Agency and the \u3cem\u3eAdagio\u3c/em\u3e: Mimetic Engagement in Barber\u27s Op. 11 Quartet

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (1936) is undoubtedly the most famous elegiac work of the twentieth-century. We know it from movies, television, and highly publicized memorial services. Yet the music was originally written as the second movement of Barber’s string quartet, op. 11, with a number of interesting connections to the outer movements. This article highlights several recurring gestures throughout op. 11 that suggest the will of an individual “agent” struggling against gravity and weight. It proposes a broad, multi-movement narrative that draws together the three movements with a special focus on mimetic engagement, leading-tone resolution, and the quest for major-mode closure

Form and forms in Wagner's Die Walküre

Includes abstract and vita.This dissertation presents three new approaches to understanding Wagnerian form using Die Walkiire as a case study. The opening chapter sets the stage with a history ofWagnerian formal analysis; further literature review is divided among the individual chapters. In Chapter Two I reach a more formalized understanding of the Wagnerian cadence and its role in delineating form. After a discussion of historical and contemporary views towards the cadence, I consider the "scenic cadence" (or sc), an obligatory musical goal that, according to Wagner's own theories, occurs precisely once each scene. I discuss the musical factors that determine the scenic cadence as well as methods of sc failure and sc deferral. Of special interest is the lack of such an sc in Act II, Scene 3. The chapter concludes with a look at the micro-form of the entire music drama. Having clarified in the previous chapter the form-defining cadence in Die Walkiire, I introduce in Chapter Three the manifold sentence, wherein Wagner opens up multi-ple rhetorical sentence spaces in order to delay the cadence. These top-heavy sentences, characterized by the grouping duration at the expected continuation, create mounting tension and have clear dramatic implications. Following an overview of recent work on the sentence, I present several examples of this small form, looking at their placement in larger contexts and considering some compositional precedents dating back to Haydn. I conclude with a look at the changes Wagner made to these forms between the Kompositionsskizze and the Partiturerstschrift. Chapter Four deals with duration and proportion more explicitly and on a much larger scale than Chapter Three through a discussion of time-pitch isomorphisms. Two ana-lytic vignettes, which combine to create a larger narrative for the end of Act II, show the promise of this approach. I consider the distinction between proportion in the musical score ("conceptual" time) and proportion in seconds ("observable" time), as well as possible compositional reasons for these structures, before concluding with a look at possible future avenues for this method