In this study, the Anton Webern's music is considered in two groups: that which was written before Webern adopted the twelve-tone technique, Opp 1-16, and that written in the twelve-tone technique, Opp. 17-31. This division is not intended to represent an attempt at periodization of Webern's music, for the changes of style in Op. 17 are not that significant. But the fact that Webern employed the twelve-tone technique in all the works he wrote after Op. 16 makes this a natural point of division for a study of this sort. Besides the music of Webern, two peripheral areas are included in this study. No attempt has been made at an exhaustive biography of Webern, but facts relative to his life, and impressions about the person are presented. Also, to create a proper perspective for the study of Webern's which existed during the time that Webern lived and composed, is presented.

One of the most recognized icons of Mexico is the mariachi moderno tradition, which in the global popular imaginary, is associated with nostalgic, humorous, and emotional songs of love, heartache, death, drinking, and place. Inseparably fused to tequila and the historic charro figure, mariachi moderno completes a symbolic trinity of hetero-nationalist culture, conveyed within a popular imaginary of authentic mexicanidad (Mexican-ness). For mariachis and aficionados in Mexico, performative hypermasculine machismo acts as a perceptual baseline, structuring modes of feeling that signify an experience of authentic nationalist musicality This process is musically constructed in an incorporation of bodily movement, instruments, sound timbres, and symbolic clothing, simultaneously gestured with a heavy male-accent fusing an experience that feels genuinely Mexican. This reflexive signification is a consequence of the lived experience, shared dispositions, and competencies learned in the habitus, constituting real and imagined notions of hetero-nationalist culture. I refer to this musical semiosis as mariachismo, a neologism describing an intersubjective experience of machismo-infused mariachi subjectivity, ritualized through repeated gestures of sound, lyric, and corporeality. The semiotic power of mariachismo is most potent for subjects enculturated to Mexico's hetero-nationalist culture, shaped by popular imaginaries operationalizing gender and mexicanidad, connecting the two, making them feel unquestioned, …

Favorable judgment of a work of art, or of a man, usually means that the work of art, or a record of the man, will be preserved for future generations to judge for themselves. An unfavorable judgment may result in a richly deserved obscurity or an irreplaceable loss, unless favorable circumstances combine to preserve the evidence for a more perspicacious generation. One can be forgiven if he distrusts history's judgment; mistakes which have been corrected are legion (the case of J. S. Bach comes most vividly to mind) and skepticism is warranted unless or until the facts are available for confirmation. It is difficult to explain the paucity of information about Jacques-Christophe Naudot, Not that he is another J. S. Bach; neither Fleury, who made the first serious effort to revive interest in his music in the early 1920's, nor Ruf, who has done much in this regard recently, nor this writer makes any such claim. He does not, however, deserve the obscurity that has been his lot. If his music is not always profound, it nevertheless has both intrinsic and historical value, and some of his works reveal considerable contrapuntal skill. It may be that Naudot stood in the …

In this document, I discuss the creative process of a piece for instruments, electronics, and video titled Music for the End of the World in the context of the Anthropocene and music's relationship with it. The document is divided into two parts: Part I, divided into three chapters, is a critical essay and Part II, the score for Music for the End of the World. In the first two chapters, I present the conceptual basis for the creation of the piece and discuss relevant musical references. In the third chapter, I describe the creative process in detail and explain how the aesthetic decisions I made relate to the original concept. The first chapter starts by defining the Anthropocene and pointing out some connections between music, colonialism, and ecology. It also highlights some of the Anthropocene potential implications for the arts through the lens of Timothy Morton's post-humanist philosophy. In the second chapter, three important references for the creation of Music for the End of the World are presented: Luigi Nono's Prometeo; Francisco López La Selva; and João Pedro Oliveira's Neshamah. In the third chapter, I present the creative process of Music for the End of the World in detail. It …

Four contrasting recitals were presented to fulfill the requirements for the degree Doctor of Musical Arts. The first recital contained music of miscellaneous composers. Two Preludes and Fugues by the North German Baroque composers Vincent Libeck and Dietrich Buxtehude were separated by Samuel Scheidt's Variations on the Netherlands folk song "Ach du feiner Reiter". The Brahms Chorale Prelude "0 wie selig seid ihr doch, ihr Frommen" and the Louis Vierne "Intermezzo" from the Third Symphony represented Romantic-style composition. The major work of the program was the Carl Nielsen Commotio, a large work in orchestral style. The second recital consisted completely of music by J. S. Bach. Four works of contrasting styles were presented: Concerto, Opus 3, No. 8, composed by Antonio Vivaldi and transcribed by Bach, Partita on Sie gegrisset, Jesu gtig, Sonata IV, and Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor. The third recital was the lecture recital: Registration of Orchestral Textures in Organ Music. This lecture was an attempt to deal with the contemporary problem in performance practice of registration of Romantic organ music. The trends in organ building in the twentieth century have ranged from a deeper exploration of the possibilities of the Romantic organ to the reevaluation …

The two fields of acousmatic music and site-specific conceptual art take strikingly different approaches to the notions of space and place. In this document, I describe how these two areas of aesthetic research diverge and relate to each other, focusing on how their unique approaches can be implemented in the practice of site-specific music composition. The first part of this document surveys the distinctive features of each of these fields, describing the particular differences between them in their approach to space and place. The contradictions between the two approaches are then briefly analyzed in reference to Georgina Born's understanding of music as fundamentally multitextual. In the second part of the document, I describe in detail how I implemented a site-specific approach when composing "…threaded through," a 16-channel audio, 6 video, site-specific installation for the UNT College of Music Main Building. In this, I describe how both the space and place of the UNT College of Music Main Building influenced my musical choices, visual content, and approach to audio and visual spatialization. The final part of the document contains a detailed score for realizing "…threaded through" in the location of the UNT College of Music Main Building.

Two of the leading methodologies for spatializing audio over multiple channels include non-real-time multi-track tape and variations of real-time systems that often involve complex configurations of hardware. Of the latter, composers relying on MIDI as a control source have used pairs of sound modules, effects units and automation capable mixers to achieve spatialization over four loudspeakers. These systems typically employ intensity panning, Doppler shifts and reverberation. The present research details the development of a compact spatialization system using a MAX patch controlling a Kurzweil K2500 sampler. This system supports real-time diffusion of up to six simultaneous sound files over eight loudspeakers while incorporating intensity panning, Doppler shifts, delays and filtering. The MAX patch allows composers to choose from several automatic sound spatialization trajectories or to use the mouse to draw and store their own trajectories for later playback. The piece, Circumfusion, is an eighteen-minute composition of electroacoustic music utilizing this spatialization system.

The chansonnier held by the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome, designated Codex 2856 (0. V. 208), is a handsome volume containing 123 polyphonic compositions in the style of the Franco-Flemish School, circa 1450 to 1400. Although no text beyond the incipit is found in the manuscript, the value of the source is enhanced by the names of the composers of 106 of the compositions. Volume one focuses on the manuscript, giving a physical description of the manuscript, recounting the history of the manuscript, and includes discussion of selected composers and a concordance. Volume two contains the music of the chansonnier Biblioteca casanatense 2856.

Music binder's volumes, or collections of sheet music typically bound by women in the nineteenth century, constitute an informative and underutilized set of historical artifacts. Each binder's volume can be viewed as a Spotify playlist frozen in time. An individual volume contains more than just the volume's individual pieces; it also holds the marginalia, the choices women made on what to include in a binder, and information on where and how music was produced. This dissertation examines music binder's volumes quantitatively, processing information found in binder's volumes by using the MARC and other cataloguing data to construct a relational database. I engage with broad questions of music publishing and consumption and provide a method to contextualize qualitative results on a larger scale. In doing so, I make two distinct contributions to music research and the digital humanities. First, this project offers a clear path for engaging with music binder's volumes and material history of nineteenth-century America in ways that scholars have rarely engaged in prior to this point. I highlight how data analysis provides new framings for binder's volumes and for sheet music consumption both at the song-level and at larger levels of the data. Second, and more broadly, this …

Inasmuch as this investigator can determine, no major study has been done concerning music's relation to the "isms" selected for this discussion. The contemporary interest in the movements themselves has been so widespread that the documentation of them, in scattered accounts, is enormous. It is disappointing that these records provide little or no information about the musical aspects of the movements; the graphic and literary accounts, on the other hand, have been accorded generous treatments. Since futurism, cubism, and surrealism, in their origins, were oriented toward the visual and literary arts, it is not surprising that these two aspects would receive the greatest amount of attention. The meager attention to music and the distortion of its role in the movements, as has largely been the case, has created an artistic imbalance, This writer's efforts have been directed toward an exhaustive search for factors which have, in some way or other, linked music with these movements. Musical futurism has been the easiest to identify, although its underlying theories are not always clear, since the futurists, in explaining their theories, were not always convincing, perhaps even to themselves. This writer's main attempt has been to interpret ideas that were frequently vague and …

The histories of acoustic ecology, field recording, and soundscape composition are intertwined. This combination of disciplines has lead to the potential for powerful insights, but an over-emphasis on music composition using recorded sound has to led to some problematic tendencies in the study of soundscapes. I begin by tracing the development of acoustic ecology and related disciplines, leading to a proposal for a practice of acoustic ecology that centers the study of all sounds from an ecological perspective and incorporates the insights of creative practices. I include the results and data from my acoustic surveys in Patagonia, Iceland, and Texas. These three locations are varied in their climate, and they are all threatened by noise pollution or human interference from one source or another. Each survey plots out the daily sound activity in a given location and then includes information such as decibel level and the amount of anthropogenic noise. Using the field recordings from my acoustic surveys, I composed a non-linear piece, Resonance Ecology, that generates soundscapes by combining sounds from different locations based on connections such as geography or weather patterns. There is also the option for acoustic performers to perform alongside the electronics, creating an unpredictably evolving …

In this dissertation, I develop and apply an original voice-leading method to the music of Shostakovich. Between the years of 1926 and 1948, his music involved extreme chromaticism that required analytical views from both Russia and the West. In the mid-twentieth century, Russian theorists such as Lev Mazel' and Alexandr Dolzhansky wrote about the modal language of Shostakovich's works, but their writings lacked how to identify them within extremely chromatic passages. In the West, scholars describe his music as both tonal and atonal, sometimes combined within one work. I unify these two views with my voice-leading system consisting of an intervallic resolution of the doubly augmented prime (DAP), which appears seemingly random on the musical surface, but occurs for specific compositional reasons. First mentioned by name in Aleksei Ogolevets' 1946 "An Introduction into Contemporary Musical Thought," the DAP served no harmonic or modal purpose. While Ogolevets mentions and includes examples that show this interval, he does not discuss its resolutions nor how it functions in musical contexts. This structure, however, has broader conceptual and analytical implications. Therefore, I develop a method based on the voice leading and semitonal resolutions of the DAP, which I apply to the music of Shostakovich. …

This study traces the significant developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which led to the development of electronic music and increased writing for percussion. Whether by coincidence or premeditation, the field of percussion in Western culture and electronic music share many parallel aspects in their history. Carlos Chavez, Edgard Varese and John Cage foresaw a time when electronic music would allow composers to realize compositions with ease, provide new sounds to the spectrum of possible material for pieces and aid in the conception of works. Significantly, these same composers were important figures in the development of percussion composition. In many ways, Lejaren Hiller's Machine Music can be seen as a culmination of the developments which had been taking place in the history of electronic music and percussion music. A product of the innovations in both fields, it poses some formidable problems for the performers. This study will give some background into its composition, examine its structure and deal with its performance problems.

In Victorian Britain, music circulating libraries libraries operated by music publishers Novello & Co. and Augener & Co. supported upper- and upper-middle-class patrons in their pursuit of cultural capital that would help them perform their socioeconomic status. Studying these libraries in the context of domestic music-making reveals the economic and social impact of these libraries in the lives of amateur musicians and in the music publishing industry. An analysis of the account books in the Novello Business Archives demonstrates that the direct income that Novello & Co., Ltd.'s Universal Circulating Musical Library generated was negligible at best. Yet the fact that the library continued to be part of the business for over forty years indicates that Novello & Co., Ltd. found it to be profitable in some way. In this case, the library could have helped the publisher to attract customers through branding and advertising, in addition to informing publishing decisions by tracking demand. Catalogs for music circulating libraries, as well as for the publishers who owned them, contain lists of library and publisher inventory and pricing. Studying changes in these catalogs reveals how patrons' tastes changed over time. A case study of violin-piano duets in multiple catalogs confirms a …

This paper uses the concept of mimesis to clarify the debate concerning the representation of reality in music. Specifically, this study defines the audio reality effect and the three main practices of realism as a way of understanding mimetic practices in multiple artistic media, in particular regarding the multimedia works of the "Landscape series." After addressing the historical debates concerning mimesis, this study develops a framework for the understanding of mimesis in sound by addressing the writings of Weiss, Baudrillard, Barthes, Deleuze, and Prendergast and by examining mimetic practices in 19th-century European painting and multimedia performance works. The audio reality effect is proposed as a meaningful translation of Roland Barthes' literary reality effect to the sonic realm. The main trends of realist practice are applied to electroacoustic music and soundscape composition using the works and writings of Emmerson, Truax, Wishart, Risset, Riddell, Smalley, Murray Schafer, Fischman, Young, and Field. Lastly, this study mimetically analyzes "2 seconds / b minor / wave" by Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto and the works of the "Landscape series" in order to demonstrate the relevance of mimesis for understanding current musical practice.

This study discusses how cultural and social aspects of contemporary Swedish society impact the musical arts. It contains biographical information on representative Swedish composers, and analyzes technical and structural elements of their compositional styles. Finally, it recommends performance practice considerations regarding technical and interpretive details in Tommy Zwedberg's Face the Music for trumpet and prepared audio tape, Folke Habe's Shazam for unaccompanied trumpet, and Bo Nilsson's Infrastruktur for brass quintet.

This dissertation contextualizes Brahms's vocal quartets within a largely forgotten discourse about Hausmusik that flourished in German-speaking lands in the second half of the nineteenth century. In numerous texts about Hausmusik from ca. 1848-1900, authors conceived the genre as an aesthetically and politically conservative expression of German identity and connected its accessible style to an ideal of social cohesion in the pre-industrial age. Similar issues of national identity and musical style arise in the reception of Brahms's quartets, which, I contend, was informed by the works' generic status as Hausmusik. Critics either praised Brahms's works for their simple, folk-like style or disparaged their complexity, artifice, and foreignness. Ultimately, I argue, Brahms sought to elevate the genre of Hausmusik in his vocal quartets by integrating aesthetic and cultural values associated with this genre with a more sophisticated musical style. The works' stylistic and generic ambiguity and the disparity in critics' responses reveal competing aesthetic, political, and cultural world views immediately before and after German unification. Chapter 2 shows how discourse about Hausmusik constructed German identity in the private sphere by promoting a folk-like aesthetic and accessible musical style over the perceived cosmopolitanism and commercialism of Salonmusik and other repertoires. Chapter 3 …

Christian Wolff's alternatively notated scores grant the performer several interpretive choices. These pieces feature symbols (known as "coordination neumes") that instruct performers when to begin and end a sound event in relation to the sounds being made around them, thereby generating a reactive improvisation between the musicians. Among these scores are five compositions that form the basis of this project: For 5 or 10 People (1962), In Between Pieces (1963), For 1, 2, or 3 People (1964), Septet (1964), and Edges (1968). Focusing on these pieces specifically, this dissertation explores the unique performance practices required by Wolff's indeterminate music and contextualizes that music within his career in classics and comparative literature, particularly with regard to the concept of translation, and within his creative communities. These creative communities include his fellow New York School composers, New York's wider downtown artistic scenes in the 1950s and 60s, and the experimental music scenes at Cologne and Darmstadt. While scholars such as David Behrman, Thomas DeLio, and Mark Nelson have addressed the interactive quality of Wolff's notation and the technical skills needed to execute his pieces, I argue that there are deeper processes at work in these compositions that go beyond typical discussions of …

This dissertation is a thorough examination of the problems modern composers of electronic music face when writing or discussing acousmatic music as derived from Pierre Schaeffer. By taking a close examination of Schaeffer's own writings on the subjects of reduced listening and acousmatic sounds, I illustrate the difficulties and inconsistencies in Schaeffer's philosophy and the problems that his reliance on Husserl's phenomenology creates. Further examination of criticisms of Husserl from Derrida and Heidegger highlight the ways that Schaeffer's phenomenology needs to be updated for the modern acousmatic composer. Articles by modern acousmatic composers such as Adrian Moore, Denis Smalley, Simon Emmerson, and others illustrate how artists have dealt with the problems in Schaeffer's ideas and the inconsistent ways they have applied his principles of sound and the sound object. I argue that a new method of musical meaning as a method of composition and analysis is necessary to resolve these conflicts and inconsistencies. This method is found in the writings of J.L. Austin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein through Andrew Chung, who places significant emphasis on the actions and effects that music takes. By reframing the acousmatic problem through meaning-as-use, I attempt to modernize Schaeffer's conceptions of sound and emphasize the significance …

This dissertation investigates the process of collaboration and the application of both notational and technological schemes to integrate elements of contemporary composition and tap dance as a consolidated art form. Overall, this document gives an overview of choreographer/composer collaborations in Western classical music; movement notation; and ultimately analyzes my original music—a live set for tap dancer, live musicians and electronics—entitled Digital Tap Dance. Altogether, this project represents the culmination of music and dance as a compelling intermedia collaboration. By (1) researching different practices of composer-choreographer collaborations, (2) notating rudiments for tap dance, (3) creating software for tap dancers, and (4) composing original music for tap dancers, this dissertation will create options for composers and choreographers alike in composition and improvisation.

In the summer of 1953, Karlheinz Stockhausen began composing his first piece of elektronische Musik at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne. Up to that point, Stockhausen's only experience with electroacoustic music was his time spent at the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française the previous year, where he assisted Pierre Schaeffer and composed a piece of musique concrète. An early case study in the marriage of serial aesthetics and electroacoustic techniques, Studie I is a rigorously organized work that reflects Stockhausen's compositional philosophy of a unified structural principle in which all musical materials and parametric values are generated by and arranged according to a single governing series. In spite of this meticulously wrought serial structure, Studie I displays features that are the consequences of the realities of electronic sound production either imposing on the sonic result, or altering the compositional plan entirely. I use a three-part approach to my analysis of Studie I by examining Stockhausen's serial system, the electroacoustic studio techniques in use in 1953, and the original recorded realization through spectrographic analysis. Using this methodology, I expose the blurring of the supposed divide between elektronische Musik and musique concrète by exploring the features that lie between the serial …

Metaphor and Mimesis in an Animal Soundscape serves as a supplementary document for two pieces of contemporary concert music; HOWL, for viola, saxophone and fixed media, and Pastorale for viola and fixed media. Both works quote the second movement of Antonio Vivaldi's violin concerto, La Primavera. This quotation is used to support a musical program which explores the larger topic of metaphor in music. In addition, both pieces play with contemporary trends in music including, but not limited to, acoustic ecology and spectralism.

"Compositional Approaches to New Media Paradigms" is the discursive accompaniment to the original composition BoMoH, (a new media chamber opera. A variety of new media concepts and practices are discussed in relation to their use as a contemporary compositional methodology for computer musicians and digital content producers. This paper aligns relevant discourse with a variety of concepts as they influence and affect the compositional process. This paper does not propose a new working method; rather it draws attention to a contemporary interdisciplinary practice that facilitates new possibilities for engagement and aesthetics in digital art/music. Finally, in demonstrating a selection of the design principals, from a variety of new media theories of interest, in compositional structure and concept, it is my hope to provide composers and computer musicians with a tested resource that will function as a helpful set of working guidelines for producing new media enabled art, sonic or otherwise.

Bulgaria, though a fairly small Eastern European country, boasts an ancient history of folk traditions and music; however, very few notated works exist due to the people's primitive lifestyle throughout Bulgaria's history. Singing and dancing as well as creating instruments from wood and animal skin were considered an integral part of everyday life, equal to cooking, sewing, herding, or farming; in fact, one almost always accompanied the other. Thus, more than 1500 years of folklore was orally passed on and preserved generation after generation; however, nothing was notated until only very recently when Bulgarians realized the cultural and national value of their history. After the liberation from Ottoman Rule (1453-1877) a nationalist movement spread throughout the Balkan countries, which resulted in the emergence of Bulgarian composers. Music and songs from the local folk traditions evolved, developed, and - with notation - became the foundation for the vocal and instrumental music of the so-called first generation of Bulgarian composers. Around the turn of the century, many Bulgarian artists and musicians traveled to Western Europe (mostly Austria, Germany, and Russia) and upon their return, their artistic output created an original mixture of Bulgarian national folk with influences from Western classical music. After …