Finding A Voice – Exploration of Modes and Timbres : A portfolio of ten original compositions with accompanying commentaries

This thesis marks the culmination of four years’ work, as part of my PhD study in composition. The portfolio consists of ten pieces, lasting in total approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes, and a commentary comprising an analysis of each of the works. The main emphasis has been on the development of an individual style, informed by the exploration of twentieth and twenty-first century compositional techniques, instrumental timbres, stylistic genres, forms, scale derivations and the wider aesthetic of contemporary music. The portfolio includes works for solo instruments, ensemble and orchestra. One of the main areas of research has been to devise combinatorial scales, based on modality, whole-tone scales and pentatony, based on my knowledge and experience of a range of musical traditions and genres, both western and eastern, thereby deriving new melodic and harmonic resources. Each piece in the portfolio was written with one or more different concepts in mind and consists of either single- or multi-movement formats

What is the Music of Music Therapy? An Enquiry into the Aesthetics of Clinical Improvisation

In many places in the Western world where music therapy occurs, improvisation is a significant and widespread practice in clinical work. The question of the nature of improvisation in music therapy is the topic of this enquiry, with particular reference to musical ontology and aesthetics. I examine how a consideration of ontology enables a distinction to be drawn between the music made within the clinical setting, known as clinical improvisation, and music that is made elsewhere. The context for this enquiry is the music therapy practice of the UK. Through an examination of the recent history of this practice, I establish two distinct approaches to clinical improvisation in the UK, music-centred and psychodynamic. I show how there are different ontologies of music ‘at work’ between these two approaches. I also demonstrate how these distinctions manifest in the question of the location of the therapeutic effect: is it in the music or the therapeutic relationship? Finally, I examine the nature of clinical improvisation in relation to performance. I explain how a consideration of distinct ontologies of music within clinical improvisation indicates a further distinction between the music of music therapy and art improvisation that is made elsewhere

Filling The Gaps: Playing The Semiotic Network In The Extemporization Of Scores For Improvisational Theater

The Art of Scoring for Improvisational Theater draws on traditions whose origins are obscured by the fog of History and Myth. With no prior plan, a musician is tasked with providing accompaniment that creates or reinforces mood, era, location, or genre. Through such accompaniment, a musician reads and activates nodes in a semiotic network, to generate context, subtext, or both. Drawing from sources in Semiotics, Multimedia, Marketing, Sociology, Artificial Intelligence, Film Music History, Theater, Music Theory, and Musicology, as well as interviews with an array of Participants and the Author\u27s personal experience, this paper seeks to articulate a framework of musical understanding that is uniquely in-the-moment, yet ever-present

SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON FEMALE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMPOSER EVELYN SIMPSON-CURENTON

Those who are interested in learning more about Evelyn Simpson-Curenton (b. 1953) will find it challenging to find scholarly material on her life and music. She is best known for her arrangements of spirituals that were sang and recorded by Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman (whose concert recording Spirituals in Concert was released in 1991). Simpson-Curenton is also known for her choral work, “Psalm 91,” made famous by Oakwood University’s Aeolians. Though she is self-published, her absence from compilations, volumes, and anthologies for solo voice and piano is regrettable. This dissertation provides well researched scholarly information about her musical life and contributions. It presents biographical information, a first-person interview, and a descriptive works catalogue for teachers, performers, and research scholars. By highlighting Simpson-Curenton’s work and promoting it, we also actively reckon with the racist past and its exclusion of black voices. The goal of this work is to promote Simpson-Curenton’s music for use by teachers, singers, and coaches. It also works to lift black voices, specifically black female artists, into the spotlight they so deserve

Making music out of architecture and from-architecture-music-an oddyssey

These are the documents submitted for the First Review as work-in-progress, the first (longer) and the second (shorter) versions of the PhD research project to date, together with a summary titled The Final Proposal for PhD for First Review September 2019. Please note that the first version is unfinished and needs approximately another 30,000 words, questions answered, some further exploration of points raised in discussion and other relevant points, revision and editing. The second version is on-going. Please Note: The file titled Latest save of Making music out of architecture seems unable to be viewed in Preview perhaps due to its size. It can however be viewed from Download in which case please allow some time for this to occur. The other two documents can be viewed in Previe

There used to be order : Life on the Copperbelt after the privatisation of the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines

Includes bibliographical references.The thesis examines what happened to the texture of place and the experience of life on a Zambian Copperbelt town when the state-owned mine, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) was privatized beginning 1997 following the implementation of structural adjustment policies that introduced free market policies and drastically reduced social welfare. The Copperbelt has long been a locus for innovative research on urbanisation in Africa. My study, unusual in the ethnographic corpus in its examination of middle-income decline, directs us to thinking of the Copperbelt not only as an extractive locale for copper whose activities are affected by the market, but also as a place where the residents’ engagement with the reality of losing jobs and struggling to earn a living after the withdrawal of mine welfare is re-texturing simultaneously both the material and social character of the place. It builds on an established anthropological engagement with the region that began with the Manchester school. This had done much to develop a theoretical approach to social change. The dissertation contributes to this literature by reflecting on how landscape and the art of living are interwoven and co-produce possibilities that, owing to both historical contingencies (for example, market fluctuations) and social formation (the kinds of networks and relationships to which one has access, positions in a nascent class structure and access to material means) make certain forms of inhabiting the world (im) possible, (un) successful for oneself and others. Ethnographic fieldwork using qualitative research methods was conducted over a two-year period between 2007 and 2009 with a core of close informant relationships from which a wider network was established. This was complemented by two quantitative neighbourhood surveys to measure the scale of observable phenomena. The author makes a case for an anthropology of "trying", an expression often made in response by Copperbelt residents to how they are getting on. It is one that indicates an improvised life and offers an analytical approach to exploring the back-story to the residents’ observation that in the (ZCCM) past there used to be order

A Creative Improvisational Companion Based On Idiomatic Harmonic Bricks

This demonstration presents an implementation of a computer-assisted approach to music generation called functional scaffolding for musical composition (FSMC) whose representation facilitates creative combination, exploration, and transformation of musical ideas and spaces. The approach is demonstrated through a program called MaestroGenesis with a convenient GUI that makes it accessible to even non-musicians. Music in FSMC is represented as a functional relationship between an existing human composition, or scaffold, and a generated accompaniment. This relationship is represented by a type of artificial neural network called a compositional pattern producing network (CPPN). A human user without any musical expertise can then explore how accompaniment can relate to the scaffold through an interactive evolutionary process akin to animal breeding

A creative improvisational companion based on idiomatic harmonic bricks

We describe an improvisational companion based on the concept of harmonic bricks, as articulated by Cork and others. Our companion is software that can play background for, and trade melodies with, a human soloist. While exhibiting creativity itself, its greater purpose is to improve creativity of its user. Bricks, originally intended for memorization of chord progressions, are used here as a structuring device for improvised melodies within a tune, as a basis for interaction, and as a means of learning new grammars for the purpose of generating melodies by the companion. A user interface for a partially implemented system is presented