Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Music theory'

Due to technological advancements, the role of the musician has changed dramatically in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. For the composer or songwriter especially, it is becoming increasingly expected for them to have some familiarity with music production and engineering, so that they are able to provide a finished product to employers, clients, or listeners. One goal of a successful production or engineered recording is to most effectively portray the recorded material. Music theory, and specifically analysis, has the ability to reveal important or expressive characteristics in a musical work. The relationship between musical analysis and production is explored to discover how music analysis can provide a more effective and informed musical production or recording and how a consideration of music production elements, notably timbre and instrumentation, can help to better inform a musical analysis. Two supplemental MP3 files are included with this thesis to demonstrate proposed mixing guidelines derived from the analysis.

Studies of musical agency have been growing in the field of music theory since the publication of Edward T. Cone's book The Composer's Voice (1974). Indeed, recent publications by scholars such as Robert Hatten and Seth Monahan demonstrate that musical agency continues to be a topic worthy of investigation today. These authors tend to explore the function of agents within a piece, virtually ignoring the way agents arise in music. In this dissertation I work toward a solution to this problem by developing a theory of musical agency that explores the following questions: (1) How do virtual agents emerge in music? (2) What is the relationship between agency and narrative? (3) Can virtual agents influence music at levels deeper than the surface?

I propose that the concept of musical intention provides music theorists with a possible answer to this question. Action Theory, a robust subfield active in philosophy and sociology, views intentionality as a focal point in research on human agency—research that deserves more attention in studies of musical agency. Following assertions by action theorists Donald Davidson and Alfred Mele, I argue that an entity only attains the status of an agent when it performs an intentional act. With respect to music, then, I outline six categories of intentionality that can offer support to an agential hearing: gesture, contradiction of musical forces, unexpected event, conflict, repetition/restatement, and change of state. Further, I suggest that certain passages of music can be interpreted as intentional acts performed by virtual musical agents.

I begin by reviewing the literature surrounding Action Theory in philosophy and sociology, and Agency in music theory in Chapter One. After defining each category of intentionality in Chapter Two, I investigate how the categories of intentionality interact with recent theories of musical narrative and Schenkerian analysis in Chapter Three. To demonstrate how my insights apply to analysis, I examine Beethoven's Bagatelle Op. 126, No. 2 and Mendelssohn's Song Without Words Op. 30, No. 6. These two analyses also serve as an introduction to the way in which my methodology is applied in analysis. In Chapter Four, I use the categories of intentionality in combination with both narrative and Schenkerian analysis to develop an agential reading of Schubert's Piano Sonata in A, D. 959. My agential analysis adds nuance to Hatten's (1993) and Charles Fisk's (2001) readings of the work. I suggest that two agents are present at the beginning of the movement, and I investigate how these agents act throughout all four movements of the piece. In the first three movements, the two agents are in conflict with one another, and by the end of the fourth movement the two agents achieve a synthesis that resolves their conflict. Not only does an understanding of intentionality in music clarify earlier work on musical agency, but it also provides opportunities for richer interpretive analyses. To conclude my dissertation I suggest possible avenues for further investigation, and I briefly apply my methodology to a passage of post-tonal music.

Absolute pitch (AP) is also referred to as Perfect Pitch. AP possessors are able to identify pitch in any kinds of sound without a reference point. However, Absolute Pitch may hinder possessors in music studies because it can confuse their brain. It is significant to understand that Absolute Pitch is not purely an advantage for possessors. While Absolute Pitch has great impact on possessors, it may bring negative phenomenon to them, which could decrease their learning ability.

This project’s purpose is to examine whether Absolute Pitch is a benefit or challenge in music studies. I will begin my project with archival research to provide background information and facts of Absolute Pitch. It will explain how Absolute Pitch is beneficial and challenging for musicians. Five hypotheses are suggested in the project: (1) Absolute Pitch possessors perform excellently in music dictation. (2) Absolute Pitch possessors value special tone quality. (3) Possession of Absolute Pitch is not always useful and accurate. (4) Absolute Pitch possessors have different perspectives in hearing intervals. (5) Absolute Pitch possessors have difficulty at transposing music.

Piano Etudes of Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) and Franz Liszt (1811–1886) remain important concert repertoire and indispensable technical studies for serious pianists to this day. Along with their musical inventiveness, the technical requirement is often novel, with new figurations, extreme range as well as extended passages calling for considerable endurance.

The element of endurance has not been singled out for examination in the literature. To rectify, this paper takes a closer look at the virtuosic etudes from three collections: Chopin's Etudes Op. 10 and Op. 25, and Liszt's 12 Transcendental Etudes (1852) for an analysis of passages requiring endurance, and introduces the Endurance Rating (E.I.) as a factor of duration and strain.

It is hoped that the conclusion regarding endurance will elucidate the differences and similarities between etudes of Chopin and Liszt, determine the role of endurance in contributing to technical difficulty, and assist pianists in choosing appropriate works that would reduce the risk of injury from excessive strain.

The following dissertation combines reception history and technical analysis in a revisionist account of Russian orchestral music from 1850 to 1870. Through close readings of a wide range of reception materials, I recover little-known historical perspectives on this repertory, focusing particularly on ways in which Russian musicians engaged with transnational musical trends. These historical perspectives inform my analyses of compositions by Mikhail Glinka, Mily Balakirev, Alexander Dargomyzhsky, and Anton Rubinstein. In these analyses, I elucidate formal, harmonic, and orchestrational features that nineteenth-century Russian listeners found notable, such as Balakirev's disintegrating recapitulations, Dargomyzhsky's ubiquitous augmented triads, and Glinka's timbrai crescendos. This analytical approach allows me to reimagine this repertory as a variegated network of musical works, where each new composition is a reaction to existing ones, to domestic reception, and to pan-European aesthetic currents.

Chapter 1, entitled "Glinka's Three Models of Instrumental Music," traces the organicist discourse surrounding Glinka's orchestral fantasias, links the origins of this discourse to the writings of Adolf Bernhard Marx, and articulates the musical features that distinguish the three fantasias. Chapter 2, "Formal Disintegration in Balakirev's Overtures," portrays Balakirev's attempts to distinguish himself from Glinka as well as from established formal conventions of the time, primarily through creative reinterpretations of formal strategies employed by Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz, and Franz Liszt. Chapter 3, "Satire,

This study presents a detailed analytical examination of formal organization in Anton Bruckner’s early instrumental slow movements: from the String Quartet, WAB 111, to the Third Symphony, WAB 103. It proposes an analytical methodology and conception of the formative process of musical works that seeks to 1) reappraise the development and idiosyncrasies of his slow movements’ form, and 2) turn the textual multiplicity often associated with Bruckner’s large-scale works (a scholarly issue often referred to as the “Bruckner Problem”) into a Bruckner Potential.

In addressing traditional and innovative formal aspects of Bruckner’s music, critics have tended to overemphasize one side or the other, consequentially portraying his handling of form as either whimsical or excessively schematic. By way of a reconstruction of Bruckner’s early experiments with slow-movement form (1862–1873), this study argues that influential lines of criticism in the reception history of Bruckner’s large-scale forms find little substantiation in the acoustical surface of Bruckner’s music and its dialogic engagement with mid- and late-19th-century generic expectations.

Because the textual multiplicity often associated with Bruckner’s works does not sit comfortably with traditional notions of authenticity and authorship, Bruckner scholarship has operated under aesthetic premises that fail to acknowledge textual multiplicity as a basic trait of his oeuvre. The present study circumvents this shortcoming by conceiving formal-expressive meaning in Bruckner’s symphonies as growing out of a dual-dimensional dialogue comprising 1) an outward dialogue, characterized by the interplay between a given version of a Bruckner symphony and its implied genre (in this case, sonata form); and 2) an inward dialogue, characterized by the interplay among the various individualized realizations of a single Bruckner symphony. The analytical method is exemplified through a detailed consideration of each of the surviving realizations of the slow movement of Bruckner’s Third Symphony, WAB 103.