A Survey of New Extensions of Clarinet Technique as They Appear in Four Published Works (open access)

A Survey of New Extensions of Clarinet Technique as They Appear in Four Published Works

This paper explores the new extensions of clarinet technique in four published works, discussing the percussive effects, melodic effects, and multiple sounds that can be produced through these extensions. David R. Widder also explores the history of innovational solo clarinet works.
Date: August 1972
Creator: Widder, David R.
System: The UNT Digital Library
Pianistic Problems in the Fifth Sonata of Scriabin (open access)

Pianistic Problems in the Fifth Sonata of Scriabin

This paper discusses the pianist problems in the fifth sonata created by Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin and provides historical background to the works of the composer before analyzing his work.
Date: August 1972
Creator: Smith, Jennie
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Four Chopin Ballades: A Guide to Performance and Interpretation (open access)

The Four Chopin Ballades: A Guide to Performance and Interpretation

This paper discusses the origin of literary and musical ballads and focuses on analysis and interpretation of the four Chopin ballades. Jill Beth Street also discusses how to perform these ballades based off of this interpretation.
Date: December 1971
Creator: Street, Jill Beth
System: The UNT Digital Library
Analysis of Selected Trombone Methods Developed at the Paris Conservatory of Music (open access)

Analysis of Selected Trombone Methods Developed at the Paris Conservatory of Music

This study described various Trombone methods and specifically analysed the eight methods developed at the Paris Conservatory of Music, which considered to be an outstanding methods for most of the good trombone literature of today.
Date: December 1971
Creator: Jackson, Robert Milton
System: The UNT Digital Library
Analysis of Darius Milhaud's La Creation Du Monde (open access)

Analysis of Darius Milhaud's La Creation Du Monde

Darius Milhaud was born on September 4, 1892, to a Jewish family in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France. This study provide analysis of Darius Milhaud's work, entitled La Creation Du Monde.
Date: December 1971
Creator: Salord, Yves C.
System: The UNT Digital Library
A Study of Seventeen German Protestant Chorales (open access)

A Study of Seventeen German Protestant Chorales

German Chorales is a great resource of church music in use today. This study investigate the Seventeen German Protestant Chorales. The researcher hoped that the important work of reviving the invaluable source of inspiration and sacred song will continue and grow.
Date: May 1971
Creator: Petrash, David L.
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Chorale Kyrie, Gott Vater in Ewigkeit and its Use in Bach's Clavierubung, Part III (open access)

The Chorale Kyrie, Gott Vater in Ewigkeit and its Use in Bach's Clavierubung, Part III

This study closely explores the Chorale Kyrie, Gott Vater in Ewigkeit and its Use in Bach's Clavierubung. The effect is one of gentilness and intimacy that conceal a wealth of inner emotion.
Date: December 1971
Creator: Mc Murray, Harry
System: The UNT Digital Library
An Analysis of the Hindemith Sonata for Double Bass and Piano, for Performance Purposes (open access)

An Analysis of the Hindemith Sonata for Double Bass and Piano, for Performance Purposes

This paper analyzes composer Paul Hindemith's Sonata for Double Bass and Piano and provides conclusions about how to interpret the movements in performance as well as the compositional techniques used by Hindemith to create them.
Date: August 1972
Creator: Jacobson, Harry P.
System: The UNT Digital Library
An Analysis of Jaques Ibert’s Concertino Da Camera for Alto Saxophone and Eleven Instruments (open access)

An Analysis of Jaques Ibert’s Concertino Da Camera for Alto Saxophone and Eleven Instruments

This paper provides historical background for the creation of Jacques Ibert's Concertino da camera for alto saxophone and eleven instruments and analyzes its three movements. As one of the first works written for the saxophone, James Garland Riggs explains the importance of the piece.
Date: December 1972
Creator: Riggs, James Garland
System: The UNT Digital Library
Some Acoustical Considerations in the Design of the Contemporary Organ Case (open access)

Some Acoustical Considerations in the Design of the Contemporary Organ Case

This paper discusses the historical roots, placement, shape, and materials and methods in the construction of the contemporary organ case. James W. Kibbie explores the acoustical considerations of its design and how these are reflected in the finished product.
Date: August 1972
Creator: Kibbie, James W.
System: The UNT Digital Library
Some Influences of the Organ Reform Movement on the Instruments of Texas (open access)

Some Influences of the Organ Reform Movement on the Instruments of Texas

This paper explores the impact of the organ reform movement on the construction of organs in Texas. E. Dean Beasley also explores the possibilities of further reform for the instrument.
Date: December 1972
Creator: Beasley, E. Dean
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Four Dominating Elements in the Piano Literature of Sergei Prokofieff (open access)

The Four Dominating Elements in the Piano Literature of Sergei Prokofieff

This paper analyzes the piano compositions of Sergei Prokofieff and identifies four elements evident in the literature: classicism, innovation, toccata, and lyricism. Elisabeth Euwer Roberts traces the history of his works and the evidence of these elements in them.
Date: May 1972
Creator: Roberts, Elisabeth Euwer
System: The UNT Digital Library
A Style Comparison of the Piano and Organ Versions of Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H (open access)

A Style Comparison of the Piano and Organ Versions of Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H

This paper analyzes the piano and organ versions of the Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H composed by Franz Liszt and provides a style comparison of the two. Jerry Glynn Smith also provides context for Liszt's work with the organ.
Date: August 1972
Creator: Smith, Jerry Glynn
System: The UNT Digital Library
"Untune the Sky": Ten Original Pieces for Microtonal Viola da Gamba with Voice and Electronics (open access)

"Untune the Sky": Ten Original Pieces for Microtonal Viola da Gamba with Voice and Electronics

Untune the Sky is a collection of ten original preludes, dances, and songs for microtonal viola da gamba in 7-limit just intonation with voice and live electronics that incorporates elements of Baroque music, traditional Irish dance music, extended just intonation tuning theory, and live electronic audio processing techniques. This thesis thoroughly describes the work and contextualizes its relationship to its historical and contemporary influences. The first sections explain why extended just intonation and viola da gamba were chosen as the central elements of the work. This is followed by a description of the structure, instrumentation, notational conventions, and intended performance practice of the work. The final section contains a musical analysis of the form, harmony, and structure of each piece in the collection. For researchers and interested performers, Appendix A contains a brief catalog of existing microtonal viol repertoire listed with a description of the microtonal techniques used.
Date: August 2022
Creator: Snead, Jonathan Dunnam
System: The UNT Digital Library
Dido the Chaste: A Characterization of Dido in Spanish Baroque Pasticcio Opera (open access)

Dido the Chaste: A Characterization of Dido in Spanish Baroque Pasticcio Opera

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 …
Date: August 2022
Creator: Zimmerman, Camila
System: The UNT Digital Library
Motivic Stratification in Fauré's Late Chamber Works: Perspectives on Voice Leading and Tonal Coherence (open access)

Motivic Stratification in Fauré's Late Chamber Works: Perspectives on Voice Leading and Tonal Coherence

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.
Date: August 2022
Creator: Bilik, Matthew Allan
System: The UNT Digital Library
"Stateside: An opera in one act" on the Experiences of the Military Spouse (open access)

"Stateside: An opera in one act" on the Experiences of the Military Spouse

Based on the poetry of Jehanne Dubrow, professor of English at the University of North Texas, Stateside: An opera in one act uses the mythology of Penelope and Odysseus to tell a story of a modern day military wife. David T. Little's opera Soldier Songs, Sarah Kirkland Snider's song-cycle Penelope, and Stateside are dramatic musical works influenced by the genre, instrumentation, and formal structures of popular music that broadly deal with the emotional and internal elements of military life. These three works prioritize narrative structure of the text in relation to character, and employ elements of popular music harmony, melody, and structure. The critical essay analyzes selections from Soldier Songs and Penelope and explains the compositional process of Stateside. The creative document consists of the full score of Stateside: an opera in one act.
Date: August 2022
Creator: Whelan, Rachel Lanik
System: The UNT Digital Library
"Songs from Vessels" for Ensemble and Live Electronics and Vessels: A Virtual Reality Micro-Opera (open access)

"Songs from Vessels" for Ensemble and Live Electronics and Vessels: A Virtual Reality Micro-Opera

Starting in the mid-2010s VR's high cost of entry became low enough for consumers and artists to explore and experiment with the technology. There have been a few VR operas developed by medium to large sized teams such as Michel Van Der Aa's Eight (2018) and Alexander Schubert's ⁂ASTERISM⁂ (2021), but no widespread work has been produced by a small team comprising only a librettist and composer. Vessels engages in this process with a libretto written by Bea Goodwin and music, audio processing, visual design, and programming by Christopher Poovey. The first step in the process of creating Vessels was the creation of the song cycle Songs from Vessels for soprano, extended tenor, flute, bass flute, A clarinet, viola, contrabass, percussion, and live electronics. These songs are the basis of the micro-opera Vessels which presents recordings of the songs with live processing alongside two songs exclusive to the opera in a VR environment with immersive projections and audio. The development of an ensemble and electronic work along with a VR micro-opera necessitates the implementation and creation of software. Both the Grainflow and cpDelayNetworks packages for Cycling ‘74 Max are pivotal to audio processing in both versions of the work. In …
Date: August 2022
Creator: Poovey, Christopher Alex
System: The UNT Digital Library

Occupational Stress and Burnout among American Pastoral Musicians

Occupational burnout is a concern to the health and longevity of clergy and musician careers. However, no known study has assessed occupational burnout among pastoral musicians. A literature review revealed pastoral musicians anecdotally experienced multi-tasking, workplace politics, inequality of workload, competing liturgical styles, lack of job security, lack of financial security, and lack of rest, among other indicators of burnout. Therefore, the aims of this paper were to: (1) describe pastoral musicians as a population; (2) identify the prevalence rate of burnout among pastoral musicians; (3) investigate the relationship between pastoral musicians' burnout and religious coping; and (4) investigate the relationships between pastoral musicians' burnout and depression, anxiety, and stress. In 2021, an online questionnaire was designed to assess burnout among pastoral musicians. Dissemination techniques included emails to members of the Hymn Society of North America and via social media to collect data from pastoral music directors in the United States of America. The survey yielded n = 1,050 respondents: 83.8% experienced one or more symptoms of burnout (41.3% with low efficacy; 12.4% with high emotional exhaustion; 21.3% with high cynicism; 8.8% with burnout). Ineffectiveness was positively correlated with negative religious coping. Emotional exhaustion and cynicism were positively correlated with …
Date: August 2022
Creator: Behel, Kensley Anne
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Practice of Content-Driven Composition for Instrument and Computer (open access)

The Practice of Content-Driven Composition for Instrument and Computer

Two compositions, live electronic music for instrument and computer, have been analyzed in the essay to reflect one of my aesthetics principles, content-driven composition, and the solutions that the I have applied to solve the problems which have occurred in practice. By content-driven, I mean that compositional process, material, mood, and affect are expressions of content drawn from visual art, literature, nature, religion, traditional aesthetics and other non-musical sources. During the journey of exploration, I was often deeply moved and inspired by a historical moment, a real-world story, a film, a poem, a statement, an image, a piece of music, or a natural law. In content-driven works, these elements play a major role in the creative processes.
Date: May 2022
Creator: Shen, Qi
System: The UNT Digital Library
A Study of Large-Scale Auxiliary Cadence Types in Songs of Schubert, Brahms and Berg (open access)

A Study of Large-Scale Auxiliary Cadence Types in Songs of Schubert, Brahms and Berg

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.
Date: May 2022
Creator: Wang, He
System: The UNT Digital Library

Ideal Hausmusik: Brahms's Vocal Quartets (opp. 31, 52, 64, 65, 92, 103, and 112) and the Politics of Domestic Music ca. 1848-1900

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 …
Date: May 2022
Creator: Anderson, Robert Michael
System: The UNT Digital Library

Vocal Fold Onset and Its Effect on the Spectral Envelope

The purpose of this study is to examine the acoustic implications of using aspirated, well-coordinated, coup de la glotte, and hard glottal onset methods, in order to compare and contrast the radiated acoustic spectra. Twenty-five singers trained in bel canto singing style were asked to sing 5-second samples on three pre-determined pitches comprising the low, middle, and high range in male and female voices. Each participant was instructed and trained to sing the three pitches with the four methods. EGG was used with audio perception to verify onset type, and VoceVista Video Pro was used to analyze power spectra. A repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance (rMANOVA) was performed with the SPSS General Linear Model function, with onset type as the within-subjects variable to determine main effects and interaction effects on harmonic amplitude (up to 5000Hz) from the independent variables. A significant main effect was found for onset type and more specifically, a significant acoustic difference was found between the well-coordinated and coup de la glotte onsets. Substantial inconsistencies were found in the execution of the well-coordinated onset, as well as in participants' reported preferred onset compared to their baseline measurement of executed onset type. Intentional study of the phonatory …
Date: May 2022
Creator: Austin, Kourtney Regan
System: The UNT Digital Library

Developing Ogolevets's Doubly Augmented Prime: Semitonal Voice Leading in the Music of Shostakovich

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. …
Date: May 2022
Creator: Hatch, Amy M
System: The UNT Digital Library