Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Music'

This thesis presents a professional/organisational analysis of popular music journalism in the UK. It considers the conditions under which consumer music magazines are produced (at the level of both the newsroom and the publishing organisation) and how music journalists deal with their main point of informational contact, the press officer. Drawing on original interview and participant observation research, the thesis considers: the economic and bureaucratic forces within magazine publishing organisations; how titles are positioned both individually and collectively as part of portfolio of niched titles; how market forces condition how and why titles are launched, redesigned and folded; and, ultimately, how all these factors impact upon and shape the socio-professional and cultural conditions under which editors and their staff work. The thesis then considers the music press officer (both in-house and independent and their office/departmental hierarchies) in terms of how they exist and operate at the meeting point of three distinct groups: the artists they are employed to represent; the artists' record companies; and the press (and their attempts to reconcile these often divergent needs). Having considered the music press and music journalists in isolation (in terms of power structures as well as their collective and individual goals) and press officers in isolation (in terms of their position within wider music industry promotional strategies and how they build, develop and revise a roster of artists) the thesis then moves on to analyse how these two distinct professional groups (journalists/editors and press officers) work together, how they professionally and organisationally define their goals and objectives and the steps they take to meet these goals and objectives, negotiating quantitatively and qualitatively the coverage of artists. A complex relationship of conditional power and mutual dependency links these two sets of professionals in both their formal activities and their socio-cultural activities. Breaking from previous studies that have described a uni-directional flow of power and influence of press officers over the press, the thesis argues that the relationships that tie these groups together (in terms of gatekeeping within the hierarchy of the newsroom and a tilting balance of power) are much more complex that has previously been assumed.

This thesis comprises a portfolio of thirteen original musical compositions supported by a 30,000 word critical commentary along with videos and sound recordings of a number of the works on CD and DVD. The two operatic works are both set to o~gin<.!-l libretti which are included as appendices. I As the title of the thesis suggests, all of the musical works submitted are linked by a common dramatic voice. The written commentary analyses the processes and influences on those works, with particular emphasis on the theatrical. The focal point of the submission is a large-scale operatic work scored for full symphonic forces and three tenors called Piano Mall. The commentary considers the process of creating this piece and the other works ;in the portfolio are considered within the context of its production. The other works are scored for a variety of forces - from choral works to works for mixed instrumental ensembles. The chapters of the commentary build to create a complete picture of my working methodology and places my work in the context of current music theatre trends. The first forms an introduction to this thesis and sets my work within a wider contemporary context. It also outlines my approach to Shakespeare in adaptation before taking a critical look at modem music theatre and suggesting ways in which my work attempts to take the art form forwards. Chapter Two considers musical and theatrical references in my work and Chapter Three focuses in particular on the influence of Brecht's Epic Theatre. A summary of practical workshops with students from Bradfield College in Reading and Chigwell School in Essex forms the basis of Chapter Four which considers the role of the audience in modem music theatre. And finally, Chapter Five is a detailed analysis of the creation of Piallo Man.

Thesis (M.M.)--Cleveland State University, 2009.
Abstract. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Dec. 15, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-55). Available online via the OhioLINK ETD Center and also available in print.

Music performance dysfunction in professionally trained elite musicians is a broad, pervasive, yet oft times narrow and temporary phenomenon, situated in a culture rarely understood by those outside the field of professional music. This project explored the meaning of music performance dysfunction in professional musicians by addressing how musicians understand themselves in the field of music and through their relationship to music. The nature of inquiry for this project used an overarching ethnographic and sociological paradigm upon which was set a conceptual framework encouraged by the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The project was organised around three domains of the musician's lived experience: the subjective world of the professional musician; negative affect, anxiety, and dysfunction in the musician arising through the context of music performance; and the emotions, memories, and insights that emerge through Guided Imagery and Music. Music is the dimensional phenomenon that binds all domains. The three domains were investigated through two distinct studies that elicited a rich tapestry of findings and illuminated a colourful world, unique to the field. The first study addressed a few salient features of being a modern professional musician. Fifteen musicians were interviewed about what it is to be a musician, what it is to perform, what is music to the musician, what is the musician’s relationship to music, and the issue of music performance anxiety. Phenomenological analysis revealed themed issues surrounding a tacit understanding and acceptance by the musicians of the enormous highs and devastating lows in their chosen career. Acute music performance anxiety was understood as a continuum within a larger of the occupational field and personal life, a musician’s position along which is dependent upon an individual’s propensity to embody the many influences within the social domains of a complex occupational field. The second study was built upon the first study. The issue of music performance dysfunction in three professional musicians was individually explored using the music therapy method of Modified Guided Imagery and Music (MGIM) in a multiple case study design. This study explored each musician’s unique experiences of performance dysfunction in a ten week program of themed MGIM sessions. Each session comprised specifically programmed music that supported the topic at hand. Through hermeneutic and phenomenological analysis, the music based exploration brought to light the unique foundational issues of each musician’s performance dysfunction and gave each an opportunity to renew their relationship with music The findings from each study revealed a distinct composite essence. Furthermore, a reflective overview combining findings from both studies showed emotion as a substance of exchange in performance. The quality and meaning of musicians’ experience were found to prevail within a social milieu, and were determined and dependent on the emotional foundation of an individual's dispositional tendencies that develop through embodied experience. Through the qualitative and sociological frame employed in this project, the musicians’ experience of music performance dysfunction was shown to be a complex and enduring concern that has deleterious effects on career and personal life.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate a particular form of cultural production; the creation of musical product, the pop song. Previous accounts have been dominated by casting the process as one of transmission in which the music of the artists is captured in a recording and the resulting object is released into the market. I argue that this portrayal of cultural production as a pipeline directs attention towards activities at either end: the recruitment of talented artists and the distribution and promotional efforts of the record companies. What happens in the ‘pipe’, how the product is created, is concealed, explained away by reference to stylised notions of technological and economic forces and the operation of unknowable creative talent. To open up this ‘black box’, an approach not previously applied to popular music production is used, actor-network theory. This thesis traces the formation and performance of moments in the production of musical product: songwriting, recording, mixing, mastering and live performance. Tracing the production of music is carried out through analysis of interviews conducted with the protagonists, the producers, engineers, studio managers and artists, and is supported by observation of studio sessions. The principal argument that I develop in the thesis is that musical product is not a discrete ‘thing’ to be diffused, but a networked entity indissociable from the roles and identities, qualities and practices of others that constitute and perform the production, reproduction and consumption of popular music. Accordingly in this thesis musical product is revealed as an achievement, not an a priori fact, and I examine how its constructed qualities are stabilised and shape the network of production and consumption. Following the construction of these qualities reveals how the various interests of the protagonists are translated through their enrolment in practices and systems of calculation into relational arrangements that perform the power of the producer. The contribution of this research lies not just in making visible what has previously been obscured, but also in the way that it illustrates the value in analysing organised activity as a performative association of relationally constructed roles, objects, and qualities, of, in this case, the musical product, colloquially known as ‘a pop song’.

The present research looks at peer collaboration and creativity, an area largely neglected by previous peer collaboration researchers, where goals are ill-defined and measures ambiguous. In previous (science based) peer collaboration research, the crucial factor promoting group productivity appears to be the 'social instrument of language'. Groups achieving intersubjectivity, or mutual understanding, through dialogue out-perform those groups who do not. The returning theme is one of sharing ideas verbally with other group members, arguing through alternatives and providing justifications for accepted and rejected solutions. It was suggested that in collaborative music composition tasks an alternative medium exists for the communication of ideas and for the establishment of a shared understanding of the task, namely communication through the music itself. It was hypothesised that, rather than talking about their ideas, children would be more likely to try them out directly on the musical instruments. It was also predicted that this form of interaction would be significantly related to group productivity.;The present research also considers three key gender issues: firstly, the recurring finding by previous researchers that boys in mixed gender groups take control of the task by dominating verbally and non-verbally over the girls; secondly, suggested differences between the genders in communicative styles; and thirdly, the relative productivity of single gender and mixed gender groups.;Three studies were carried out with children aged 9-10, working in groups of four of varying gender compositions. Each study involved a distinct type of music composition task. Evidence was provided for the occurrence of interaction through music, and its importance for group productivity was found to be dependent on the nature of the task. Important gender differences were observed, including female domination in mixed gender groups. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to previous peer collaboration research and classroom practice.

This thesis will demonstrate the effects of American music, specifically jazz, on the different styles of Cuban music. It will be presented chronologically, explaining decade by decade, how American music penetrated the Cuban culture in almost all musical genres.

In this thesis I examine the philosophical and psychological literature on the human experimence of the ingredients of music, and pay particular attention to that body of literature which describes the interpersonal temporal and prosodic features of basic human communication, that is, the literature on non-verbal mother-infant interaction. I propose that improvisation in music therapy provides a pivotal synthesis for demonstrating the duality of music and basic emotional processes, and support this with experimental work.

Sound and music, both independently and inside film are sometimes considered to be secondary to the visual. Some disciplines wish to classify them as triggers to neurological systems while some others will emphasise their affect-inflicting capacity; in both cases these remain as secondary functions and in the case of film as nothing but accompanying elements. Yet, observed psychologically sound and music have a unique and wholesome function in the human psyche. Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology opens the door for the understanding of both as images, far beyond the consensual acceptance of image being of a visual faculty only. Understanding music as image puts music in a different position inside a film as well as a stand-alone phenomenon in the every-day life. Analytical psychology, in both original Jungian and contemporary Post-Jungian versions, using the core ideas of archetype, opposites, functions of the psyche and image - supports the very concept of music/sound as image. This thesis will approach the consequent understanding of the role of music in film beyond the decorative-accompaniment task attributed to it and as an image on its own right. The work is divided into three main parts: Part I will introduce general Jungian aspects to build the case of a Jungian psychological account of the music-image. Part II will attempt to combine theory with practice in analysing how the auditory image (mainly music) works (or sometimes clashes) with the visual (picture) to create the ‘film as a whole’ experience. Part III will implement a specific understanding of three individual film cases of different genres, eras and styles as psychologically scrutinised ‘case histories’.

This work seeks to explore the relationship between two arts: music and painting. The aim of this thesis is the creation and execution of an interdisciplinary performance in which music and painting dialogue live, "Painting music", to investigate how both arts relate and influence each other when they are part of a single artistic act and how performers and audience perceive this relationship. To do so, we will investigate interdisciplinary performances, synesthesia (union of perceptions) and the different ways in which painting and music can relate to each other.

Communication is and has always been important for the human as we aredesigned by evolution to communicate as a way to survive and reproduce. Whatmany people do not think about is that music and communication are very closelyrelated due to the fact that music is a type of communication. In this thesis wehave focused on the field of music and communication to discuss the possibilityof combining these to areas to provide better information technology services.More specifically we have focused on discussing the advantages of combining thecommunication technology of instant messaging with music playback. Our goalsare that it will increase the user experience as well as indirectly help the musicindustry to promote artists and their music as the communicating peers will beable to share information about their music in a more efficient way.

The personality of musicians, artists, and other creative persons is of considerable interest to researchers and educators who seek to identify traits associated with musical behaviors. Personality traits can influence music behaviors such as instrument choice, ensemble choice, practice habits, and musical experience, which may contribute to continued music participation. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationships between personality type, music ensemble section, instrument choice (vocal or instrumental), and musical experience in college students and individuals who choose to continue participation after college. Few studies have concentrated on personality characteristics of ensemble members at the collegiate level and after formal education ceases. This is particularly relevant as personality characteristics may not be stable with age. This study examined the following questions: 1) To what extent do personality traits (Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience) relate to ensemble choice (instrumental, vocal no musical ensemble participation) and gender?; and 2) To what extent do personality traits (Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience) relate to ensemble section (e.g., brass, alto voice)? Participants were given a survey containing demographic questions and the Big Five Personality Inventory IPIP (Goldberg, 1992). Results showed that vocalists scored higher in Extroversion and Agreeableness compared to instrumentalists, and Instrumentalists scored higher in Neuroticism than vocalists. These results are consistent with previous research findings. This study has many implications for ensemble directors, such as rehearsal structure and repertoire choice. Music educators could also benefit from this knowledge when developing lesson plans and group assignments. Understanding different personality traits would also help ensemble members with communication within the ensemble.

Throughout the history of Japanese contemporary music composers have been exploring ways to merge Western-style art music and their original, traditional Japanese music. Although in the past compositions which applied expressions of traditional Japanese music to Western-style music were partly successful, ensembles of Western and Japanese instruments often resulted in a serious mismatch. The starting point of this paper is this experience of Japanese contemporary music. It insists that, while the cause is composers' ignorance of the difference in musical parameters between the two musics, those of electroacoustic music can be compatible with Japanese musical tradition in spite of its background in Western culture, because the most developed genre of Japanese music is timbre-dominant. This research examines, from the viewpoint of electroacoustic composition, the musical parameters, acoustical structure and sound aesthetics of traditional Japanese music, and explores the compositional strategy of live electronics for these non-Western instruments, applying them to acousmatic composition.

We investigate the modelling of polyphonic “tracker music” using deep neural networks. Tracker music is a music storage format invented in the late 1980s for use on that time’s home computers and is often used for storing synthesized electronic music. Tracker music differs significantly from other music formats and has properties that makes it both harder and easier to use for training neural networks than other formats. This makes it interesting to explore what methods are most suitable for extracting musical information from the format. As far as we know, we are the first to explore how to use tracker music for music generation. We design a method for turning tracker music into sequential data usable for training neural networks. The sequential nature of the data means that musically unaware sequence models can be used for training. The method is general and can be applied to other kinds of symbolic music. We then compile a dataset of about 20 000 freely available instrumental songs in the tracker format MOD, downloaded from the website The Mod Archive. We use the dataset to train several different sequence models, including a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network and a Transformer model. We evaluate the models using a sequence completion task and we investigate the statistical properties of the output. We also conduct a listener study involving some 100 participants to determine how often music generated by the models is preferred over human-composed music. The listener study’s result indicates that music generated by the models trained on the dataset is sometimes competitive with music composed by humans. We conclude that neural networks for music generation can be trained using tracker music using our proposed conversion method, but that it is cumbersone. Due to how the tracker music format is constructed it is significantly more difficult to get musical information out of it than we initially thought.
Vi undersöker hur man bäst använder sig av trackermusik för att träna neurala nätverk till att generera polyfonisk musik. Trackermusik kan sägas både vara en speciell instrumental musikgenre och ett speciellt musikformat. Formatet som skiljer sig markant från exempelvis MIDI och MP3 har en del egenskaper som gör det svårare och andra som gör det lättare att träna neurala nätverk med det än med jämförbara musikformat. Därför är det intressant att utforska vilka metoder som är bäst att använda för att utvinna musikinformation ur formatet. Så vitt vi vet har ämnet inte utforskats tidigare och vårt utforskande av det är vår uppsats centrala bidrag till forskningen kring musikgenerering med neurala nätverk. I uppsatsen föreslår vi en metod som konverterar trackermusik till ett sekventiellt format som är lämpligt att använda för att träna neurala nätverk. Vi demonstrerar också att metoden fungerar i praktiken genom att träna ett antal neurala nätverk med en samling på cirka 20 000 instrumentala sånger i trackermusiklagringsformatet MOD som vi sedan utvärderar. Utvärderingen består bland annat i en lyssnarstudie. Resultatet av den visar att den musik som genereras av tre neurala nätverk som vi tränar med trackermusiksamlingen ibland föredras av lyssnare över musik skapad av människor. Vi drar slutsatsen att musikgenererande neurala nätverk kan tränas med hjälp av trackermusik med vår föreslagna konverteringsmetod, men att det är bökigt. På grund av hur trackermusik är uppbyggt och organiserat är det betydligt svårare än vad vi inledningsvis trodde att utvinna musikinformation ur det.

The present study is a comparison of music and non-music students with respect to their response patterns on the Brief Symptom Inventory as well as several demographic questions. The sample consisted of 148 non-music students and 141 music students at three levels: (1) freshmen/sophomore; (2) juniors/seniors; and (3) graduate students. Music students consisted of volunteers from several different music classes and non-music students were volunteers from non-music classes. There were no significant differences found among or between groups for the BSI subscales. However, music students were significantly less likely to have gone to counseling in the past and to seek professional counseling for future problems. Recommendations for psycho-educational interventions with musicians are discussed as well as suggestions for future research.

Music Performance
D.M.A.
A prominent yet under-researched composer, Wang Lisan contributed many significant works to the Chinese piano music repertoire. The monograph is a subjective analysis of Wang's selective works and their origins based on the author's own understanding.
Temple University--Theses

Elder Music, Instrumental Music Performance and Affirmative Aging is a Practice-led research project in Community Music performance. A phenomenological, autoethnographic critique of lived musical experience by a senior, former professional musician returning to an accomplished instrumental music performance practice after a playing hiatus of twenty-four years. Research that arose in response to this personal aesthetic process resulted in a performance-led community music investigation, detailing the journey of a musician returning to active performance, without claiming to be either unique or typical. It is both a chronicle articulating the incidence and benefice of later life music making and a report on how this experiential and artistic process involves many mature musicians. Qualitative artistic research revealing a context to the breadth of active involvement and commitment of older musicians, who are not only quantitatively significant and noteworthy in their numbers and musical influence, but in also reflecting the positive benefits of community music making within our society in promoting personal and collective wellness, vitality and social bonding through collegial expressions of abstract musical truth and beauty.
Thesis (Masters)
Master of Music Research (MMusRes)
Queensland Conservatorium
Arts, Education and Law
Full Text

Recently, there have been efforts to design more efficient ways to internalize music by applying the disciplines of cognition, psychology, temporality, aesthetics, and philosophy. Bringing together the fields of art and science, computational techniques can also be applied to musical analysis. Although a wide range of research projects have been conducted, the automatization of music analysis remains emergent. Importantly, patterns are revealed by using automated tools to analyze core musical elements created from melodies, harmonies, and rhythms, high-level features that are perceivable by the human ear. For music to be captured and successfully analyzed by a computer, however, one needs to extract certain information found in the lower-level features of amplitude, frequency, and duration. Moreover, while the identity of harmonic progressions, melodic contour, musical patterns, and pitch quantification are crucial factors in traditional music analysis, these alone are not exclusive. Visual representations are useful tools that reflect form and structure of non-conventional musical repertoire. Because I regard the fluidity of music and visual shape as strongly interactive, the ultimate goal of this thesis is to construct a practical tool that prepares the visual material used for musical composition. By utilizing concepts of time, computation, and composition, this tool effectively integrates computer science, signal processing, and music perception. This will be obtained by presenting two concepts, one abstract and one mathematical, that will provide materials leading to the original composition. To extract the desired visualization, I propose a fully automated tool for musical analysis that is grounded in both the mid-level elements of loudness, density, and range, and low-level features of frequency and duration. As evidenced by my sinfonietta, Equilibrium, this tool, capable of rapidly analyzing a variety of musical examples such as instrumental repertoire, electro-acoustic music, improvisation and folk music, is highly beneficial to my proposed compositional procedure.

I have been designing and building a set of battery powered hybrid synthesizer speaker objects that can be deployed in any location without the need for any additional infrastructure. Composing for and performing with the resulting system has become the focus of my artistic practice. This project brings together my interests in composition, design, synthesis, politics and performance to investigate new methods for performing and experiencing electronic music. The work takes the idea of the impossibility of an objective listener as its starting position and generates environments that give agency to the listener to create their own sonic experience of a given space. It also engages in questions of power and how this practice might work throughits entanglement in various power relations as a minor practice by introducing and opening up the conditions of possibility for other actions. This thesis traces the aesthetic roots of my undertaking in the work of others, including Okkyung Lee, Rie Nakajima, Tetsuya Umeda, Marginal Consort, Tony Conrad and Luc Ferrari. It also details my own experience creating work for the GRM's Acous- monium, the series of decisions made in creating my own alternative speaker orchestra, and the practical process of situated learning2 that I have undertaken to develop a performance practice via three stagings: at Röda Sten Konsthall in Göteborg, within a pedestrian underpass running below the E4 national highway, and at Järvafältet Nature Reserve, north of Stockholm.

Gravel Music is a collection of poems, encompassing a wide range of styles from free verse to sonnets, including several unique forms, using rhyme where it was deemed pertinent, but also operating in a deconstructive mode where prosody is concerned. The book is divided into three sections. Poems in the first section strive toward political and critical utterance, addressing Marxism, Darwinism, neo-pragmatism, and humanism in a sequence of interrogations of the barriers between aesthetics, politics, critical theory, and philosophy, hoping to find traces of truth, fact, and authenticity that transcend category. The second section is comprised of a single lyrical narrative which follows a married couple as they interact on their small farm in late Autumn, addressing themes of literacy, love, and domesticity. The third section continues the focus on domestic life, but also addresses themes of nostalgia for childhood and lost love. The poems of this section move away from the formal, socio-political outbursts of the first section, instead operating primarily through persona and voice, bringing the book to a quiet, personal close.

1. SIRIUS. String quartet in five movements: C, B, A, K, S Approximate duration: 68 minutes 2. Justine: Overture for dance – “The Silvery Crescent Moon” / “The Dance of the Clown”. Full orchestra. Approximate duration: 18 minutes. 3. “The Great Gate of the Capital of Kiev”. Chamber orchestra. Approximate duration: 10 minutes. An arrangement and expansion of the original piece of the same title, as composed by Modest Petrovich Moussorgsky for his piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition. 4. i6. Song for small ensemble (counter-tenor, viola, harp and piano). Approximate duration: 10 minutes. 5. Mattinata. Choral work for solo mixed voices a capella (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass). Approximate duration: 8 minutes. 6. Rose Serenades. Three pieces for piano solo: Claire; …looks, my love…; “When I can Dance…” Approximate duration: 12 minutes 7. Two pieces inspired by the Düben family of organists: - Skara, for string quartet - “Prinz Regent: Tyska Kyrkan (Swedish Prelude)”, for organ. Approximate duration: 11 minutes 8. Five O’Clock. Chamber work for small ensemble (Flute, Clarinet in A, Percussion [Sleigh Bells, Claves, Sand Block, Glockenspiel, Bongo Drums], Piano, Violin, Violoncello. Approximate duration: 16 minutes.

Magister Artium - MA
Molla's Music is a novella about Maureen (Molla), a white Afrikaans woman born in 1935 in Cape Town, who faced poverty and abandonment before apartheid and who, during apartheid, faced the choice between an unwanted pregnancy with a married man, and a carreer in music funded by the father who had betrayed her. Maureen is introduced in three sections with very different voices in each. In the first section she is depicted in the context of being cared for by a single mother with severe post natal depression. The short chapters and long sentences reflect the naïvity of the subject, whose unfiltered observations allow the reader to bear witness to the traumas that dictate her character later in life. She was so ashamed of her poverty, her father's abandonment, and her pregnancy, that she hid all memories of her past from her children and grandchildren and almost managed to die with all her secrets in tact. The second section becomes more sophisticated with longer chapters. The reader is guided through the fifties by a young adult whose adolescent memories inform the events that unfold over a mere two days. Finally, the last section consists of only one chapter, but it reviews an entire life. It is written in the first person, revealing the identity of the narrator. Maureen taught herself piano before school. Her father played the violin and her dedication to music seems to be a mechanism for connecting to him and what his absence from her life represents. It is an absense that eludes consolidation until her death. Molla proved to be such a gifted child that she skipped two years of school and took on music as an extra subject until matric, but financial strain and the shackles of patriarchy limited her options and only after years of working, does she apply to the UCT college of music. She inherits a piano from her landlords, who are evicted during the implementation of the Group Areas Act of 1957. In the years after that, playing piano becomes her private liberation practised in plain sight, on the only heirloom that persists from her past. When she dies, her granddaughter has a heritage that beckons to be resolved and remembered. She does not play the piano she inherited from her grandmother, but starts to investigate its past. In the course of Molla's Music, I explore themes of Afrikaner identity, and question modes of being for white Afrikaans women in South Africa today. By offering an intimate depiction of an individual's search for meaning, while negotiating the forces of Apartheid and patriarchy, especially as a confluence of forces, I hope to gain clarity with regard to my own questions about identity.

The works in this folio are not so much concerned with stylistic unity and consistency as with balancing a strongly subjective expression with the need to shape the music into an effective dramatic (or even melodramatic) entity. In achieving a successful fusion of these priorities the eight works gradually unfold various approaches to handling melodic, rhythmic, harmonic and textural parameters. In preserving and enhancing that which is purely instinctual there is an emerging realization throughout the folio that it has to be submitted to some exercise of the intellect, incorporating a degree of external pre-planning. This provides an ever-increasing security of control over my material and, I believe, a greater sophistication and facility of expression. Within this general concern there emerges one other major trait: a desire to give expression to received cultural characteristics from my own background, which is Scottish and Celtic, This is achieved either by absorbing some element of Celtic traditional music or by employing some extra-musical subject matter as an ingredient, ie: a poem as a setting or as an influence, or some quasi-programmatic handling of natural or cultural phenomena from my native country. However, the ultimate purpose in this was not to write ‘national' music (ie: any notion of parody is studiously avoided), but paradoxically to attain an individual voice.

The attached portfolio is a selection of works that I have composed since October 1990. The selection includes most of the concert music written in this period but excludes the incidental music that I wrote for three productions of Astra Theatre (Woyzeck, Macbeth arid Th~e White Scourge), and incidental music to The Beggar's Opera (written for the St Magnus Festival, Orkney). Two chamber works, with which I was never satisfied, are also omitted: Catch for Three for three oboes, composed for a project for children with special needs and Chimaeric Visions for free bass accordion and percussion. The group of works submitted display several common characteristics; a fascination with instrumental colour and the variety of blends and hues available within an ensemble, a concern for shaping gesture at a motivic and a dramatic level, an interest in metaphor and metonymy in language and music and the possibility of drawing a connection between both art forms, the role of composition processes and structures in determining the perception and comprehension of a work and finally the engagement of the performer in the realisation of the-'virtual' music of the score. This commentary is intended to explore these issues in relation to my work but cannot, for reasons of scope and space, be an authoritative dissertation on each subject. I am aware of the dangers of appropriating terms and concepts from disciplines outside music and have attempted to outline the points of contact in my introductory chapter.

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Este trabalho traz questões relacionadas com a glitch music, gênero ligado à estética do erro que surgiu na década de 1990. Divido em dois pontos: no primeiro, a pesquisa parte de definições iniciais sobre o glitch e a glitch music, buscando delinear um contexto geral que o gênero se desenvolveu. Levantamos também questões conceituais sobre o “erro”, procurando apontar o uso do erro como estética na música. No segundo, mostramos três perspectivas de abordagens distintas do glitch em três compositores diferentes: Yasunao Tone, Oval e Alva Noto. Por último, o trabalho busca abrir novas discussões a respeito do que é o gênero glitch music e o que ele engloba.
This work brings questions related to glitch music, genre linked with the aesthetic of failure that arose in the 1990's. It is divided in two parts. In the first part, the research starts with definitions about glitch and glitch music, trying to outline a general context that the genre has developed. We also bring conceptual questions about "failure" trying to point out the use of error as an aesthetic in music. In the second part, we show three perspectives of different approaches of glitch in three different composers: Yasunao Tone, Oval and Alva Noto. Lastly, this work intends to open new discussions concerning what glitch music genre is, and what it includes.

In a world of open boundaries where the free circulation of spiritual assets and the impetuous flood of information is assured, it appears natural to attempt to assume the clarification of fundamental concepts regarding the art of sounds such as it has been the case in European countries or, to be more specific, in music composed during the 20th century. This stage that was formerly a privilege of a few centres, later of countries, has now been replaced. The united effort of generations has built an impressive thesaurus, generating patterns taken over by still crystallizing cultures which are, in their turn, creating their own musical patrimony whose powerful propensity needs to be inventoried and made available to other people.

I am exploring the way music alters or enhances the perception of our environment. This creative project allows me to explore and visualize several issues that intrigue me: music (sound), emotion, and visual imagery (film). My goal in developing this topic is to allow others to have an experience related to sound and image, where image is altered and enhanced by the use of music.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the importance of the subject of music for high school students. A quantitative method, digital survey, has been used to examine high school students' experiences and feelings toward the subject of music. The results have been analyzed from a socio-cultural perspective and from the viewpoint that learning takes place in communication and interactions between people. The previous research that dealt with the subject in the past has also been included in the analysis process. The results show that the subject of music is important for high school students, albeit of different kinds of significance and from different perspectives. Many students have positive experiences of the subject of music, which results in the subject having a positive meaning for them, while others have negative experiences of the subject. The results also show that the subject of music is important not only for students' mood but also for an individual's development of creativity, problem-solving ability and collaboration ability. This creativity also contributes to other professions and should not only be seen as something artistic for only music or other artistic forms of expression. Creativity can contribute to other professions where problem-solving ability, creativity and collaboration are required.

Can music be made with words alone, artistically arranged? Can music be part of a novel or a short story? Can a novella realize a musical form, and does it mean it is a musical piece? Is being a piece of literature incompatible with being a piece of music as well? If so – in what way or ways? If not, for what reason? These simple questions are the conceptual starting point of the research developed in the present dissertation. It investigates the essential interrelation between music and artistic prose in cases of imitation of music within the latter. Musica textualis, its central concept, is introduced in the first part as a meeting point of two distinct traditions of study, namely Philosophy of Music, on one hand, and the Word and Music Studies, on the other. It is an aporetic field emerging organically in the course of the historical development and dissolution of the system of the arts. Mutual intermedial imitations on the level of artistic creation and appreciation are continuously counterpointed by parallel processes within the history of aesthetic thought, metaphysics of art and musico-literary criticism, influencing greatly ways of perceiving and understanding distinct artforms and the aesthetic experiences they elicit. One of the main aims of the present research was to establish the actual status of the literary incarnations of music in artistic prose. The initial hypothesis was that there are some special cases, where music is not only represented in words by means of description, evocation, allusion and other standard literary techniques, but is actually there in the text, strictly speaking. Such local cases are possible and instantiated: the paradigm example is (Mann, 1967) with its model interpretation in (Scher, 1967), but there are also antecedent cases such as (Woolf, 1921) interpreted in (Harmat, 2008) or very recent artistically outstanding realizations as (Libera, 2013), interpreted here. What emerges as a positive theory from this research is the category of musica textualis. It denotes a mixed form which unites word-made-music with literary prose in a compound whole sui generis. It is conceptually symmetrical to programme music, where the real presence of music and literature in a compound structure perceptually made solely of musical sounds without words is not contested. Through its complex nature and fragile statute, it functions as a regulative ideal for the above-mentioned eponymous aporetic field. The explanatory force, methodological and interpretative implications of this theory are significant. Especially, the very process of its historical emergence through the aesthetics of Romanticism, the development of programme music and R. Wagner’s musical drama technique and the “intermedia turn” characterizing Modernism, unveil its necessary place in the conceptual map of the complex interrelation of these two temporal allographic arts: epics and music. The dissertation takes into account the vast and problematic discussion internal to the Word and Music studies and similar branches of intermodal/interart/transdisciplinary studies in their classical Anglophone version cf. (Scher, 1970; Wolf, 1999; Petermann, 2014), as well as in their Polish counterpart, anticipated critically in the work of Tadeusz Szulc (1937), and recently developed in, e.g. (Balbus, 2004; Hejmej, 2008, 2012). Also French and other studies are taken into consideration, cf. e.g. (Pautrot, 2004; Picard, 2008, 2010). It can potentially contribute to some significant clarifications in these controversial fields, but it is methodologically autonomous. It combines some elements of conceptual analysis and argumentation typical of analytic Philosophy of Art with a broader “continental” contextual horizon and interpretative ambitions. The main source of its insight comes from the immediate aesthetic experience of prose containing crucial instantiations of what can be interpreted as musica textualis. These insights are confronted with the achievements of the classical Philosophy of Music on one hand and the Word and Music practice on the other. As far as it is known, this is a novel approach within Philosophy. This method, intended as facilitating future mutual dialogue between the disciplines, is potentially beneficial for both (and open for further dialogue with musicology, which today is keen on borrowing research tools from Literary Theory). For the philosophers of music it discovers a neglected area of study, through a meticulous polemics with the conceptualizations of music at hand in the analytic tradition. It shows that works of musica textualis are, at least in part (like operas or Lieder, for that matter) works of music, and that there are no substantial grounds for excluding them from philosophical scrutiny of music. It shows that only the most anti-essentialist, accidentalist philosopher could find a coherent reason to reject a work of musica textualis from the realm of music on contingent grounds of the communis opinio; even his reasoning, though, is ultimately proven fallacious. Other philosophers are invited to rethink the way they localize essential features of the phenomenon in question. For the literary scholars interested in the practices described as musicalization of fiction, intermedial transposition / translation / transfer, the musical novel, music in the words within the venerated tradition of the comparison of the arts on the axis Music – Literature and especially in the 20th Century born Word and Music Studies – musica textualis can become a helpful tool in the on-going methodological dispute. It helps to distinguish genuine problems of method within the Word and Music Studies from what emerges as the vital aporetical core of interart phenomena such as Mann’s Doctor Faustus. This core confronts us with questions which cannot be resolved through some consensus within the scholarly community, but are better accepted and cherished as fertile sources of artistic and intellectual inspiration. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part introduces the concept of musica textualis, and places it within the contemporary philosophical discussion on music, explaining in detail its Boethian pedigree as well as its relation to the state of the art within Word and Music studies, as discussed in the Introduction. In the chapter Music Beyond the Senses it offers some novel arguments against definitions of music that would exclude musica textualis a priori; it defends a slight modification of the definition of music advanced by (Kania, 2011). Problematic cases of silent music are discussed extensively and the notion of intentional calibration – inspired by stances taken by Husserl, Ingarden, Iser, Wittgenstein, Wollheim, Scruton and others – is introduced. The second part consists of three chapters consecrated to three Polish authors (Iwaszkiewicz, Libera, Bartnicki) whose work is interpreted as displaying three radically different modes of musica textualis. This choice, by no means exhaustive, is intended to illustrate the introduced concept at work in dissimilar cases, sharing though one property: all have been paid little or no attention by the international musico-literary scholarship (not to mention the philosophers of music). The third and conclusive part shows musica textualis as a genuine aporetic field.
Al centro della ricerca presenata nella dissertazione si pone la domanda se la musica possa essere parte di un romanzo o un racconto breve o, in altri termini, se il fatto che un’opera sia letteraria sia (in)compatibile con il suo essere anche un’opera musicale. Si può far musica con le parole? E se sì, in che modo? Se invece la risposta è “no”, per quali ragioni? La dissertazione indaga le relazioni tra musica e prosa artistica nei casi in cui all’interno di quest’ultima vi sia un’imitazione della musica. Il lavoro è articolato in tre parti. Nella prima parte introduco il concetto di musica textualis, lo colloco nella contemporanea discussione filosofica sulla musica e ne spiego la discendenza Boeziana. Si tratta del concetto centrale della ricerca, il punto d’incontro di due diverse tradizioni di studio, vale a dire, da un lato la filosofia della musica e, dall’altro, i cosiddetti Word and Music Studies, offrendo lo stato dell’arte. Sempre in questa parte, nel capitolo intitolato Music Beyond the Senses, offro alcuni argomenti nuovi contro le definizioni della musica che escluderebbero a priori la musica textualis. Inoltre, vengono discussi estensivamente casi di silent music. Nel capitolo successivo viene sviluppata la riflessione sul carattere intenzionale di ogni proprieta musicale, ispirata a posizioni di Husserl, Ingarden, Iser, Wittgenstein, Wollheim, Scruton e altri. Una definizione di musica ispirata a Kania (2011) viene proposta per accomodare musica textualis. Il mio lavoro prende in considerazione l’ampia discussone interna ai Word and Music studies e agli analoghi filoni di studio sull’intermodalità sia nella classica versione anglofona (Scher, 1970; Wolf, 1999; Prieto, 2002; Shockley, 2009; Petermann, 2014), sia nella controparte di lingua polacca, anticipata nei lavori di Tadeusz Szulc (1937) e sviluppata in anni più recenti ad esempio (Hejmej e Głowiński). Anche contributi provenienti dall’area linguistica francese sono presi in considerazione (Pautrot, Picard). Nei tre capitoli della seconda parte del lavoro mi rivolgo a tre autori polacchi (Iwaszkiewicz, Libera, Bartnicki), interpretandone le opere come esempi di tre modi radicalmente diversi di musica textualis. La scelta di questi autori, in nessun modo esaustiva, è volta a illustrare come i concetti precedentemente introdotti operino in casi diversi che, tuttavia, condividono una proprietà: tutti hanno prestato poca o nessuna attenzione alla scholarship musico-letteraria internazionale (per non menzionare la filosofia della musica). Nella terza e ultima parte della dissertazione offro ulteriori riflessioni sulla musica textualis in quanto nozione che fa sorgere un genuino campo aporetico. La dissertazione mostra come il complesso campo d’indagine della musica textualis emerga dallo sviluppo e dalla dissoluzione del sistema delle arti. Reciproche imitazioni intermediali a livello della creazione e dell’apprezzamento artistico trovano riscontro in processi paralleli nell’estetica, nella metafisica dell’arte e sul piano della critica musicale e letteraria, influenzando il modo di percepire e comprendere forme d’arte diverse e l’esperienza estetica che occasionano. Uno degli scopi principali della ricerca è stato di stabilire lo status attuale dell’incarnazione della musica nella prosa artistica. L’ipotesi iniziale è stata quella di una presenza della musica nel testo, inteso come spartito per un’interpretazione musicale, e non tanto in descrizioni, evocazioni e attraverso altre tecniche letterarie. Al riguardo l’esempio paradigmatico è il Doktor Faustus di Thomas Mann, ma vi sono anche antecedenti come Monday or Tuesday di Virginia Woolf ed esempi più recenti come lo straordinatio Toccata in do maggiore di Antoni Libera (trad. it. 2015), di cui la dissertazione offre un’interpretazione. Alla luce dell’analisi di questi casi, un risultato della ricerca è di mostrare che la categoria di musica textualis denota una forma mista che unisce musica-fatta-con-le-parole e prosa letteraria in un tutto sui generis. Si tratta di una realizzazione concettualmente simmetrica alla musica a programma, nella quale la presenza reale di musica e letteratura in una struttura composta, percettivamente costituita solo da suoni musicali senza parole, pur essendo contestabile da parte dei formalisti estremi, rimane pur sempre chiaramente concettualizzata. Nel mio lavoro metto in luce la forza esplicativa e le implicazioni metodologiche e interpretative di questa prospettiva teorica, il cui luogo nella mappa concettuale delle relazioni complesse delle due arti allografiche temporali – l’epica e la musica – è del resto rivelato già dal processo della sua emergenza storica nell’estetica romantica, nello sviluppo della musica a programma, nel dramma musicale wagneriano e nell’“intermedia turn” modernista. La dissertazione combina elementi di analisi concettuale tipici della filosofia analitica con le più ampie ambizioni interpretative “continentali”. La fonte principale delle sue intuizioni deriva comunque dall’esperienza (estetica) di una prosa contenente esemplificazioni cruciali di ciò che può essere interpretato come musica textualis. Tali intuizioni sono confrontate da un lato con i risultati della classica filosofia della musica, dall’altro, con la pratica della Word and Music. Si tratta di un approccio filosofico che apre, per la filosofia della musica, un campo di studio trascurato dalle teorie sulla musica presenti nella tradizione analitica. Mostro che le opere di musica textualis sono, almeno in parte, opere musicali, e che non vi sono ragioni sostanziali per escluderle dall’indagine filosofica della musica. La ricerca mostra inoltre come, per gli studiosi di letteratura interessati alla pratica descritta come musicalization of fiction, trasposizone intermediale o music in the words, all’interno della tradizione del paragone fra le arti lungo l’asse musica-letteratura, l’ipotesi musica textualis possa essere uno strumento utile nella continua disputa metodologica. Essa aiuta a distinguere i genuini problemi di metodo interni ai Word and Music Studies da quanto emerge come il vitale nucleo aporetico di fenomeni inter-artistici come il Doktor Faustus di Mann. Questo nucleo presenta questioni che, secondo me, vanno accettate e coltivate come fertili fonti di ispirazione artistica e intellettuale.

This essay is about the municipal music and culture schools’ teaching of students during their ordinary school day in elementary schools. There is a debate going on concerning if it is according to the law or not when students leave their class to get instrumental or song lessons. The music and culture schools has been teaching students in their ordinary schooldays since a long time in Sweden and my intention is to examine the attitudes for or against music teaching in ordinary schooldays. For this purpose, I choose to interview principals and teachers from elementary schools in different parts of Sweden. There are differences between the schools in my examination according to size and if they are situated in a city or in the countryside. Common to all the choosen schools is that they all have students leaving their scheduled school day for instrumental or song lessons. The result of this examine is not clear but shows differences between the schools concerning the principals’ and teachers’ attitudes for or against music lessons during the school day. A tendency I notice is that the principals and teachers in countryside schools are more positive than those in the city schools. The result does not show a generalized image of attitudes when my selection is too small but shows an image of each of the principals and teachers’ attitudes about music and culture school teaching. At the end I am discussing the uncertainty that is present in the schools about how to relate to culture schools’ teaching of students during their ordinary school day. From the government and the inspecting authority, the frames are conflicting with each other and causes this uncertainty in how to act.
Uppsatsen handlar om de kommunala musik- och kulturskolornas undervisning av elever under ordinarie skoldag i grundskolan. Skolinspektionen utfärdar ett vite om 500 000 kronor i juni 2019 gentemot Gislaveds kommun eftersom musikskolan där undervisar under skoltid. Elever som går ifrån ordinarie undervisning riskerar att inte nå målen i skolan menar Skolinspektionen och att sådan frånvaro strider mot skollagen. Musik- och kulturskolorna har under lång tid undervisat vissa elever under deras ordinarie skoldag och för att ta reda på attityderna för eller emot detta har jag valt att intervjua rektorer och lärare i grundskolan. Skolorna som blir föremål för mina intervjuer ligger i olika delar av landet och uppvisar skillnader i storlek och om de ligger i tätort eller på landsbygden. Alla skolorna har det gemensamt att de har elever som går till sin kulturskolelektion på skoltid. Syftet är att undersöka hur grundskolans rektorer och lärare ser på kulturskolornas närvaro under skoldagen, och om hur de ställer sig till att elever går till sina kulturskolelektioner under ordinarie skoltid. Resultatet av undersökningen är inte entydigt utan visar på en splittring mellan skolorna i hur rektorer och lärare ser på kulturskolornas undervisning under skoldagen. Tendensen är att man i glesbygdsskolor är mer positiv och i tätort mer negativ till kulturskoleundervisning på skoltid. Arbetet ger ingen generell bild av attityder eftersom urvalet är för litet men det ger en bild av de enskilda rektorernas och lärarnas attityder till kulturskoleundervisning på skoltid. I diskussionen diskuterar jag den osäkerhet som råder kring hur man i skolan kan förhålla sig till kulturskoleundervisning på skoltid. Ramarna för hur skolorna kan agera är motstridiga med regering och inspekterande myndighet som resonerar olika i frågan.