This doctoral study examines the evolving role of the dramaturg in the British contemporary performance scene from 2000-2015. In 1999, the role was seen in the UK as a luxury, not an essential; now the same companies are working with dramaturgs, often within an academic context, as the funding culture has shifted from Arts Council England to the Academy. This study proceeds through a combination of practice as research and a contextual survey of the role s recent history taken from readings, interviews and a narrative of personal experience. As John Freeman writes, Research is also always re-search: a drawing on one s previous experience and developing this into knowledge . I arrive at new knowledge about the dramaturg s current position in a shifting landscape by inhabiting both the role and the landscape. John Berger suggests that to understand a landscape we have to situate ourselves in it. The doctoral study seeks to do this through practice, research and practice as research. I devised three performances - The Trilogy (2014). Their non-linearity is relevant to the line of investigation I took into the role of the dramaturg today, both inviting and playing the role. The practice as research applies different theoretical models of how a dramaturg operates to a body of theatre work that interrogates the role from different perspectives. The practice asks how dramaturgy might function with or without a dramaturg as an agent for critical feedback or meaning-making by exploring other models such as embedded criticism, work-in-progresses and post-show discussions. The performance work attempts to put the dramaturg onstage and in so doing explores what he / she does as part of the theatre event to make it happen. The project is concerned with making visible the textual trace of dramaturgy within the work. As such, I have written a thesis on the dramaturgy of my practice that questions notions of proximity and distance, objectivity and subjectivity, self and other. The thesis documents how the role has evolved over the last 15 years and argues that it has had a significant, tangible impact on the British contemporary performance scene. Through an understanding of the role, the dramaturg, outside of a traditional writer-director paradigm, becomes an application with which to deconstruct and decode the tropes and contradictions of contemporary performance. I posit that dramaturgs and outside eyes operate in fluid and often undefined spatial territory between writer, deviser, director and dramatist as well as any hyphenated combination thereof - and the doctoral study reflects this fluidity in its style.

The fact that a number of pianists of the past two centuries adapted, embellished, and rearranged piano works for performance, be these original works or transcriptions, has been well documented throughout history. This thought, in addition to the fact that Stradal’s scores needed revision, encouraged me to make alterations to Stradal’s transcriptions and served as a strong incentive to write the current study. In it, I will comment on the alterations performed to segments of Stradal’s piano transcriptions of Wagner’s Schluβ der letzten Aufzuges (End of the last Act) from Siegfried and Trauermusik aus dem letzten Aufzug (Siegfried’s Funeral March) from Götterdämmerung. These changes have the purpose of reflecting in the piano as closely as possible the sonorous reality of the transcriptions’ operatic sources and, by doing so, making Stradal’s arrangements more effective for performance.

The connection between text, music, and performance in the lieder of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is an integral aspect to fully comprehending the style and performance of the genre. It is also essential in order to understand the full development of the lied in its totality. The era represented a transitional period in musical development, influenced by Enlightenment values of elegance, good taste, simplicity, and naturalness which sought to eradicate the overly decorative “excesses” of the high-Baroque. In this study, emphasis is placed upon the unique development of the lied in the northern German regions by the composers Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Carl Friedrich Zelter and their musical settings of the lyric poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The study also addresses the overall development of the genre as it progressed from the Baroque through Classicism/Neo-Classicism, Sturm und Drang, and into Romanticism exploring the musical settings and performance possibilities both then and now in the context of the various treatises and correspondence between the composers and poet. It seeks to effectively address the notion that these early songs were composed and performed by those versed in the ideal of music being an improvisatory/dramatic vehicle for expressing emotion and textual meaning. In opera, and to a lesser extent other vocal idioms, musico-dramatic excesses occurred in the late Baroque and the cult of the singer reigned. However, the reforms which led to the new aesthetic of naturalness did not suddenly end this improvisatory vocal performance practice. The musical complexity of the lied was gaining in prominence but not yet to the detriment of the priority of the poetic text and its effective rendering.

The research presented here was undertaken with the aim of providing today’s musical practitioners (anyone from a scholar, performer, composer, or even listener) with a framework to begin understanding how aesthetic movements and performance practices interact with the socio-professional layout of classical music. I present what I see as a major shift from practitioner-based systems of value, as seen in Paris in the 1830s, to a practice-based system of value which came to prominence in the 20th century. This exploration covers the topics of piano literature, virtuosity, canon formation, both performance and compositional practices, as well as the rise of musical institutions in the past century. The third chapter uses the work of Michel Foucault to shed light on how the developments that occurred in classical music mirror wider societal changes. The dissertation closes with a look at how practitioners might restructure classical music’s value-giving systems so that they might regain their agency and ability to shape and participate in their field’s development.

The performance of vocal works using the twelve-tone technique requires thorough study of complex rhythms, non-tonal melodies, non-traditional notations, and specific musical terms. They generally also require advanced and varied vocal techniques. Twelve-tone vocal works often contain unusual features vital to the composer's intention. One of the premiere twelve-tone composers in the United States, Donald Martino (1931-2005) composed only two solo vocal works using the twelve-tone technique: Three Songs (1955) and Two Rilke Songs (1961). He has explored innovative and progressive uses of the twelve-tone technique, and composed music with particular methods of his own, later used by other composers. Three Songs, his first twelve-tone work, and Two Rilke Songs, the only twelve-tone song cycle in his mature style, present comparable features in his use of the twelve-tone technique, text setting, and notations. The variety of ways in which Martino uses these features in the song cycles is discussed in the performance guide. The intention of the present study is to help performers, especially singers, understand Donald Martino's two twelve-tone song cycles, and to aid in the preparation of an excellent performance. The study includes a study of historical context, the poems, and Martino's compositional and aesthetic approaches to setting them. It also offers practical and systemized ways of analyzing and preparing Martino's songs for performance. It is hoped that the methods suggested herein will reduce a singer's difficulties and rehearsal time with the pianist. The present study will offer a valuable addition to the literature on the performance practice of twelve-tone vocal music, and provide insight and advice on how to practice and perform other non-tonal music. This method of study may be applied to other contemporary music. Doing so can in turn help develop a singer's skill in handling tonal and rhythmic difficulties of all kinds, including non-traditional notations.

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Theoretical constructs latent in thoroughbass treatises of the 18th century can serve students of thoroughbass today. In the following work, I draw from Johann David Heinichen’s Der General-Bass in der Composition (1728), David Kellner’s Treulicher Unterricht im General-Baß (2nd edition, 1737), Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg’s Handbuch bey dem Generalbasse und der Composition, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (part 2, 1762), and recent scholarship in the areas of Partimento theory, Musica Poetica, and early music theory in general, to demonstrate how the many thoroughbass figures can all be contextualized in an historically informed theoretical framework. In the first two chapters, (1) thoroughbass figures are analyzed as having an internal hierarchy of primary and auxiliary intervals, allowing chords to be understood both vertically and linearly; (2) chords are localized in the major and minor modes according to bass scale steps; and (3) the various contrapuntal procedures associated with dissonant chords used in both the strict style (stylus gravis) and freer styles (stylus luxurians communis and stylus luxurians theatralis) are analyzed as German musical-rhetorical figures. In chapter 3, these three theoretical constructs are used to organize an extensive collection of dissonant chord progressions derived from the aforementioned treatises of Heinichen, Mattheson, Marpurg, and Bach. In chapter 4, I draw from basic elements of partimento theory—namely cadences, sequences, and the Rule of the Octave (regola dell’ottava or règle de l’octave)—to construct a series of exercises; most of these exercises use a relatively strict four-part texture and are illustrated from multiple righthand starting positions to promote flexibility in the student. Finally, in chapter 5, practical matters of thoroughbass realization, namely pragmatic and expressive concerns, are discussed and illustrated with examples from many treatises of the 17th and 18th centuries.

La pratique des interprètes de Berlioz qui créèrent Benvenuto Cellini, La Damnation de Faust et Béatrice et Bénédict gagne à être mieux connue : ils observaient d’autres traditions que les nôtres, et saisir leurs usages et leur contexte artistique offre un autre regard sur les œuvres. La présente thèse examine le cadre de travail de ces artistes, c’est-à-dire leurs formations, leurs carrières, le déroulement des répétitions d’une œuvre et les corps de métier convoqués, mais aussi les écoles de jeu, de chant, et les étapes de préparation d’un rôle. Ces artistes seront aussi présentés, en particulier ceux qui jouèrent dans les scènes comiques des œuvres concernées. Les derniers chapitres, qui explorent la manière dont les œuvres du corpus furent interprétées sur les scènes de l’Opéra et du théâtre de Bade, ainsi qu’à l’Opéra-Comique et au théâtre de Weimar, mêlent l’ensemble de ces sources et croisent aspect scéniques et musicaux. / The practices of the performers who first produced Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, La Damnation de Faust and Béatrice et Bénédict deserves to be better known: they followed other traditions than ours, and to understand their habits, practices and artistic context offers another way of conceiving these musical works. The present thesis considers the framework in which these artists worked, that is to say their training, their careers, the progress of the rehearsal of an opera and the trades involved, as well as the schools of acting, of singing, and the preparation of a role. The individual artists will also be introduced, in particular those who played in the comic scenes of the concerned works. The last chapters, which explore the way in which the corpus’ works were performed on the stage of the Paris Opera and the theater of Bade, as well as at the Paris Opera-Comic and the theater of Weimar, mix all these sources and documents and combine musical and scenic elements.

This dissertation aims to explore the functions and meanings of four frequently used dynamic accent markings (fp, rf, sf and sfp) in Beethoven’s early chamber music with the fortepiano, with the consideration of acoustic qualities and playing capabilities of instruments intended for the studied works. The sources of reference here include the three Op.1 piano trios, two Op.5 cello sonatas, and three Op.12 violin sonatas, using a modern critical edition in conjunction with the first editions published during Beethoven's lifetime. The study consists of two parts. The first part surveys historical aspects including: 1) the development of relevant instruments, namely the bow and the fortepiano, and 2) existing accentuation conventions, especially those found in selected works of Haydn and Mozart, and appropriate treatises from Beethoven's time. The second part of the study entails the examination of consistency and frequency of dynamic accent markings in general, and that of individual accent markings using specific musical examples. The process of this investigation shows that these signs have distinct meanings, and consequently, require different treatments for their respective executions in performance. It also implies that the acoustic qualities of the ensembles with instruments from Beethoven's time are the most important factor contributing to variations found in his use of the accent markings among the different genres. Such acoustic qualities include the quieter volume and faster decay of the fortepiano, as well as the larger sonority from the cello especially in the lower register, when compared with instruments made for today's concert halls. These insights not only illuminate the possible ways to realize each marking, but also clarify accent markings which could seem inconsistent to modern performers, in terms of acoustic balance, especially in combinations that include the cello.