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Since its emergence as an aesthetic category in the mid-twentieth century, minimalism has been contentious amongst scholars of all forms of art. It has been alternately celebrated, questioned, and condemned by not only its critics, but also the artists whose works have been given the historical title “minimalist.” This article explores the emergence of minimalist music, examining its relation to the earlier “avant-garde” works of John Cage and other eclectic influences, such as jazz and Eastern music. In doing so, this article attempts to establish a broad understanding of the elements integral to minimalist music, with a special focus on the composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich. The works of Riley and Reich are compared to the works of visual artists Barnett Newman and Sol LeWitt in order to highlight the pivotal elements of the minimalist aesthetic, including repetition, simplicity, and, to borrow Cage’s term, “Unfixity.” This article concludes that the minimalist compositions of the aforementioned composers ultimately demonstrate the integral characteristics of minimalism better than their visual counterparts, due to the temporal nature of music. However, the article seeks to demonstrate the importance of contemplating visual and musical interpretations of minimalism together, as they are complimentary windows into this modern movement.

In 1923, Ernst Krenek composed an operatic setting of Orpheus und Eurydike, a drama by painter and occasional playwright Oskar Kokoschka. Because musicologists and opera houses alike have overlooked this work, credit afforded to Krenek for his role in Weimar modernity is often confined to the Zeitoper vein of 1920s European culture: the cosmopolitan, jazz-inspired, contemporary aesthetic of Krenek’s 1927 Jonny Spielt Auf. This article, the first English-language study devoted to Orpheus und Eurydike, explores Krenek’s contribution to another crucial facet of Weimar culture: the Austro-German identity crisis provoked by defeat in World War I and social upheaval. After tracing the opera’s rich genealogy and situating it in the lives of its creators (Alma and Gustav Mahler, among others, influenced Kokoschka's original play), this paper focuses on the drama’s multiple death scenes. Drawing on scholar Maria Tatar’s study of the Weimar obsession with sexually-tinged female death, I argue through score and libretto analysis that Krenek and Kokoschka synthesize aspects of the contemporary Lustmord (sexual murder) trope with elements of the Wagnerian Liebestod (love death) archetype. Rather than reconcile them with their artistic predecessors, however, this synthesis fleshes out the Lustmord latent in any Liebestod. With its first performance in 1926, this opera joined the ranks of “progressive” works by male artists who used aesthetic violence against women to navigate the Weimar identity crisis—in many ways, a crisis of masculinity. Paying Orpheus und Eurydike the attention it deserves underscores Krenek’s seminal but underappreciated role in both the glittering and dark sides of Weimar culture, and reveals just how interrelated those two sides are. Though it retells a well-worn classical myth, this Orpheus is as much an “opera of its time” as Jonny.

This essay explores how the architectural design of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus effects the performance of Wagner’s later operas, specifically Der Ring des Nibelungen. Contrary to Wagner’s theoretical writings, which advocate equality among the various facets of operatic production (Gesamtkuntswerk), I argue that Wagner’s architectural design elevates music above these other art forms. The evidence lies within the unique architecture of the house, which Wagner constructed to realize his operatic vision. An old conception of Wagnerian performance advocated by Cosima Wagner—in interviews and letters—was consciously left by Richard Wagner. However, I juxtapose this with Daniel Barenboim’s modern interpretation, which suggests that Wagner unconsciously, or by a Will beyond himself, created Bayreuth as more than the legacy he passed on. The juxtaposition parallels the revolutionary nature of Wagner’s ideas embedded in Bayreuth’s architecture. To underscore this revolution, I briefly outline Wagner’s philosophical development, specifically the ideas he extracted from the works of Ludwig Feuerbach and Arthur Schopenhauer, further defining the focus of Wagner’s composition and performance of the music. . The analysis thereby challenges the prevailing belief that Wagner intended Bayreuth and Der Ring des Nibelungen, the opera which inspired the house’s inception, to embody Gesamtkunstwerk; instead, these creations internalize the drama, allowing the music to reign supreme. From this research I hope to encourage scholars to critically examine the connections between theatre design, composition and performance so that we may better understand the process by which works are manifested in performance.

This paper examines Anton Weidinger, the 18th- and early 19th-century keyed trumpet player for whom Joseph Haydn and Johann Nepomuk Hummel composed their trumpet concerti. As the most successful of many attempts to chromaticize the trumpet in the late 18th century, during which the Baroque clarino style of trumpet-playing was waning, Weidinger’s keyed trumpet enjoyed a short-lived period of prominence from about 1800 to 1804, the period during which Weidinger premiered these two concerti. Subsequently, the keyed trumpet declined in popularity, and eventually it was replaced by the valve trumpet. Both concerti emphasize the chromatic capabilities of the new instrument. A detailed examination of some passages from the third movements of the two concerti suggests a deliberate attempt on the part of Hummel (perhaps under Weidinger’s influence) to “quote” and outdo the most virtuosic passages in the Haydn concerto and to cast the new instrument as capable of playing in a “singing” operatic style. Musical quotation from Luigi Cherubini’s opera Les Deux Journées further cements the implicit connection Hummel draws between the keyed trumpet and opera (and, by extension, the human voice). The paper concludes that Weidinger and Hummel sought, in Hummel’s concerto, to announce to the musical world that the trumpet was ready to move beyond its Classical status as a tutti instrument. Though the success of Weidinger and his keyed trumpet was transient, the two concerti composed for him today stand as cornerstones of the solo trumpet literature.

This paper examines the work of Koji Kondo in the 1998 video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Using a variety of techniques of harmonic analysis, the paper examines the commonalities between teleportation pieces and presents a model to describe their organization. Concepts are drawn from the work of three authors for the harmonic analysis. William Caplin’s substitutions; Daniel Harrison’s fundamental bases; and, Dmitri Tymoczko’s parsimonious voice leading form the basis of the model for categorizing the teleportation pieces. In general, these pieces begin with some form of prolongation (often tonic); proceed to a subdominant function; employ a chromatically altered chord in a quasi-dominant function; and, end with a weakened cadence in the major tonic key. By examining the elements of this model in each piece, this paper explains how the teleportation pieces use unusual harmonic language and progressions while maintaining a coherent identity in the context of the game’s score.

Music has been used for millennia to worship God. Today the words worship and music are almost interchangeable in American Evangelical churches. Christian music has become a growing genre with its own radio stations, billboard charts and awards, and recording artists who exclusively sing Christian songs. Church music has also changed drastically in the past century. The musical portion of a church service used to consist of hymns led by a choir and music director who is accompanied by a piano or organ. Now many churches have a worship leader who plans and leads the musical portion of the church service. The contemporary service consists of a full praise band performing Contemporary Christian music with added lighting effects, video, and amplification through a sound system. These changes, both in popular Christian music and in church worship music, are intrinsically linked. The Christian music industry and church worship music have become interconnected--as the industry continues to change with its surrounding culture, church music changes with it. This thesis will explore the history of contemporary Christian music and its connection with the church.

Popular music has long been ignored by academic music programs and their associated libraries. If we are now playing 'catch-up' with pop music, then what is the status of jazz music? At Western, surprising collections of jazz music exist, but are hidden. This presentation offers an overview of the Simmons Collection and the CKGW Radio Orchestra collection, and highlights some of the Canadian content contained therein.

The presence of music is a visceral part of the human experience and its influence on cognitive function is a growing area of research in psychology. In particular, perceptual properties of music (mood and arousal) have been shown to significantly affect performance. There has been minimal research in the field on the interaction of mood and arousal and their influence on attention, thus the purpose of this study. Fifty undergraduate students currently enrolled at the University of Western Ontario were recruited for this study. Given that music is a highly subjective experience, participants rated an assortment of music clips on their mood and arousal levels. The clips that participants rated highest and lowest on mood (positive and negative) and arousal (low and high) were chosen for use on the Posner cueing task. This visual attention task was either performed in silence or while listening to music clips as per their ratings. Results indicated that musical mood and musical arousal, independently of one another, had no significant effect on visual attention. Rather, a significant interaction between the two perceptual properties was observed. The fastest reaction times were recorded when participants listened to high arousal positive music and the longest reaction times were found when participants listened to high arousal negative music. Intermediate performance occurred when participants listened to low arousal negative music and low arousal positive music. Future studies should investigate whether the combined modulatory effects of musical mood and musical arousal generalize to other attentional paradigms.

This book examines the exercise of power in the Stalinist music world as well as the ways in which composers and ordinary people responded to it. It presents a comparative inquiry into the relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic and Poland from the aftermath of World War II through Stalin’s death in 1953, concluding with the slow process of de-Stalinization in the mid- to late-1950s. The author explores how the Communist parties in both countries expressed their attitudes to music of all kinds, and how composers, performers, and audiences cooperated with, resisted, and negotiated these suggestions and demands. Based on a deep analysis of the archival and contemporary published sources on state, party, and professional organizations concerned with musical life, Tompkins argues that music, as a significant part of cultural production in these countries, played a key role in instituting and maintaining the regimes of East Central Europe. As part of the Stalinist project to create and control a new socialist identity at the personal as well as collective level, the ruling parties in East Germany and Poland sought to saturate public space through the production of music. Politically effective ideas and symbols were introduced that furthered their attempts to, in the parlance of the day, “engineer the human soul.” Music also helped the Communist parties establish legitimacy. Extensive state support for musical life encouraged musical elites and audiences to accept the dominant position and political missions of these regimes. Party leaders invested considerable resources in the attempt to create an authorized musical language that would secure and maintain hegemony over the cultural and wider social worlds. The responses of composers and audiences ran the gamut from enthusiasm to suspicion, but indifference was not an option., https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks/1029/thumbnail.jpg

Film music scholarship has historically focused its attention between two clear-cut scoring practices; the classical Hollywood score and the popular music score. This study attempts to break that mould by investigating the pluralistic trends found in Michael Giacchino’s film score for the film Up(2009), examining the motivic growth of specific leitmotif, and charting how that musical theme is set in a variety of musical. Unlike the classical Hollywood scoring model that is outlined by writers like Claudia Gorbman and Jeff Smith, these diverse musical settings pass through a plethora of distinct genres and styles—both “highbrow” and “lowbrow”—that have hitherto been unseen in film music history. These musical settings allow Giacchino to imbue specific leitmotifs with connotation of diverse musical histories, styles and traditions. The ultimate result is a binary system of signification, with the leitmotifs introversively signifying themes and characters within the film’s diegesis, while the diverse musical settings extroversively signify sights and sounds in the wider world. By synthesizing diverse musical styles into one musical thread, Giacchino’s film scores illustrate the power of music to draw on well-known musical genres from Western culture to enhance audiences’ narrative understanding. In this way, Giacchino’s work in Up straddles inspiration from both the classical and popular Hollywood score, adopting the diverse timbres, styles and aesthetics of the popular score, while still retaining the consistent use and development of a leitmotif that is found in the classical score. I call this new hybridized scoring practice the “pastiche score.”

This thesis examines audio mastering as musical communication. Tasks including loudness management, harmonic balance, denoising, phase alignment, monitoring, effects application, and administrative responsibilities are of central importance to mastering engineers. With the exception of administrative responsibilities, each of these tasks significantly shapes a record’s aesthetic character and physical makeup. These contributions – the final creative steps before an album’s release – demonstrate the mastering engineer’s role as a collaborative auteur in recorded musical communications.

Music, like language, is a universal means of communication unique to humans, and the overlap of music and linguistic cognitive and neurological processes is well established. Performers and listeners alike are drawn to music as an avenue of emotional expression, as music is recognized for its rich emotional content. The study of affective priming indicates the communication of emotion-based concepts: stimuli that are related by affect give rise to response facilitation, an effect not observed to stimuli that are unrelated by affect. The measure of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) reveal, with exquisite temporal accuracy, that music clearly conveys emotion concepts in a manner commensurate to written language and prosody. To date, ERP studies of affective priming with music have involved written language and prosody, and have focused on the N400, an indication of semantic cognitive integration. The current study is the first to measure ERP responses in an affective priming paradigm of music and speech. In addition to the N400, the current study is the first of its kind to measure the N300, indicating cognitive categorization and the P300, reflecting recognition. Three sets of analyses – based on categorically correct responses, behaviourally correct responses and subjective responses – reveal N300 and N400 affective priming effects, corresponding to deliberate cognitive categorization and conceptual integration, respectively. Master of Science (MSc)

This dissertation examines contemporary cultural representations of rurality in southern Ontario. It demonstrates how literary and cultural texts construct, support and/or expand our understandings of the social composition and character of rural culture. Examining various literary forms (drama, life narrative, and the novel), music, and photography, my research and analysis responds to Chris Philo’s pivotal call in the field of rural geography “to pay more careful attention to ‘the multiple forms of otherness’ present in . . . rural areas” (“Neglected” 199) and to foreground what he identifies as “neglected rural geographies.” I argue that dominant literary and cultural representations of rural southern Ontario overwhelmingly mobilize and rarely contest white heteromasculinist rural discourses that support rural cultures of sameness and exclusion. As a means of exposing the motivations for and deleterious effects of these discourses, I draw attention to alternative representations of the region’s rural social geography that expand the imaginative scope circumscribed by hegemonic conceptualizations of what it means to be rural in southern Ontario. As such, my project responds to Philo’s call in three ways: first, it repositions southern Ontario as a rural locale of critical relevance; second, it addresses a gap in Canadian literary and cultural studies by taking up new and evolving approaches in rural studies, with respect to rural “others,” being developed in disciplines like geography, sociology, history and political science; third, it intervenes in dominant socio-spatial discourses currently circulating in Canadian literary and cultural studies that eagerly address issues of gender, sexuality, race and class in Canada’s urban environments while too often neglecting how they intersect with discourses of rurality. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This research questions how the expressive range of the saxophone / bass clarinet can be extended in new ways by employing both a systematic use of microtonality and electronic manipulation of the instrument. The use of digital signal processing (DSP) is well advanced among certain music practitioners, most notably electric guitarists, extending that instrument’s expressive powers considerably. Woodwind instrumentalists have a huge unexplored potential to engage with new technologies, furthering the range, polyphonic voicings, loops, reverbs and general signal manipulation. The marraige of these two disciplines with conventional woodwind practice greatly deepens the expressive range of the instrument while offering many new performance and compositional opportunities. Similarily a practice-based investigation into the use of DSP technology with respect to woodwinds will form part of the research process. This research will explore the application of guitar effects processors, MIDI controllers, MAX/ MSP algorithms, electronic wind instruments, multi-touch controllers and the emerging technologies using Open Sound Control. The research will present the findings with relevance to practising instrumentalists.

Author(s): Khalil, Alexander K | Abstract: At present, the need for an understanding of both physical and cultural geography is increasingly urgent in America’s schools. The present study explores using music as focus for the exploration of geography. Not only is music strongly linked to culture and environment but also its study provides an experiential understanding of a given culture in a way that few others can. Instrumental music, unfettered by practical, semantic, or representational constraints of other traditional art forms, can be considered as one of the most direct forms of cultural expression, reflecting primarily the collective imagination of the culture that developed it and the environment in which it developed. Musical instruments are shaped by a culture’s aesthetics and made using locally available materials and technologies.The present article takes as a case study a class at the Museum School, a San Diego Unified School District charter school that emphasizes experiential learning and the arts in its daily curriculum. In this case study, 23 children in grades 4-6 focused their attention on the culture and geography of the Island of Bali, Indonesia, through studying its instrumental music, known as “gamelan.”The Museum School has had a Balinese gamelan program as part of its music curriculum since 2000 and thus all of the students approached the subject with substantial experiential knowledge. The course of study, which lasted several weeks, went through four stages of inquiry and discussion. First, the students conducted background research on Balinese music, focusing in particular on organology. Second, the students explored Balinese geography through organology, deducing aspects of the Balinese environment based on the design and construction of the instruments. Third, the students examined Balinese culture through its music, focusing on musical structure. Fourth the students were asked to make connections between Balinese culture and physical geography as seen through music. Finally, the students compared and contrast what they had learned with musics of their own choice, pointing out likely cultural and environmental factors that likely caused the differences and similarities they observed.This course of study helped the students make connections between cultural and physical geography in a nuanced way. Further, although focus on music and art as a subject, the core elements of the class were writing and research skills. Combining these skills with experiential learning not only deepens and nuances understanding of geography but also expands students’ cognitive repertoire, providing tools for further exploration.

Few recent historical developments have had as much impact on American Evangelical Christianity as the Jesus Movement. Dating back only a few decades, this movement resulted in the conversion of many countercultural youth and the consequent revitalization of many American churches. One of the greatest impacts of the Jesus Movement was its new music which came to be known as "Jesus Music". This thesis describes the history of the Jesus Movement and the musical impact it had on American Evangelical Christianity.