Identity is a powerful concept that influences behavior and health. For over thirty years, researchers in sport psychology have been using the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale (AIMS) as a research instrument providing insights into the relationships between athletic identity and health variables. While musician identity is recognized as an important factor to be investigated in relation to occupational health, there are no known robust instruments like the AIMS in music psychology research. The current study aimed to adapt and validate the athletic identity measurement scale for use with musicians. The AIMS history includes episodes of modifications for performance enhancement of the instrument that resulted in five different models. The validation process includes evaluating the psychometrical properties across all five models. The sample included student musicians and non-student musicians (N = 1040). The traditional confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation method were used. The exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) and robust weighted least squares (WLS) was utilized to explore a new method of estimation that was known to resolve issues consistent with the CFA and ML method. The goodness-of-fit indices of CFA and ESEM were compared. The results showed that the MIMS is a reliable and valid …

When Czech composer Bedřich Smetana's opera The Bartered Bride received its American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in February 1909, New York music critics published positive reviews which displayed a great fascination with the many "Bohemian" aspects of the production. However, certain comments or language used by some critics indicate that American opinions of the Czech people were less than positive. After Czechs began immigrating to America en masse in 1848, already-established American citizens developed skewed cultural perceptions of the Czech people, established negative stereotypes, and propagated their opinions in various forms of press throughout the nation. Despite a general dislike of the Czechs, reviewers revered The Bartered Bride and praised its many authentic "Bohemian" qualities. This research explores the idea of a paradoxical cultural phenomenon in which the prejudice against Czech people did not fully cross over into the musical sphere. Instead, appreciation for Czech music and musicians may have trumped any such negative opinions and authentic Czech productions such as The Bartered Bride may have been considered a novelty in the eyes of early twentieth-century New Yorkers.

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 …

The progressive metal style "djent" emerged in the mid-to-late 2000s with bands that modeled their use of extended range instruments and complex rhythmic cycles after that of Swedish metal band Meshuggah. The addition of a new vocabulary of melody and harmony by bands such as Periphery, Tesseract, and Animals as Leaders has come to define djent in a new way and provided fruitful ground for voice-leading and metrical analysis. In this dissertation, I approach analysis in two steps. The first step is the production of detailed transcriptions of four djent songs. The process of transcription has allowed for the development of Transcription Preference Rules, modeled after Lerdahl and Jackendoff's preference rule approach in their Generative Theory of Tonal Music. The Transcription Preference Rules account for the selection of key signatures, time signatures, and other features of the scores that may affect analysis. Second, using these scores, I examine the connection between the textual topic of change and the voice-leading and metrical structures in Periphery's "Insomnia" and Tesseract's "Of Matter." I show how this topic is reflected by techniques such as change melodic direction, multidimensional metrical dissonance, and auxiliary cadential events. Finally, I apply voice-leading and metrical analysis to Animals as …

In this thesis, I explore the careers and songs of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds—two African American female composers who were part of the Chicago Renaissance. Price and Bonds were members of extensive, often informal, networks of Black women that fostered creativity and forged paths to success for Black female musicians during this era. Building on the work of Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I contend that these efforts reflect Black feminist principles of Black women working together to create supportive environments, uplift one another, and foster resistance. I further argue that Black women's agency enabled the careers of Price and Bonds and that elements of Black feminism are not only present in their professional relationships, but also in their songs. Initially, I discuss how the background of the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances and racial uplift ideology shaped these women's artistic environment. I then examine how Bonds and Price incorporated, updated, and expanded versions of these ideals in their music and careers. Drawing on the scholarship of Rae Linda Brown, Angela Davis, and Tammy L. Kernodle, I analyze Price's "Song to the Dark Virgin," "Sympathy," and "Don't You Tell Me No" and Bonds's "Dream Variation," "Note on Commercial Theater," …

Muzio Clementi's symphonies were first performed in London between 1786 and 1796. After an extended hiatus from 1796 to 1813, his symphonic works appeared on programs again from 1813 to 1824. Clementi's career as a symphonist corresponds closely with trends in London's concert life. The reception of Clementi's symphonies during his lifetime has frequently been misinterpreted by scholars who oversimplify the use of "science" in musical discourse of the day and fail to consider the positive connotations of this adjective, so frequently applied to Clementi. Musical discourse at the time addressed the science and art of music emphasizing a composition, or its composer's, science, harmony, effects, genius, and the audience's response. Though an unstated ideal, reviews evince a preference for balancing scientific and artistic display. Reviews of Clementi's symphonies suggest he initially struggled to balance the technical and artistic qualities of his compositions but succeeded, according to reviews, in finally doing so in 1796. After his early efforts, Clementi was consistently praised as worthy to stand among the current and most prestigious composers of the continent: Haydn and Mozart initially, and Beethoven and Rossini later.

Music plays an important role in Mexican funeral ceremonies, acting as a vehicle for men to acceptably express emotions of bereavement. As an important symbol of mexicanidad (Mexicanness), mariachi music is often used in traditional Catholic funerals, ritualizing grief equally as a mourning of loss and a celebration of the life of a deceased person. Although a form of popular music, mariachi's secular songs go through a process of sacralization, becoming meaningful sites for experiencing grief. As a musical expression of Mexico's idealized gender norms mariachi opens an aesthetic sphere for masculine grief to be expressed, experienced, and socialized in an acceptable form. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the musical mediation of masculine grief, experienced and ritualized within funeral ceremonies, and observed through an ethnographic study of Mexican immigrant communities.

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. …

The Dido myth has evolved and been adapted by many cultures over the centuries. Each Dido was altered to fit the needs of its creator, their society and customs. Despite these variations, every Dido retelling is derived from the Virgilian Dido, historical Dido, or chaste Dido narrative, or a combination of these stories. The pasticcio opera, Ópera armónica al estilo italiano que se intitula Dido y Eneas draws on the general Virgilian plot but emphasizes the chaste Dido narrative. The changes in the plot of Dido y Eneas reflect societal gender norms, theatrical conventions, and historical figures, specifically Queen María Luisa Gabriela, from eighteenth-century Spain. The Dido of Dido y Eneas can be divided into two main personas: Dido the queen and Dido the lover. Her arias, which come from preexisting Italian operas, convey the dramatic text very well. However, no matter what persona Dido portrays, she never fully loses control nor lets her passions rule her actions. Even in the moments before her suicide, her aria, "Punta intrepida," lacks the overt emotionality found in the popular Dido lament made famous by Purcell. This thesis aims to situate Dido y Eneas within the history of the Dido narrative and gender …

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.

The period between 1880 and 1885 was a significant time in Claude Debussy's life and compositional career. 1880 marks the date of his first published composition, "Nuit d'étoiles," and 1885 is the year in which he began his two-year tenure in Rome after winning the coveted Prix de Rome in 1884. During the intervening time Debussy composed about forty songs. Scholarly literature, especially analytical literature, tends to focus heavily on music in Debussy's mature style, often casting his early compositions in an unfavorable light. Writing on Debussy is scattered with references to the early songs but authors almost always situate them on one end of a continuum that shows an evolution of compositional style culminating in maturity. Such a view tends, if only tacitly, to regard early works as inferior instances of juvenilia rather than works worthy of study in their own right. In this dissertation I establish a foundation for regarding Debussy's early songs as significant compositions in their own right, independent from anachronistic comparisons with his more mature compositional style, and provide justification for considering the songs as a unified, identifiable repertoire within Debussy's larger œuvre. Using a modified Schenkerian analytical approach, I identify consistencies among the songs …

This dissertation explores Robert Schumann's treatment of phrase boundaries in the Novelletten, Op. 21, and his other piano works from the late 1830s. It argues that in contrast to Classical-style works, which generally feature clearly delineates phrases and formal sections, Schumann's works of the 1830s undermine formal boundaries, making it difficult to discern exactly where phrases and sections begin and end. I examine three means through which Schumann promotes a sense of formal continuity in his music: (1) by beginning phrases with a cadential harmonic progression; (2) by ending phrases without a cadence; and (3) by weakening the boundary between the middle section and the recapitulation in small-ternary-form pieces. The dissertation culminates with a detailed analysis of Noveletten Op. 21, No. 5.

This thesis investigates possible connections between the music of Erik Satie (1866-1925) and the later surrealist movement, turning to Parade (1917) in a case study that seeks to understand surrealism in music through the idea of self-exploration, a well-established interpretive approach in studies of surrealism in the visual arts. This thesis seeks to redefine surrealism in music not as a set of concrete musical characteristics, but as a collection of techniques meant to evoke subconscious turbulence by blurring the boundary between the "outside" and "inside," between conscious and subconscious, leading to a new discovery of higher or deeper truth. Satie's music aligns with the psychoanalytic elements of the discourse on surrealism. Psychoanalysis, pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his followers in the 1890s in Vienna, permeated France around the time of the creation of the work. It inspired early surrealist techniques like automatism, illusory formal structures, collage, and stylistic allusion. This thesis demonstrates that such techniques can be discerned throughout Parade, not only in Satie's music, but also in its scenario, staging, costumes, and choreography. As such, Parade was a foundational work for the surrealist movement, with Satie's music contributing with the other media equally to the emotional and psychological …

Creativity is not a hierarchical, but an intertextual, rhizomic process, pulling from a vast array of interests, experiences, and influences. These feed into each other, to inform and motivate artists as creating persons in an ongoing process we call the creative act. Anytime an artist sets out to make something, they are experiencing a dynamic yet concentrated moment of energy in the chaotic cloud of creativity. To demonstrate this, I explore several ideas that inform my piece, Codex Symphonia, including musical influences, but also visual art, film, literature, philosophy, social theory, and politics. In this document, I show that the act of creating a musical work is a deeply personal process that relies heavily on the experiences and vast network of influences on the composer. With this document I look to the contextual structure(s) that point to the possibilities that a work might exist. That is to say that the composition Codex Symphonia is a specific result of an extensive network of ideas and influences not coming from a single origin—it is, in fact all of them together at the same time in a metamodernist act of reconciliation.

This study assessed music educators' health literacy, musician health literacy, and intentions to teach the health-related Fine Arts TEKS in ensembles. An online survey was developed using the integrated behavior model, Newest Vital Sign (NVS), and Musician Health Literacy Questionnaire (MHL-Q19). Texas music educators who taught secondary band, choir, or orchestra were recruited via email and social media. Results: This survey yielded N = 207 respondents, with 43%, 29%, 14.5%, and 13.5% teaching band, choir, orchestra, and multiple ensembles, respectively. Most participants (67.6%) demonstrated adequate health literacy by answering at least four items correctly on the NVS. Attitude (p =.47) and personal agency (p =.30) were significant predictors of behavioral intention, while perceived norm was not (R2 =.484). Including NVS total score and MHL-Q19 total score in the model showed that while both factors improved the model (ΔR2=.038), only NVS total score was significant (p =.26) in predicting behavioral intention. Music educators in this study had adequate health literacy, which may contribute to their intentions to teach health concepts in ensembles. However, future efforts to improve these intentions should focus on bolstering perceived norms and personal agency by providing music educators with opportunities to take charge of implementing these concepts …

The extended Lydian Locrian theory of harmony (ELL) is a system of analyzing harmonies and progressions according to their position along a vast spectrum of colors. The musical premise is that chords and progressions spanning upwards around the circle of fifths sound brighter, whereas chords and progressions spanning downwards around the circle of fifths sound darker. This simple premise gives rise to a complex but unified system of harmonic structures and relations, a system which provides a valuable tool for analyzing and composing music, especially of advanced tonal genres. ELL not only provides fruitful techniques for analyzing certain kinds of traditional harmonies and progressions but also provides a framework for discovering more exotic and colorful harmonies and progressions.

This dissertation explores the use of topics for dramatic purposes in Mozart's Così fan tutte. The five analytical chapters are organized around a central question: how do pastoral and fanfare topics shape the plot of Così fan tutte? Chapter 2 highlights the role topics and tropes play in emplacing and nuancing emergent meaning in the Così fan tutte motto. Chapter 3 examines transformative topical tropes in "Ah guarda, sorella." Chapter 4 shows how the horn fifths and fanfare topics in "Per pietà, ben mio" frame Fiordiligi's choice: the Albanian or Guglielmo. Chapter 5 illustrates the relationship between fanfare topics and galant recitative schemas to articulate formal boundaries between accompanied recitatives and arias. The expectations of closure emplaced by the examples from Così fan tutte nuance a reading of "Hai già vinta la causa!" from Le nozze di Figaro. Chapter 6 discusses the role of recitative intrusions and their articulation of the Count's unrest in "Vedrò mentre io sospiro." Detailed analyses and close readings of the topics and tropes in this dissertation drawn from throughout Così fan tutte showcase Mozart's rich deployment of topics in varied musical and dramatic roles.

This thesis is a critical analysis and creative commentary providing research and insight into my 150-minute multimedia exhibition, "Femininity: Ownership and Power," that premiered October 23, 2021. All of my research, composition, and collaboration efforts seek to recontextualize the semiotics of ‘femininity' through ownership and empowerment from varying intersections and identities. The titles of the eight works composed and premiered as part of the exhibition include: a beautiful reckoning; Dust; Moirai; Gaia; Portrait of the American Woman; Shared, In Balanced Contrast; At My Intersection; and I See You. Also included was #pinkcode, an exhibit that features a fuschia graphic user interface for an interactive modulation synthesis application built in Csound designed to bring femininity into computer music spaces. The musical compositions vary in instrumentation including flute, alto flute, voice, guitar, viola, harp, cajon, vibraphone, live electronics, and fixed media. They also vary in medium including live performance, virtual reality video, music video, audio-reactive TouchDesigner video, immersive text projections, light show, and live dance. Feminist texts by women poets and authors recited by women personally connected to me are also included in the fabric of the musical fixed media of multiple pieces in the thesis exhibition. Collaborators of artistic media including …

This dissertation reexamines the music-theoretical writing of Georg Jospeh Vogler (1749-1814) in light of his educational background. His system, which is often characterized as "awkward" or "self-contradictory," is actually indicative of the rationalist/humanist preferences of Vogler's main source of training: the Jesuit Order. I argue that Vogler's theories and compositional style have been marginalized, partially due to their incompatibility with the more prevalent systems of his era, which were predominantly based in empirical modes of thought.

This paper presents an overview of the concepts and strategies in the original composition, The Harbour of Incense, a cycle of three movements for different groups of instruments. Each movement addresses an aspect of the musical cultures of Hong Kong. The first movement Taan Go for Harp Solo explores the sound world of the folk genre saltwater song; the second movement Jat1 Wun2 Sai3 Ngau4 Naam5 Min6 for Flute and Piano highlights the musicality of Cantonese language; the third movement Daa Zaai for Oboe, Clarinet in B-flat, Bassoon, and Percussion, is inspired by the keyi music used in the Taoist funeral. The paper discusses how to bring together Southeast Asian aesthetics and contemporary Western compositional techniques, as well as how to communicate this unique cultural experience to performers and audiences from other backgrounds. It provides the transcriptions of two saltwater songs and an excerpt of keyi music, and illustrate how they inform the structures, textures, and melodic gestures of the composition. The nine tones of Cantonese language are also explored for generating melodic materials, metric plans, and articulation writing.

This dissertation explores the influence of melody on harmonic function in pop and rock songs from around 1950 to the present. While authors define the term "function" in several ways, none consider melody in their explanations, and I contend that any discussion of harmonic function in rock must include melody. I offer a novel perspective on function by defining it through what I call tension-as-anticipation, and I define a "melodic function" that accounts for the sense of tension and relaxation a melody creates within a particular moment in a track. My dissertation defines two types of melodic function—dominant and tonic—based on the melody's goal-directed scale-degree content, position within a phrase, and relation with the harmony. Dominant-melodic function results in two musical phenomena that I call the "imposed dominant" and the "dominant remainder." An imposed dominant occurs when a dominant-melodic function is initially dissonant with the harmony and resolves over a tonic. A dominant remainder occurs when a dominant-melodic function occurs over a harmonic resolution to the tonic, creating a slower dissipation of tension. Tonic-melodic function produces a phenomenon I call the "tonic anticipation," where a melody outlines a tonic mode over a pretonic harmony, creating a maximum sense of tension-as-anticipation. …

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 …

The following thesis documents the collaboration process behind Idle Flux, a collaboration between Samuel A. Montgomery, a graduate composer at University of North Texas, and Emily Jensen, a graduate choreographer at Texas Woman's University. Comprising an 18-minute stereo fixed media composition and choreography for seven dancers, Idle Flux seeks to challenge the traditional spatial relationship between audience members and performers through restructuring seating and stage arrangements while featuring immersive sound design in multiple venues. This thesis considers multiple sources of inspiration, including Immersive Van Gogh® Exhibit Dallas, John Jasperse's Canyon, Zoe | Juniper's BeginAgain, Francisco López's installations, Alexander Ekman's A Swan Lake, Imagine Dragons' "Enemy," Son Lux's "Dream State (Dark Day)," and Ryan Lott's dance compositions. This thesis also examines the interdependent collaborative relationship between composer and choreographer by considering the issues of autonomy and creative control, examining previous collaborative models proposed or implemented by Van Stiefel, José Limón and Norman Lloyd, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Doris Humphrey and Norman Lloyd. In addition, this thesis discusses the creative process and foundational concepts behind the fixed media composition, including the use of sound samples, exploration of timbre through synthesizers, development of motives and musical language, and the spatialization of sound …

Making Sense of Things is a piece composed through consideration of the relationship between music, meaning, and materiality. The piece, written for voice, flute, percussion, and live electronics, explores topics of the "sensible" and "nonsensical" in music, moving through a variety of sonic episodes that feature different notational approaches, electronic textures, technical instrumental practice, and theatrical elements in order to explore a variety of expressive possibilities while unified around the central musical ideas of scratching sounds and metal bars. The critical essay examines the relationship between the piece and the theoretical writings which inspired it. Reading through the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I examine the relationship between Making Sense of Things and new materialist discourses, affect theory, and semiotics.