An Analytical Study of Paradox and Structural Dualism in the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven (open access)

An Analytical Study of Paradox and Structural Dualism in the Music of Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven's rich compositional language evokes unique problems that have fueled scholarly dialogue for many years. My analyses focus on two types of paradoxes as central compositional problems in some of Beethoven's symphonic pieces and piano sonatas. My readings of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 27 (Op. 90), Symphony No. 4 (Op. 60), and Symphony No. 8 (Op. 93) explore the nature and significance of paradoxical unresolved six-four chords and their impact on tonal structure. I consider formal-tonal paradoxes in Beethoven's Tempest Sonata (Op. 31, No. 2), Ninth Symphony (Op. 125), and Overture die Weihe des Hauses (Op. 124). Movements that evoke formal-tonal paradoxes retain the structural framework of a paradigmatic interrupted structure, but contain unique voice-leading features that superimpose an undivided structure on top of the "residual" interrupted structure. Carl Schachter's observations about "genuine double meaning" and his arguments about the interplay between design and tonal structure in "Either/Or" establish the foundation for my analytical approach to paradox. Timothy Jackson's reading of Brahms' "Immer leiser word meine Schlummer" (Op. 105, No. 2) and Stephen Slottow's "Von einem Kunstler: Shapes in the Clouds" both clarify the methodology employed here. My interpretation of paradox involves more than just a slight contradiction between two …
Date: May 2016
Creator: Graf, Benjamin
System: The UNT Digital Library
Musical and Dramatic Functions of Loops and Loop Breakers in Philip Glass's Opera The Voyage (open access)

Musical and Dramatic Functions of Loops and Loop Breakers in Philip Glass's Opera The Voyage

Philip Glass's minimalist opera The Voyage commemorates the 500th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America. In the opera, Philip Glass, like other composers, expresses singers' and non-singers' words and activities by means of melodies, rhythms, chords, textures, timbres, and dynamics. In addition to these traditional musical expressions, successions of reiterating materials (RMs, two or more iterations of materials) and non reiterating materials (NRMs) become new musical expressions. However, dividing materials into theses two categories only distinguishes NRMs from RMs without exploring relations among them in successions. For instance, a listener cannot perceive the functional relations between a partial iteration of the RM and the NRM following the partial RM because both the partial RM and the NRM are NRMs. As a result, a listener hears a succession of NRM followed by another NRM. When an analyst relabels the partial RM as partial loop, and the NRM following the partial RM as loop breaker, a listener hears the NRM as a loop breaker causing a partial loop. The musical functions of loops and loop breakers concern a listener's expectations of the creation, sustaining, departure, and return to the norm in successions of loops and loop breakers. When a listener associates …
Date: May 2016
Creator: Wu, Chia-Ying (Charles)
System: The UNT Digital Library
Searching for Songs of the People: The Ideology of the Composers' Collective and Its Musical Implications (open access)

Searching for Songs of the People: The Ideology of the Composers' Collective and Its Musical Implications

The Composers' Collective, founded by leftist composers in 1932 New York City, sought to create proletarian music that avoided the "bourgeois" traditions of the past and functioned as a vehicle to engage Americans in political dialogue. The Collective aimed to understand how the modern composer became isolated from his public, and discussions on the relationship between music and society pervade the radical writings of Marc Blitzstein, Charles Seeger, and Elie Siegmeister, three of the organization's most vocal members. This new proletarian music juxtaposed revolutionary text with avant-garde musical idioms that were incorporated in increasingly greater quantities; thus, composers progressively acclimated the listener to the dissonance of modern music, a distinctive sound that the Collective hoped would become associated with revolutionary ideals. The mass songs of the two Workers' Song Books published by the Collective, illustrate the transitional phase of the musical implementation of their ideology. In contrast, a case study of the song "Chinaman! Laundryman!" by Ruth Crawford Seeger, a fringe member of the Collective, suggests that this song belongs within the final stage of proletarian music, where the text and highly modernist music seamlessly interact to create what Charles Seeger called an "art-product of the highest type."
Date: May 2018
Creator: Chaplin-Kyzer, Abigail
System: The UNT Digital Library
Depicting Affect through Text, Music, and Gesture in Venetian Opera, c. 1640-1658 (open access)

Depicting Affect through Text, Music, and Gesture in Venetian Opera, c. 1640-1658

Although early Venetian operas by composers such as Claudio Monteverdi and Francesco Cavalli offer today's listeners profound moments of emotion, the complex codes of meaning connecting emotion (or affect) with music in this repertoire are different from those of later seventeenth-century operatic repertoire. The specific textual and musical markers that librettists and composers used to indicate individual emotions in these operas were historically and culturally contingent, and many scholars thus consider them to be inaccessible to listeners today. This dissertation demonstrates a new analytical framework that is designed to identify the specific combinations of elements that communicate each lifelike emotion in this repertoire. Re-establishing the codes that govern the relationship between text, musical sound, and affect in this repertoire illuminates the nuanced emotional language of operas by composers such as Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, Antonio Cesti, and Francesco Lucio. The new analytical framework that underlies this study derives from analysis of seventeenth-century Venetian explanations and depictions of emotional processes, which reveal a basis in their society's underlying Aristotelian philosophy. Chapters III and IV examine extant documents from opera librettists, composers, audience members, and their associates to reveal how they understood emotions to work in the mind and body. These authors, …
Date: May 2018
Creator: Hagen, Emily
System: The UNT Digital Library
Sing Rāga, Embody Bhāva: The Way of Being Rasa (open access)

Sing Rāga, Embody Bhāva: The Way of Being Rasa

The rasa theory of Indian aesthetics is concerned with the nature of the genesis of emotions and their corresponding experiences, as well as the condition of being in and experiencing the aesthetic world. According to the Indian aesthetic theory, rasa ("juice" or "essence," something that is savored, that is tasted) is an embodied aesthetic experienced through an artistic performance. In this thesis, I have investigated how the aesthetics of rasa philosophy account for creative presence and its experiences in Karnatik vocal performances. Beyond the facets of grammar, Karnatik rāga performance signifies a deeper ontological meaning as a way to experience rasa, idiomatically termed as rāga-rasa by South Indian rāga practitioners. A vocal performance of a rāga ideally depends on a singer's embodied experience of rāga and rāga-bhāva (emotive expression of rāga), as much as it does on his/her theoretical knowledge and skillset of a rāga's svaras (scale degrees), gamakas (ornamentation), lakṣhaṇās (emblematic phrases), and so on. Reflecting on my own experience of being a Karnatik student and performer for the last two decades, participant observation, interviews, and analysis of Indian aesthetic theory of rasa, I propose a way of understanding that to sing rāga is to embody bhāva opening the …
Date: May 2019
Creator: Krishnamurthy, Thanmayee
System: The UNT Digital Library

Allusions and Borrowings in Selected Works by Christopher Rouse: Interpreting Manner, Meaning, and Motive through a Narratological Lens

Access: Use of this item is restricted to the UNT Community
Christopher Rouse (b. 1949), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his Trombone Concerto (1993) and a Grammy award for his Concerto de Gaudi (1999), has come to the forefront as one of America's most prominent orchestral composers. Several of Rouse's works feature quotations of and strong allusions to other composers' works that are used both rhetorically and structurally. These borrowings range from a variety of different genres and styles of works, from Claudio Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea to Jay Ferguson's "Thunder Island." Due to the more accessible filtering and funneling methods of musical borrowings (proliferation of mass media), the weighty discourses attached to them, and their variety of functions (critiquing canons, engaging in an allusive tradition, etc.), quotation has become elevated to the most prominent of musical actors that trigger narrative listening strategies, which in turn have a stronger role in the formation of narratives about music as well as narratives of music. The primary aim of this study is to adapt and apply more recent methodological narrativity frameworks to selected instrumental compositions by Rouse containing quotations, suggesting that their manner of insertion, their method of disclosure, and their referential potential can benefit from being examined through various narrative lenses …
Date: May 2019
Creator: Morey, Michael J.
System: The UNT Digital Library
Two-Dimensional Sonata Form as Methodology: Understanding Sonata-Variation Hybrids through a Two-Dimensional Lens (open access)

Two-Dimensional Sonata Form as Methodology: Understanding Sonata-Variation Hybrids through a Two-Dimensional Lens

One of the difficulties of nineteenth-century form studies is ambiguity in ascertaining which formal types are at work and in what ways. This can be an especially difficult problem when multiple formal types seem to influence the construction of a single composition. Drawing on some recent innovations in form studies proposed by Steven Vande Moortele, Janet Schmalfeldt, and Caitlin Martinkus, I first develop a set of analytical tools specifically made for the analysis of sonata/variation formal hybrids. I then refine these tools by applying them to the analysis of two pieces. Chopin's Fourth Piano Ballade can be understood from this perspective as primarily following the broad outlines of a sonata form, but with important influences from the recursive structures of variation forms; Franck's Symphonic Variations, on the other hand, are better viewed as engaging most of all with multiple variation-form paradigms and overlaying them with some of the rhetorical and formal structures of sonata forms. I conclude with a brief speculation on some further, more general applications of my methodology.
Date: May 2019
Creator: Falterman, David
System: The UNT Digital Library
Multidimensional Musical Objects in Mahler's Seventh Symphony (open access)

Multidimensional Musical Objects in Mahler's Seventh Symphony

Gustav Mahler's Seventh Symphony seems to belie traditional notions of symphonic unity in that it progresses from E minor in the first movement to C major in the Finale. The repertoire of eighteenth and nineteenth century composers such as Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms indicates that tonal holism is a significant factor for the symphonic genre. In order to reconcile Mahler's adventurous key scheme, this dissertation explores a multidimensional harmonic model that expands upon other concepts like Robert Bailey's double-tonic complex and transformation theory. A multidimensional musical object is a nexus of several interconnected chords that occupy the same functional space (tonic, dominant, or subdominant) and can be integrated into a Schenkerian reading. Mahler's Seventh is governed by a three-dimensional tonic object that encompasses the major and minor versions of C, E, and A-flat and the augmented triad that is formed between them. The nature of this multidimensional harmony allows unusual formal procedures to unfold, most notably in the first movement's sonata form. To navigate this particular sonata design, I have incorporated my own analytical terminology, the identity narrative, to track the background harmonic events. The location of these events (identity schism, identity crisis, and identity reclamation) is critical to the …
Date: May 2019
Creator: Patterson, Jason, 1982-
System: The UNT Digital Library
A 'Bohemian' Premiere? Smetana's "The Bartered Bride" and National Identity in 1909 New York (open access)

A 'Bohemian' Premiere? Smetana's "The Bartered Bride" and National Identity in 1909 New York

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.
Date: May 2020
Creator: Fehr, Laura
System: The UNT Digital Library
Bridging the Fantastical Gap: Dread and the Uncanny in the Score of "It Follows" (open access)

Bridging the Fantastical Gap: Dread and the Uncanny in the Score of "It Follows"

"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 …
Date: May 2020
Creator: Johnson, Kinley
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Phenomenology of Harmonic Progression (open access)

The Phenomenology of Harmonic Progression

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.
Date: May 2020
Creator: Russell, Michael Lance
System: The UNT Digital Library
Change, Longing, and Frustration in Djent-Style Progressive Metal (open access)

Change, Longing, and Frustration in Djent-Style Progressive Metal

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 …
Date: May 2021
Creator: Sallings, Patrick Nolan, 1982-
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Early Songs (1880–1885) of Claude Debussy: An Analytical Approach to Defining a Repertoire (open access)

The Early Songs (1880–1885) of Claude Debussy: An Analytical Approach to Defining a Repertoire

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 …
Date: May 2021
Creator: Waldroup, William Allan
System: The UNT Digital Library
Theorizing Sonata Form from the Margins: The Keyboard Sonata in Eighteenth-Century Spain (open access)

Theorizing Sonata Form from the Margins: The Keyboard Sonata in Eighteenth-Century Spain

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.
Date: May 2022
Creator: Espinosa, Bryan Stevens
System: The UNT Digital Library
On the Precipice: Examining Generic Convention and Innovation in Thermidorian Opera through "Sapho" (1794) (open access)

On the Precipice: Examining Generic Convention and Innovation in Thermidorian Opera through "Sapho" (1794)

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. …
Date: May 2022
Creator: Wodny, Anna
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

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
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