Opera is unique among forms of Western classical music and performing arts in that it has always been a popular and accessible form of “cultured” entertainment. As a city with one of the longest and richest histories of opera performance in Texas, San Antonio provides a significant opportunity to survey the relationship between this popular art form and discourses of identity, power, and difference across ethnic, class, and gender divisions. This paper has two aims. First, it investigates the history of opera reception in San Antonio in order to examine changes in the traditional values of its citizens over the past century, focusing on the influence of ethnic identity among German immigrants. Then, it looks at the scholarship on cultural performance in various contemporary situations analogous to that of San Antonio and constructs five key processes of identification that show how individuals contextualize themselves in shared histories and identities through their participation in cultural performance of opera. / text

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

Nancy Hermiston is examining the links between music cognition and improved learning development through one of the most complicated art forms.

No description available.

<p>This thesis examines how multilingual spaces in South Africa are imagined and reconstructed through the use of scripted codeswitching in 7de Laan. It explores how the socio-political discourses and other ideologies from the broader South African context shape and influence the ways in which the soap reconstructs multilingual spaces and the identities that exist within these spaces through language and language practices. In the literature presented in this study I explore various theories and case studies that examine Afrikaans and its indexicality in our&nbsp / contemporary society, the conventions of soap opera in representing &lsquo / reality&rsquo / to society, the role of codeswitching in multilingual mass communication, the policies and ideologies that govern post apartheid television and finally the link between ideology, the media, language and imagined identities.. These five overarching themes often overlap throughout this thesis. My investigation of the main questions set in this thesis is based on a triangulated analysis of (a) a five episode transcript of the soap, (b) solicited viewer perceptions gleaned from questionnaires and (c) unsolicited social media commentaries. This analysis is framed by a poststructuralist critical analysis with a specific focus on how social practices and contemporary ideologies manifest in the discourse of the soap. This approach views discourse as the juncture where identity, stereotypes and power are negotiated, enforced, imagined and challenged. In this thesis I argue that the conspicuous absence of indigenous African languages and the use of standard white Afrikaans as the lingua franca in the soap creates an unrealistic utopian portrayal of the new South Africa that naturalises white Afrikaans culture and marginalises other indigenous cultures and languages. I argue that the soap puts middle class white Afrikaners at the epicentre of South African society thus enforcing the idea that non-whites still need to conform to white Afrikaans standards and norms at the expense of their own culture and languages despite the inception of democracy. The soap offers no depictions of resistance to this dominant white Afrikaans culture, thus misleadingly portraying it as the uncontested dominant culture of the new South Africa.</p>

<p>This dissertation consists of two parts: a chamber opera and an article on the work of Claude Vivier.</p><p>"Cardano" is a new chamber opera by composer Bryan Christian about the work and tragic life of the Renaissance polymath Gerolamo Cardano (1501-1576). Scored for three vocal soloists, an actor, and an eleven-part ensemble, "Cardano" represents a coalescence of Christian's interests in medieval and Renaissance sources, mathematics, and intensely dramatic vocal music. Christian constructed the libretto from fragmented excerpts of primary sources written by Cardano and his rival Niccolo Tartaglia. The opera reinvigorates Cardano's 16th-century scientific and philosophical models by sonifying and mapping these models to salient musical and dramatic features. These models prominently include Cardano's solution to the cubic equation and his horoscope of Jesus Christ, which was deemed so scandalous in the 16th century that it ultimately led to Cardano's imprisonment under the Roman Inquisition in 1570 - the opera's tragic conclusion. Presenting these ideas in opera allows them to resound beyond the music itself and project through the characters and drama on stage. In this way, the historical documents and theories - revealing Cardano's unique understanding of the world and his contributions to society - are given new life as they tell his tragic story.</p><p>Claude Vivier's homophonic treatment of combination tones--what he called les couleurs--demands an extension of traditional methods of harmonic and spectral analysis. Incomplete explanations of this technique throughout the secondary literature further demand a revised and cohesive definition. To analyze all variations of les couleurs, I developed the analytical concept of combination-tone classes (CTCs) and built upon Angela Lohri's (2010) combination tone matrix to create a dynamic CTC matrix, from which CTC sets may be extracted. Intensive CTC set analysis reveals a definitive correlation between CTC set and formal sections in Vivier's composition "Bouchara." Although formally adjacent CTC sets are often markedly varied, all sets share a subset of lower-order CTCs, aiding in perception of spectral cohesion across formal boundaries. This analysis illuminates the interrelationships of CTC sets to their parent dyads, their orchestration, their playing technique, and form in "Bouchara." CTC set analysis is compared with Vivier's sketches for "Bouchara," which suggest that les couleurs were intended as integral components of the work's musical structure.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis aims to provide a critical account of Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910), which has become one of the most enduring and visible of modern myths. Leroux’s text discloses anxieties about a rapidly changing world, and these anxieties manifest themselves artistically in a simultaneous fascination and horror with the emerging episteme. Leroux’s story subsequently took on a life of its own in popular culture, yet, this thesis argues, many of these adaptations remain bound up in the same issues of futurity and dichotomies of masculinity, as well as concerns about the role of the artist in determining the values of his society.

<p>Bilaga: 1 CD</p>

Since the introduction of synchronized sound at the end of the 1920s the film musical has had a special place in American film. But even with that special place the interest in the film musical has varied a lot during the 20th century. From the high interest during the  “Golden Age” in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, through low interest in the following decades and then renewed interest in musicals with the animated film musicals from Disney in the 1990s. But what has happened after the millennium? Has there been any development in the American film musical genre or is it just more of the same? This thesis tries to answer the question by analyzing three successful film musicals from the period 2001-2013, Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), The Phantom of the Opera (Joel Schumacher, 2004), and Les Misérables (Tom Hooper, 2012) and comparing them to classical traditional musicals. According to this thesis there is a split answer, some areas of the classical  American film musical have developed while other areas still remains the same.