For over two hundred years, Chinese immigrants have brought ancient customs and musical traditions to their new homes in America. As in many immigrant communities, a new heritage that embodies and exhibits both the quintessential features of American culture and genuine Chinese heritage have come together to form new expressive cultures that are uniquely "Chinese American." As the youngest of the major American Chinese immigrant centers, the city of Houston, Texas provides an exemplary example of a distinct cultural cohesion that, in part, resulted from significant cultural and political upheavals in the latter half of the twentieth century. During this era of political unrest, many Chinese people's attitudes towards their traditional culture changed drastically. The Houston Chinese Traditional Music Group (HCTMG) is a Chinese orchestra comprised of amateur and professional musicians ranging in age from 13 to over 60 years old. Performing regularly for the Chinese immigrant population in Houston, HCTMG's take on traditional Chinese music deviates greatly from that of older, more established immigrant communities on the East and West Coasts and in some parts of mainland China. Via participant observation, interviews, and analysis of source materials, this paper examines how changing political and economic climates in China during …

In the summer of 1906, Marion Bauer (1882-1955) boarded a ship to Paris to meet with Raoul Pugno, a French pianist and composer. Juliette Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) was also close with Pugno around the same time. Living with the Pugno family in Gargenville during the summer, Bauer was able to travel to Paris, where she met several important musicians of the time and also nineteen-year-old Boulanger. Pugno, who worked closely with Boulanger, asked her to teach counterpoint and harmony to Bauer. Boulanger agreed and reportedly asked Bauer for English lessons in payment. Both women went on to become important music pedagogues, teaching hundreds of students. Their meeting allowed Bauer and Boulanger to share their ideas on teaching and music with each other. As time passed, the relationship between the two women fade from collective memory, but Boulanger's teaching principles of harmony, hearing, la grande ligne, and music history and literature live on through her students and fellow teachers and composers. Bauer's writings demonstrate similarities to these four key principles. Using Kimberly Francis and Emily Green's understanding of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural production and an analysis of Boulanger's pedagogical principles, I believe that Boulanger's early accumulation of cultural capital and …

This thesis explores how the harmonic structures of J.S. Bach's triple fugues interact with their formal, contrapuntal designs. It attempts to explain how each of these elaborate fugues is supported by a single, uninterrupted structure that holds the entire work together. In Bach's fugues one generally encounters large-scale goal-directed motion towards the concluding tonic; this continuous harmonic motion towards the final tonic is consistent with the aesthetics of the Baroque style, which valorizes constant motion or dynamism.

Stravinsky seldom explained the intended theme of his works; however, he chose to do so with his Symphony in Three Movements. Stravinsky describes the first movement as a reflection on war films documenting scorched-earth tactics in China. He also states that the third movement is a reflection on the newsreels of goose-stepping soldiers, depicting the plot of the war in its entirety. In his descriptions, Stravinsky left out the second movement of the work. However, the movement already had a life of its own. The second movement expands a theme Stravinsky originally wrote for the movie The Song of Bernadette. The author, Franz Werfel, asked Stravinsky to compose music for the film when the two discussed the work and its central ideas. Although it did not appear in the film, Stravinsky recycled the music for the Symphony in Three Movements. In my opinion, the ideas of hope depicted in Werfel's novel are used by Stravinsky to evoke ideas of the importance of faith in the fallen world. My analysis aims to show the musical means used by Stravinsky to allow the central ideas from The Song of Bernadette to pervade the entirety of the Symphony in Three Movements.

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 …

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 asserts the value of James Lyon's Urania to the field of American music history as a vital contribution to the development of music in the British colonies prior to the War for Independence. While previous scholarship acknowledges Urania's importance as the first publication in America to contain music by a native-born composer, this study argues that its subscription list and selection of anthems (both of which were new to the field of American music publishing) contribute to the status this compilation is due. The confluence of the English chapel tradition and American singing school tradition contributes to the theological universality and accessibility of its twelve anthems. An introductory chapter discusses the secondary literature upon which this study is based - notably that of Oscar Sonneck and Richard Crawford - and posits applications for the idea presented herein beyond the field of musicology. Chapter 2 provides biographical information on James Lyon and contextualizes Urania within the broader framework of the English chapel tradition and the American singing-school tradition. Chapter 3 discusses the marketability of music in colonial America and explores the biographies of the subscribers to Urania using modern databases. Chapter 4 concerns the confluence of music and sacred …

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.

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.

"It Follows" (2014), written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. It chronicles the story of Jay, a college student who contracts a curse through sexual intercourse. The curse manifests itself as a human whom only the infected persons can see, always following at a walking pace, and determined to kill if it catches up. This thesis demonstrates the score's crucial role in establishing affect, setting, and character in a film with sparse dialogue and a silent monster. Moreover, the score creates a sense of the uncanny by complicating the binary between music and sound effect and fulfills the need to create dread without resorting to the loud or sudden sounds traditionally heard in horror films. The score's composer, Richard Vreeland, achieves this effect by drawing on both classical film scoring techniques as well as more modern horror scoring styles. It is this interaction between styles that enhances the viewers' experience of dread and horror in the film. This thesis analyzes how Vreeland's score for "It Follows" exploits the poetics of the fantastical gap, of the uncanny, and of musical semiosis. I primarily focus on the "Heels" theme and use of drones in …

This dissertation explores a method of music analysis that is designed to reflect the phenomenology of the listening experience, specifically in regards to harmony. It is primarily inspired by the theoretical approaches of the music theorist Moritz Hauptmann and by the writings of philosopher Edmund Husserl.

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 …

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.

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, …

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 …

Often neglected in the musicological coverage of revolutionary music and theater, the Thermidorean Reaction phase (1794–1795) of the French Revolution was a period of governmental transition, in which Parisian theaters enjoyed the institutional and generic freedoms of the Le Chapelier Laws of 1791 in addition to relaxed enforcement of censorship. In recent years, Mark Darlow and Julia Doe's work has advanced understandings of operatic genres during the early years of the Revolution, which they characterize as a balance between "rupture and continuity" with artistic conventions of the ancien régime. I extend their methods of analysis to the second half of the revolutionary decade, exploring the impact that Thermidorian theatrical politics and legal (de)regulations had on operatic genre through the lens of Sapho (1794). This tragédie lyrique premiered at the Théatre de Louvois, a venue of ambiguous status within Paris's theatrical hierarchies. Featuring a libretto by Constance de Salm and music by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini, Sapho falls within the period of temporarily suspended theatrical privilege initiated by Le Chapelier and borrows key formal elements from "great" and popular operatic styles. The opera facilitates a discussion of how composers and librettists collaborated to navigate the rapidly shifting political and legal climate of Thermidor. …

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 dissertation explores middleground functionality of six-four chords by combining a voice-leading approach with hypermetrical analysis. By acknowledging the functional ambiguity of certain six-four chords that do not fit into traditional classifications (Aldwell and Schachter's cadential, consonant, passing, and neighboring six-four), or that can be seen as fitting in more than one category, I show that our interpretation of deeper-level structures is contingent upon how we choose to hear the functionality of these harmonies. Three types of six-four chords are introduced: cadential/consonant, passing/cadential, and neighboring/consonant six-four, illustrated by works by Robert Schumann, Brahms, and Saint-Säens. Each pair refers to an ambiguity—the same chord invites two alternative harmonic interpretations. I call these chords nontraditional in the sense that they shed more light on the musical structure with their ambiguity, rather than when being wedged into a single type of a six-four chord. This approach renews the ways of hearing the malleability of nonconventional Romantic structures and permits us to trace the path of each work as a unique tonal trajectory from a listener's perspective.

This dissertation argues how motivic saturation on the musical surface complicates a conventional harmonic interpretation in Fauré's late chamber works. Using motivic segmentation and linear analysis, I illustrate how the abundance of foreground motives has far-reaching implications for tonal voice leading and overall coherence. The outcomes of motivic saliency are twofold, influencing harmonic progressions by 1) altering traditional syntax or 2) replacing traditional syntax to provide the primary form of tonal coherence. I unpack the voice-leading consequences of stratifying motives over one another and bring in two larger, emerging concepts: 1) key duality as disjunction between melody and bass and 2) tonal coherence from the tonal profile of motives. In the first case, either the melody or the bass projects its own center or key separate from the other parts, producing a sensation of key duality. In the second, a single motive furnishes the main source of tonal grounding by unfolding a structural harmony that the surface sonorities obscure. While motivic saliency is a consistent trait across Fauré's late repertoire, the two phenomena above increase over time.

This study describes a set of salient formal norms for the eighteenth-century Spanish keyboard sonata through an application of Hepokoski and Darcy's sonata theory, William Caplin's form-functional theory, and Robert Gjerdingen's schema theory. It finds that particular thematic types, intra-thematic functions, and rhetorical markers characterize this repertoire. In order to trace the development of these norms throughout the eighteenth century, this work is organized into two parts. The first part (Chapters 2 and 3) examines the mid-century Spanish keyboard sonatas of Sebastián de Albero (1722–1756), Joaquín Ojinaga (1719–1789), and their contemporaries. The second part (Chapters 4 and 5) examines the late-century Spanish keyboard sonatas of Manuel Blasco de Nebra (1750–1783) and his contemporaries.

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 …

Heinrich Schenker's concept of the auxiliary cadence can be considered as a middleground manifestation of the Ursatz; his definition of the auxiliary cadence caters only to tonal compositions with a single background tonic, such as Brahms's songs. However, there exist compositions in which the a single background tonic cannot be easily ascertained. Such unorthodox compositions, in fact, can be found even prior to Brahms's songs. In such cases, although the opening and closing tonics are different and are often categorized as large-scale auxiliary cadence structured compositions, they do not operate within the single-tonic based tonal paradigm upon which Schenker formed his idea of the auxiliary cadence. Such compositions may be approached as a novel type of auxiliary cadence and described as "process-driven." The thesis presents and contrasts examples of both types of auxiliary cadences in songs by Schubert, Brahms, and Berg.