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 …

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.

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 …

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 …