Changing the system: the music of Christian Wolff

Changing the System is piece by American composer Christian Wolff for a variable number of musicians. It was written in the early 1970s when Wolff’s music was undergoing certain changes and attempting to address the changing political situation around him. This chapter looks at the piece, Changing the System, both in terms of its constituent parts and materials, and in the broader context of experimental and indeterminate musical traditions and their relationship with ‘political’ art. The final section compares Wolff’s work with Luigi Nono, Hans Werner Henze, and Cornelius Cardew, as well as the broader issues of time and participation within avant-garde practices

Form and Dialectical Opposition in Elliott Carter’s Compositional Aesthetic

In his many writings and interviews, Elliott Carter frequently stresses the connection between human experiences of opposition and conflict and the opposition he composes into his musical interactions. While these concepts have received much attention in the scholarly literature over the decades, in this dissertation I examine the role of opposition in Carter’s music by bringing Carter’s aesthetic into contact with an Adornian tradition of dialectical aesthetics, something new to Carter scholarship. In particular, I harness Adorno’s concept of the social mediation of music materials to shed light on Carter’s linking of the musical and the human in his highly abstracted music. Central to this mediation is the way materials respond immanently to social conditions. I show how Carter conceives of musical form and temporality in terms closely aligned to Adorno, particularly with respect to non-repetition and freedom of formal design. However, I also argue that the way in which Carter worked with his musical materials did not remain static but responded to a changing modernism around the turn of the twenty-first century. Through an analysis of two of Carter’s late-late orchestral compositions, I examine how the notion of dialectical opposition finds expression in sonic images of lightness, effervescence and human fragility rather than the explosive oppositions of Carter’s middle period music. Part 1 of the thesis identifies traces of dialectical thinking in Carter’s writings and interviews and interprets these through an Adornian lens. Part 2 presents technical analyses of both the Boston Concerto (2002) and the ASKO Concerto (2000), focusing on how the repetition built in to the ritornello form of both pieces is re- formed by way of Carter’s dialectical handling of form and content. Part 3 offers a ‘second reflection’ in which philosophical concepts in Part 1 and technical concepts in Part 2 are drawn together into a critical analysis of how both materials and composer are mediated by the social

Applying a constructivist approach to the assessment of compositions in a secondary technology-based music classroom

The purpose of this case study was to explore the perspectives and reflections of students and an educator who engaged in the assessment techniques of versioning and critique in a high school classroom employing Technology-Based Music Instruction (TBMI). The use of versioning (whereby students saved projects daily with a different file name), and critique was supported by and chosen based on a constructivist perspective of learning and assessment (Fosnot, 2005; Jonassen, 1992; Scott, 2012). I sought to document what students expressed about their experiences with versioning and critique in a TBMI classroom in relation to their learning process. I also explored the ways students constructed meaning and understanding through the process of reflection and discourse while using versioning and critique in a TBMI setting, as well as the ways their experiences with versioning and critique influenced their views of growth and self-expression. I presented one educator’s impressions regarding how the use of versioning and critique influenced his view of assessment in a TBMI setting. Study participants included a teacher and four students engaged in composition as part of an Introduction to Music Technology class at a private high school. Over a three-month period, I conducted three observations and two interviews with each study participant. Data included transcriptions of interviews, student journals, videos of the classroom, and fieldnotes. For data analysis, I employed an iterative coding process, which included a deductive and inductive application of codes. Data were then sorted thematically and summarized. Analysis revealed that the educator and students found both versioning and critique to be helpful and valuable in a number of ways. The students and teacher reported that versioning provided information about each student’s individual productivity level and unique compositional process. Students found that sharing their music and providing feedback with their peers through the critique process enabled them to interact with a community of musicians who had varying musical tastes and backgrounds. Future research could expand on this study by implementing daily student reflections and replicating aspects of this study in other classroom settings

Agency and Parallelism in Three Saxophone Works by Dorothy Chang: a Performative Analysis

Dorothy Chang’s saxophone works are significant contributions to modern saxophone repertoire. Chang’s music employs multifaceted construction that presents unique post-tonal vocabularies with significant motivic action within traditional frameworks, which creates a dialogue with the past and present. This provides a wealth of interpretive avenues for performers. Nonetheless, there is a lack of scholarship pertaining to Chang and her works. This dissertation’s analytical focus of Two Preludes for alto saxophone and piano (1993), Walk on Water for alto saxophone and cello (2004), and Afterlight for soprano saxophone and piano (2018) initiates the necessary conversation of Chang’s importance as a composer while providing a useful resource on performative and post-tonal interpretation. After tools of general analysis (which includes formal, thematic, motivic, and stylistic consideration) are applied, each piece is contemplated through the lenses of agency and narrative theories, most notably those of Hatten, Agawu, and Almén. This multi-tiered approach reveals how Chang’s three saxophone works possess commonalities of developing variation and simultaneous opposition, which both play integral roles in the cultivation of narrative. Agential roles and narrative can then be traced back through the different levels of analysis to reveal narrative parallelism, which iv reinforces the potential avenues of meaning inherent in Dorothy Chang’s work. Finally, performance suggestions are provided that are grounded in these analytical findings

Musical value in the jazz tradition of the 20th century

This thesis analyses the aesthetic principles of jazz, with the underlying motivation being the question of how different cultural perspectives regarding music and art, and their boundaries and definitions, are combined. It is fundamentally interdisciplinary – a synthesis of musicology and aesthetics that analyses the development of jazz’s aesthetic values, and their relationship with social and cultural influences. This approach serves as a corrective to the musicological exploration of creative socio-cultural phenomenon, which, while insightful, has lacked the inclusion of contemporary aesthetic analysis. In exploring questions of the philosophy of music, traditional aesthetic issues such as representation, authenticity, and expression in music are confronted. As this is developed, broader philosophical topics such as ontology, artistic virtue, and culture and appropriation are discussed, with jazz’s unique aesthetic values at the centre. In building an appropriate ethical and musicological framework, this thesis posits questions regarding the reliability of Western aesthetic theory when understanding diaspora culture, particularly the view of non-Western aesthetic principles as ancillary to the development of contemporary musical aesthetics. This informs an examination of the art vs entertainment dichotomy, and an assessment of the aesthetic legacy of modernism. This thesis emphasises the importance of the synthesis of philosophical aesthetics and musicology, and in understanding jazz’s aesthetic values we see the influence of the African American creative movements of the early 20th century, the role of factors such as social status, class, race, and economics, and how strict categories such as art and entertainment overlook unique creative values

Composer and performer roles in contemporary music: an autoethnographic study

In 20th and 21st century contemporary classical music the instrumentalist has played a vital role in developing the art form. However, the input of the performer into the preparation of new works is not one which has been clearly documented. This project is a practice-led approach that articulates the contribution of the contemporary music performer in more detail. As an entry point into an autoethnographic project, I will discuss two case-studies (émoi by Evan Johnson and luminous by Kristian Ireland) as examples of my practice with contemporary music scores, and in response to these, compose my own compositions. The written thesis is contextualised by a CD of contemporary repertoire for solo flute (VALE) and recordings of two of my own compositions, as well as supporting recordings and score examples. From a methodological perspective, this project seeks to articulate the concepts and practices that lie behind my work with a contemporary score, leading to a reassessment of the performer, composer and score paradigm

New vernaculars and feminine ecriture; twenty-first century avant-garde film

This practice-based research project explores the parameters of – and aims to construct – a new film language for a feminine écriture within a twenty first century avant-garde practice. My two films, Radio and The New World, together with my contextualising thesis, ask how new vernaculars might construct subjectivity in the contemporary moment. Both films draw on classical and independent cinema to revisit the remix in a feminist context. Using appropriated and live-action footage the five short films that comprise Radio are collaged and subjective, representing an imagined world of short, chaptered ‘songs’ inside a radio set. The New World also uses both live-action and found footage to inscribe a feminist transnational world, in which the narrative is continuous and its trajectory bridges, rather than juxtaposes, the stories it tells. Both the films and the contextualising written text flag the possibility of new approaches at the intersections between cinema, poetry, feminism and critical theory. Drawing on the work of a number of filmmakers, feminists, writers and poets - including Abigail Child, Scott MacDonald, Betzy Bromberg, Christopher MacLaine, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles and others - I describe the possibilities of cross-pollination of media and approaches. Through interrogating the methodologies of feminist, independent, mainstream & experimental films, their use of protagonists, montage, mise en scene and soundtrack, I argue that my two films have developed new vernaculars, which offer the potential to constitute a new feminine écriture through a knowing revival of cinema as a form of exploratory language. In addition to the constituting force of the films themselves, questions of identity and the current and potential future of film are interrogated via the writings of such cultural theorists, philosophers and artists such as Svetlana Boym, Lauren Berlant, and Christian Marclay