The Moroccan Gnawa—widely understood to be the descendants of slaves from sub-Saharan Africa—practice ritualized healing involving spirit possession with a vast Afro-Maghrebi musical repertoire. Because the role of Gnawa music in ritual is that of healing, musical aesthetics are…
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This dissertation is about the power of sound, how sound influences and is influenced by emotion, how emotion influences national politics, and how those politics spill over into international and intercultural relations. Specifically, it is about a shared double-reed musical in…
This dissertation examines the French horn solo as a lyrical “voice” in non-diegetic Hollywood film music, 1954–2012. Through a series of case studies of longer solos (20+ seconds), I consider the changing use of the horn in film scores to show how horn solos evoke a specific ra…
In this dissertation, I argue that listeners’ ability to apprehend the expressive power and stylistic signature of late eighteenth- and early ninteenth-century music lies as much in its sonority (timbre and chord spacing) as in the traditional syntactic parameters (of harmony, r…
In Harmonielehre, Arnold Schoenberg wrote repeatedly about his conception of sound as a means of direct expression. This dissertation examines Schoenberg’s use of Sprechstimme within the musicological field of vocality. It explores and traces Schoenberg’s early uses of vocal var…
With new technology, handbells can have a clear tone on which almost any melody can be played clearly. Despite a growing body of composers and repertoire for the handbell ensemble, the relative number of top-level contemporary compositions and truly professional ensembles is sma…
Arnold Schoenberg’s theory of Klangfarbenmelodie (timbre-melody) is one of the most important yet least understood compositional innovations of the twentieth century. Critical reexaminations of his writings reveal that it is a textural principle, a way to combine the homophonic …