The jazz avant-garde of the 60s and 70s has often been depicted as a movement that signalled the end of jazz as we had come to know it, a movement of unbridled musical energy and passion without the essential restraining influences of formal guidelines and reverence for - tradit…
The social and political practice of the French Third Republic resonated with a variety of contrasting ideologies which were reflected in cultural products and their reception, including opera. The operas of Jules Massenet, the most successful Parisian opera composer of his time…
This thesis defines the theoretical, sociological, historical, cultural and practical framework of “instructive editions” (IEs). The approach adopted evaluates, for the first time, the most significant discussions found in previous literature, realising a comprehensive overview …
The aim of this thesis was to examine changing representations of men and masculinities in a particular historical period (“The Sixties”) and to explore the impact that this had in a period of rapid social change in the UK and the legacy of that impact. In order to do this, a mu…
This thesis concerns musical identities and how they affect health as young people make the transition to adulthood. The primary focus is on music listening, since this is widely reported to be a key feature of adolescents’ and young adults’ leisure time (Roe 1999; Tarrant, et a…
This PhD study starts with a single question: 'how do songwriters collaborate to write effective songs?' I will test several hypotheses, including 'amateur and professional songwriters demonstrate different behaviours', 'songwriting represents the collision of existing ideas’, '…
In recent years, flamenco has been consolidated as a prominent symbol of regional identity in Andalusia, the southernmost region of Spain. In the late 1970s, Spain began to decentralise into seventeen autonomous regions. As a result, each region has been encouraged to foreground…
This thesis considers rap music produced in London. The project employs close textual analysis and ethnography to engage with the formal characteristics of rap and the social relations constructed through its production and use. The black cultural tradition has a considerable hi…
In recent decades, black American political scholars have addressed the absence of trans formative societal change in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. The civil rights initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s pledged racial equality and economic redistribution resulting from equ…
Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Birmingham (2009-2014), this thesis explores the role music plays in shaping and producing the urban environment via a focus on three specific processes; normalisation, marginalisation, and resistance. The contemporary city’s relation…
This thesis aims to explore the musical style of Elton John by taking an interdisciplinary approach to popular music analysis. In addition to analysing Elton John’s musical style, the approach taken will itself be assessed to ascertain whether it can be beneficial for future res…
Studies of Italian opera in London during the first half of the eighteenth century have focussed on George Frideric Handel (1685-1759). As the most prolific composer of this genre in the English capital, this is unsurprising, but it has meant that other composers, contemporaneou…
In the mid-1970s, my approach to popular music was shaped by aesthetical categories developed in the fields of Euroclassical music and continental philosophy. In fact, my interest in the avant-garde movements of the 20th century predated my involvement with popular music. In 198…
This work addresses the demands of framing a theoretical problem and practice-based research and it therefore comprises two parts: a thesis and a composition. The thesis discusses the narrative structure of post-WWII Italian avant-garde opera in conceptual terms and demonstrates…
This research explores the functions of music by analyzing the relationship between musical and social classification. More particularly it focuses on the manifestation of this relationship during the active participation of audiences in music events where the individual and the…
The present document examines eight musical works for various instruments and ensembles, composed between 2007 and 2011. Brief summaries of each work’s program are followed by discussions of instrumentation and orchestration, and analysis of pitch organization. Discussions of in…
The folio of compositions submitted here consists of the six large-scale works that I have completed between the years 1994 and 2003. Over the course of this nine-year period I hope that the folio demonstrates a consistent and constantly evolving thread of techniques and process…
Music is widely used to accompany moving images, in films, advertising, television programmes and computer games. The process of choosing and using a piece of pre-existing commercial music for this purpose is known as synchronisation. The addition of music to a piece of film enh…