well as recital presented in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree for Gideon Burrows (conductor).

Recital presented at the UNT College of Music Voertman Hall in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree.

Choir concert performed at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall, as well as recital presented in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degrees for Joshua R. Brown and Charlotte Botha.

Christopher Rouse (b. 1949), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his Trombone Concerto (1993) and a Grammy award for his Concerto de Gaudi (1999), has come to the forefront as one of America's most prominent orchestral composers. Several of Rouse's works feature quotations of and strong allusions to other composers' works that are used both rhetorically and structurally. These borrowings range from a variety of different genres and styles of works, from Claudio Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea to Jay Ferguson's "Thunder Island." Due to the more accessible filtering and funneling methods of musical borrowings (proliferation of mass media), the weighty discourses attached to them, and their variety of functions (critiquing canons, engaging in an allusive tradition, etc.), quotation has become elevated to the most prominent of musical actors that trigger narrative listening strategies, which in turn have a stronger role in the formation of narratives about music as well as narratives of music. The primary aim of this study is to adapt and apply more recent methodological narrativity frameworks to selected instrumental compositions by Rouse containing quotations, suggesting that their manner of insertion, their method of disclosure, and their referential potential can benefit from being examined through various narrative lenses …

A faculty and doctoral student recital performed at the UNT College of Music Voertman Hall.

Multiple articulation is a technique that is becoming commonplace in the saxophone literature. This study provides a detailed explanation of how produce the technique. Its application to saxophone literature is explored with musical examples and commentary by the author. A compilation of pedagogical viewpoints regarding multiple articulation from educators spanning the last century is provided.

This document chronicles the history, development, process, and impact of three of the United States' first and most successful professional choirs. Representing the impact of these three choirs demonstrates a need for current professional or community choirs today. Four conductors of current professional and community choirs were interviewed and discussed elements for establishing, maintaining and succeeding in creating of a professional or community choir in the United States today. This document impresses the importance and considerations for a successful endeavor when establishing a professional or community choir.

Since the founding of "New China" in 1949, the musical culture has undergone numerous periods of identity crisis, particularly during the ten-year "Cultural Revolution," due to the fact that music had always been used to serve the needs of political propaganda. Even the development of a "National Style" encouraged by the central government was a political "brainchild" under the socialist ideology. Nevertheless, professional musicians struggled to create a new path in musical composition while walking on the thin ice of harsh political climate. Isolated from the rest of the world for almost two decades, China's musical development had not been able to keep pace with the world until the late 1970s, when the central government reevaluated its agenda on how to lead the country. This change of political environment eventually led to a more open society. The newly established contact with the outside world in the musical scene lent great opportunities for Chinese musicians to study the newest thinking about music, which ultimately, in the early 1980s, fostered the emergence of a new "National Style"- the so-called "New Wave." The style of "New Wave" differs drastically from the earlier "National Style" in that it employs primarily twentieth-century compositional techniques in …

Scholars have considered Italian chamber recitative laments only a transitional phenomenon between madrigal laments and laments organized on the descending tetrachord bass. However, the recitative lament is distinguished from them by its characteristic attitude toward the relationship between music and text. Composer of Italian chamber recitative laments attempted to express more subtle, refined and sometimes complicated emotion in their music. For that purpose, they intentionally created discrepancies between text and music. Sometimes they even destroy the original structure of text in order to clearly deliver the composer's own voice. The basic syntactic structure is deconstructed and reconstructed along with their reading and according to their intention. The discrepancy between text and music is, however, expectable and natural phenomena since text cannot be completely translated or transformed to music and vice versa. The composers of Italian chamber recitative laments utilized their innate heterogeneity between two materials (music and text) as a metaphor that represents the semantic essence of the genre, the conflict. In this context, Italian chamber recitative laments were a real embodiment of the so-called seconda prattica and through the study of them, finally, we more fully able to understand how the spirit of late Renaissance flourished in Italy in …

I contend that young students should be introduced to intercultural contemporary music, as this exposure brings benefits to their artistic development and fosters appreciation of other cultures. Variations sur un thème populaire coréen by Sung-Ki Kim (b. 1954) and Six Pieces for Piano ‘Nori' by Chung-Sock Kim (b. 1940) are effective pedagogical works that fit perfectly into the intercultural mold mentioned above, and both are suitable for late intermediate or early advanced level students. A detailed comparison of these two works can help instructors understand the ways by which these composers incorporate Korean folk materials and blend them with Western contemporary techniques. An analysis of Sung-Ki Kim's Variations sur un theme populaire coréen and Chung-Sock Kim's Six Pieces for Piano ‘Nori' can be divided into three categories: harmony, rhythm, and performance-related aspects. By analyzing these two pieces, these study illustrates in greater depth their intercultural aspects, showing the way by which both composers merged traditional Korean folk idioms through the inclusion of traditional Korean rhythms, and the imitation of sounds of several traditional Korean instruments with Western contemporary technique such as non-traditional sounds and use of sostenuto pedal. Finally, this study provides some practicing suggestions and listing exercise on how …

Composer William Bolcom (1938-) has shown a remarkable capacity for incorporating disparate materials and combining them to create original compositions, while often using traditional genres and forms. This style has earned Bolcom the reputation as a leading composer of American postmodernism. This study provides a brief sketch of Bolcom's development as a postmodern composer, his repertoire for violoncello and piano, and it examines his compositional style as applied in his Sonata for Violoncello and Piano (1989). In the Sonata Bolcom applies a wide variety of musical vocabulary from serious and popular traditions. He juxtaposes contrasting ideas to create and resolve rhythmic, melodic and harmonic tensions and amalgamates concepts of three centuries of music history into one new integral work. All these disparate elements with classical, romantic, impressionist, expressionist, modernist and popular connotations are molded together to form a serious piece of musi c with a sense of humor. The three contrasting movements of the Sonata share many common rhythmic, melodic and harmonic traits. The movements form a congruent work of Classical and Romantic spirit, often reminiscent of Brahms' music, despite the mixed use of traditional, popular, and modernist musical languages.

Choral concert performed at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall, featuring Charlotte Botha (conducting) in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree.

Recital presented at the UNT College of Music Winspear Hall in fulfillment of the Doctor of Music Arts (DMA) degree for Dwight Jilek (conducting the UNT Concert Choir) with an additional choir performance by the University Singers.

As it stands, only one arrangement of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 23 orchestral reduction exists, which is by Tchaikovsky himself. A number of critical editions of the piece exist, but none of them cover the subject of the material within the orchestral reduction. Tchaikovsky wrote the reduction from a compositional rather than a pianistic perspective, thus some passages present awkward technical challenges. The purpose of this dissertation is ultimately to contribute to the repertoire of accompanists by producing a new edition of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. I created my arrangement through a process of practical trial and error as well as observing the strategies used by other arrangers of orchestral reductions. Through a series of carefully selected omissions, note rearrangements, visual adjustments, and editorial changes, I simplified the reduction as a whole. I sought to improve the readability of the music by reducing accidentals as much as possible and also incorporating small-print cues into the main staves. Each minor adjustment or major revision contributes cumulatively to the ease of execution of the accompanimental part as a whole. Although Tchaikovsky's reduction is authentic and authoritative, a newly revised and simplified version would be useful for collaborative pianists. Thus, …