The Dramatic Use of the Flute in Bright Sheng's Melodies of a Flute and Flute Moon

Bright Sheng (b. 1955), a Chinese-born American composer, has brought his traditional heritage to his adopted home by grafting a variety of Chinese art forms onto the language of modern Western music. Sheng creates a synthetic style that incorporates Chinese traditional materials, including folkloric traditions, legends, and poetry by employing Western musical genres and instruments. His cross-cultural approach, with its sense of balance between East and West, has garnered the attention of audiences and critics both at home and internationally. This study explores Sheng’s eclectic procedures with case studies of two of his representative cultural fusion works—Flute Moon (1999) and Melodies of a Flute (2012). It focuses on two aspects of his synthetic approach. First, the essay will discuss how Sheng evokes timbres and textures that are recognizably Chinese, but executed through the exclusive use of Western instruments. Of particular importance is the imitation of the sound of Chinese flute (dizi) by using members of the Western flute family and applying a variety of colors, timbres, and playing techniques. Second, the study examines how Sheng takes inspiration from the classic lyrical poetry of the Song dynasty (songci) and Chinese mythology. I provide an interpretation of poetic images and symbolism from these elements in the context of the poem’s culture and history to afford performers a deeper understanding of Sheng’s compositional style and performing practice.Music, Moores School o

From Line to Shape to Space: Composition as Representation of The Visual Elements

It is widely understood that the experience of music exists beyond that of just listening. The idea that audience members draw pictures in their mind or trace shapes with their hands while listening to music has been well studied. This thesis draws from this research and examines it from the mirror image: what if instead of studying the images created while experiencing music, I pre-empted this and translated pre-constructed images into music. In order to create a framework around this translation, I draw from visual art theory and pedagogy, namely the concept of The Visual Elements from Otto G. Ocvirk, et. al’s Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice, Twelfth Edition (2012). Through the duration of this project, I created seven original compositions, five of which explore the translation of visual elements. In this thesis, I first present relevant literature, including quantitative research around cross-modal perception and later around the visual elements and their musical translations. Then, I discuss my compositional portfolio, methodological and analytical approaches. Finally, I will present my analysis, demonstrating how I translated the different visual elements in my body of work. This analysis is segmented based on the different elements, line, shape, form, space, colour, value, and texture. I used the idea of translating visual elements as a concept to broaden my composition technique and content inspiration

Xenakis

Xenakis: His Life in Music is a full-length study of the influential contemporary composer Iannis Xenakis. Following the trajectory of Xenakis’s compositional development, James Harley, who studied with Xenakis, presents the works together with clear explanations of the technical and conceptual innovations that shaped them. Harley examines the relationship between the composer and two early influences: Messiaen and Le Corbusier. Particular attention is paid to analyzing works which were vital to the composer’s creative development, from early, unpublished works to the breakthrough pieces Metastasis and Pithoprakta, through the oft-discussed decade of formalization and the evolving styles of the succeeding three decades

A Schenkerian-Schoenbergian Analysis of David Maslanka's Concerto for Clarinet and Wind Ensemble and Implications for Performance

David Maslanka has emerged as one of the most prominent composers of music for wind instruments. His most recent piece for clarinet, the Concerto for Clarinet and Wind Ensemble (2014), has been performed and recorded multiple times but has not been addressed by scholars, mainly because the piece is so recent. Previous scholarship concerned with the performance of Maslanka’s clarinet music, such as Mietz (2011), Wester (2013), and Franklin (2014), largely focuses on how Maslanka musically depicts his programmatic inspirations for a piece. There have been substantially fewer if any attempts to explore Maslanka’s music using other tools of analysis. In this document, I will offer a Schenkerian-Schoenbergian analysis of the Concerto for Clarinet and Wind Ensemble and discuss performance implications based on the interpretation of my analysis. In Schenkerian-Schoenbergian analysis, Schenkerian analysis is used to locate the motives that are transformed throughout a piece in accordance with Schoenberg’s concept of the Grundgestalt. The performance implications of my analysis arise not from an aim desire to communicate or convey analytical particulars, but from my reactions and emotional responses to the analysis. Motives and their development, rather than events that the performer should “bring out,” elicit emotional or physical responses that can impact performance. This approach to performance and analysis yields various interpretative options in the concerto that might otherwise go unnoticed

Urban Opera: Navigating Modernity through the Oeuvre of Strauss and Hofmannsthal.

The aural experience of modernity has in large part remained in the shadow of visuality studies in scholarship on Austro-German urban culture of the early twentieth century. This dissertation argues that rapid and radical transformations in urban soundscapes at the turn of the century fostered a notable sonic sensibility among residents. City dwellers across classes, gender, and professions frequently commented on their acoustic environments, and intellectuals and artists found aesthetic and critical inspiration in myriad soundscapes. This study identifies the collaborative operas of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal as a particularly rich and multi-faceted manifestation of this cultural-historical phenomenon, and examines a specifically modern sonic sensibility through their oeuvre. The dissertation argues that Strauss and Hofmannsthal engaged opera’s complex sound system to stage characteristically modern sounds and acoustic situations, to explore new modes of listening, and to reflect on the socio-political, cultural, and techno-scientific changes that the many novel sounds of modernity represented. Each chapter features a prominent sonic dimension: the homogeneous ambient sound of the city; urban noise; women’s heightened acoustic presence in public life; and new audio technologies. Analyses draw on opera’s musical, poetic, and dramatic material as well as on dramaturgic directions and the correspondence between the two artists. The literary and musical canon, and incidental commentary produced by contemporary political activists, music critics, journalists, and ordinary residents of Vienna, Munich, and Berlin provide further source material. Working with the score and libretto from their operas, and reading them against their cultural-historical backdrop, this dissertation contributes significantly to interdisciplinary scholarship in literary, musicological and sound studies. Hofmannsthal’s long-ignored libretti reveal how the poet saw a remedy to his Sprachskepsis (the insufficiency of language) in sound, and more specifically in the concept of tone (in poetry and the voice). The dissertation further presents a critical intervention in modernity studies by establishing the operas as a part of the modernist canon. Finally, this dissertation constructs a new story line of sound and listening in the history of German and Austrian modern culture.PHDGermanic Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102451/1/soheinz_1.pd

The Music Sound

A guide for music: compositions, events, forms, genres, groups, history, industry, instruments, language, live music, musicians, songs, musicology, techniques, terminology , theory, music video. Music is a human activity which involves structured and audible sounds, which is used for artistic or aesthetic, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The traditional or classical European aspects of music often listed are those elements given primacy in European-influenced classical music: melody, harmony, rhythm, tone color/timbre, and form. A more comprehensive list is given by stating the aspects of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Common terms used to discuss particular pieces include melody, which is a succession of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord, which is a simultaneity of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord progression, which is a succession of chords (simultaneity succession); harmony, which is the relationship between two or more pitches; counterpoint, which is the simultaneity and organization of different melodies; and rhythm, which is the organization of the durational aspects of music

Improvising Resistance: Jazz, Poetry, and the Black Arts Movement, 1960–1969

This thesis is an interdisciplinary analysis of jazz music and poetry produced by African-American artists, primarily in New York, over the course of the 1960s, set within the broad context of the civil-rights and black-nationalist movements of the same period. Its principal contention is that the two forms afford each other symbiotic illumination. Close reading of jazz musicology in particular illuminates the directions taken by the literature of the period in a manner that has rarely been fully explored. By giving equal critical attention to the two artistic forms in relation to each other, the epistemological and social radicalism latent and explicit within them can more fully be understood. Through this understanding comes also a greater appreciation of the effects that the art of this period had upon the politics of civil rights and black nationalism in America – effects which permeated wider culture during a decade in which significant change was made to the legal position of African-Americans within the United States, change forced by a newly, and multiply, vocalized African-American consciousness. The thesis examines the methods by which jazz and literature contributed to the construction of new historically-constituted black subjectivities represented aurally, orally and visually. It looks at how the different techniques of each form converse with each other, and how they prompt consequential re-presentations and re cognizations of established forms from within and without their own continua. That examination is conducted primarily through forensic close readings of records made between 1960 and 1967, which though of widely differing styles nevertheless can be said to fall under the broad umbrella term of 'post-bop' jazz, alongside equally close readings of poetry written primarily by members of the New York wing of the equally broadly-termed Black Arts Movement [BAM] between 1964 and 1969