Smooth Point is an electro-acoustic chamber suite for woodwinds and rhythm section inspired by the theories of composer/philosopher Dane Rudyar, and also by the work of esoteric author Israel Regardie. The piece was written to assist in the musical meditative practice known as t…
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Beginning around the 1820s, the refinement of the piano mechanism increased the expressiveness of the instrument’s sonority and further attracted the composers’ attention and curiosity about the instrument. Concentration on piano music became a trend for composers between the mi…
While American and western European works make up the majority of the classical clarinet repertoire known and studied in the West, works of Turkish origin are the focus of this document. Though over 100 pieces of Turkish classical clarinet repertoire exist, they are widely unkno…
On a program for a classical music recital today you will typically find the names of the performers, as well as the names of the various composers who wrote the music. At first, this seems perfectly ordinary, until we consider that there was a time when such a distinction betwe…
State-of-the-art models for the perception of grouping structure in music do not attempt to account for disagreements among listeners. But understanding these disagreements, sometimes regarded as noise in psychological studies, may be essential to fully understanding how listene…
This paper treats the connections between contemporary popular music and neoliberal ideology through a historical analysis and critique of digital music platforms, lo-fi, and EDM. Following the work of Byung-Chul Han and Philip Mirowski, I explore how the transformation of the d…
Why do we like the music that we like? This seemingly simple question is surprisingly understudied. This dissertation aims to give some answers to this question, with a focus on analyzing the dataset of the FAV Corpus, a collection of pieces and excerpts that 140 survey particip…
Largely known for her choral compositions, American composer Gwyneth Walker (b. 1947) has composed hundreds of songs for solo voice. Walker’s songs demonstrate her unique compositional style which blends many characteristics of American music, including strong rhythms, open sono…
This dissertation proposes a framework for analyzing musical interculturality—the processes through which musicians weave together multiple musical and cultural identities through performance—in twenty-first-century music. By attending to the specific sociopolitical contexts of …
During the second season of the Society for Private Musical Performances (1918-1922), known in Austria as the ‘Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen’, the members began to transcribe orchestral music for their chamber ensemble (Meibach, 1984). Previously, the Society had pr…
The present dissertation consists in an original composition for solo piano, titled Seven Nocturnes (2020). The score is preceded by a critical essay in which I discuss the overall aesthetic and formal qualities of the work, its musical, philosophical, theoretical, and historica…
John Mackey’s Places we can no longer go is a work of significant proportion, and has been met with high praise and frequent performances by some of the nation’s highest ensembles. The purposes of this dissertation are 1) To provide Historical information on the genesis of the w…
This study explores the possibilities for violoncellists to embellish the Italian baroque aria bass. The invention of the wire-wound bottom string on the violoncello in Italy around the 1660s forged two diverging paths on the use of this novel instrument in aria accompaniment: 1…
Like many terms that appear ubiquitously across both technical and popular discourses, style is an unstable concept. For students of music, the term is perhaps most unambiguous when it refers to the style periods broadly associated with different approaches to tonality: the Baro…
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) was an important representative composer in the romantic period. He broke many conventional rules and explored new horizons with his revolutionary fingerings. The overall goal is to find the optimum fingering method that allows for an appropriate hand…
Lecture recitals as the practice of pairing live music performance with verbal explication have been around since at least the end of the eighteenth century, but research on them is surprisingly scarce despite how ubiquitous they have become. What exactly are lecture recitals? W…
Given the availability of music videos past and present and the move away from album-oriented-rock to singles and visual albums—e.g., Beyoncé’s Beyoncé (2013) and Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer (2018)—popular music is continuously being presented as a multimedia product. Althoug…
Much of the surface structure—the immediate drama of the music—has become lost in scholarship concerning Beethoven’s Egmont overture. References to large-scale processes, whether they manifest as exhumations of deeply-embedded hierarchical events or as organic outgrowths of smal…
Since the Western piano music culture entered China, Chinese musicians have never stopped exploring the piano. The piano compositions grew up with the new China and have been influenced by different historical periods, from the earliest imitation of Western music structure and h…