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In the North of Thailand, known as Lanna, dynamic musical change is an inevitable corollary of people’s needs to adapt to new social and musical preferences. In Phayao Province, where this research is focused, contemporary piphat ensembles have long been developing, particularly through the uptake of Western musical instruments and tuning system, applying electronic equipment and computer karaoke, and transforming Lanna repertory. This thesis explores how the refashioning of traditional music has become the very foundation of creativity in live performance. Nowadays, Phayao’s piphat musicians all direct their artistry towards the provision of modern mass- media influenced entertainment, even as they sustain their traditional roles of performing at funerals, fon phi spirit dance ceremonies and temple festivals. In these contexts, their music helps give form to the attendee’s experiences, sometimes promoting solemnity and, at other times, stimulating revelry. In this thesis, based on empirical data acquired using personal engagement, participant observation, interviews, and filming, I chart the successes and hardships that the Phayao province piphat ensembles have experienced in the face of changing social, economic and aesthetic contexts, and argue that adaptability has been the musicians’ key to continued relevance. This adaptability relates not only to the music-making itself but also to the social networks that support it. In Phayao, the piphat musicians are ceaselessly re-negotiating complex patterns of alliance and rivalry, seeking to make their interactions and business dealings run smoothly. While collaboration has ensured the survival of piphat, competition has sometimes ignited fierce conflict, and this study also shines light on these dynamics. Furthermore, undertaking a detailed analysis of original transcriptions, this thesis explains how the piphat musicians balance tradition and innovation in their artistry, re- interpreting older repertory from Central Thailand and Lanna by adding tertian harmonies and new instrument-specific roles, and playing favourites from the lukthung pop repertory – taking piphat far beyond its original musical and social limitations.

This portfolio of nine compositions traces the composer’s compositional development from an emphasis on the timbral qualities of individual instruments (Shimmer for solo cello, Psithurism for solo flute and Three Watches of the Night for bass clarinet) through to the handling of large sound masses of choral and orchestral forces (An Unbroken Vow and Saṃsāra respectively). Underpinning almost all the compositions is an interest in Buddhist philosophy, specifically the concept of ‘emptiness’. The portfolio is accompanied by a Commentary which describes the principle technical features of the works and places them in the context of both the composer’s musical development and in a wider field of related contemporary musical practice.

This thesis examines Trevor Jones’s scoring processes that relate to his narrative television projects. In recent years, Jones has donated a large, unique collection of materials relating to his film and television productions to the University of Leeds, which form the Trevor Jones Archive. These materials consist of aural, textual, visual and notational resources, and offer the opportunity to explore many nuanced details pertaining to the industrial and musical processes that formed Jones’s television scores. In addition to the archival materials, this thesis is informed by interviews with Jones and his working team, and is contextualised by the literature surrounding the television industry and its scoring practices. Jones has composed original scores for programmes produced predominantly by the American and British television industries, and transmitted by a number of advertising and non-advertising broadcasters that operate within these industries. Furthermore, Jones has written scores for a range of programme forms, including stand-alone telefilms and multi-episodic miniseries and series. All of these factors have influenced his industrial processes when writing for television, and the archive illuminates the many ways they have done this. Jones’s musical processes are also considered, in terms of the compositional devices he employs. The findings of the thesis demonstrate that Jones’s television scoring practices undergo many industrial processes that are unique to television, and share many musical processes with his scores for cinema. Furthermore, they highlight the many changes that both of these processes have undergone since Jones’s earliest narrative television production until the most recent that is contained in the archive – a period that spans thirty years of the television industry.

This thesis uses the ‘rave’ subculture as a route into an analysis of literary representations of a music scene. Almost as soon as this sonic subculture took hold – during the Second Summer of Love in 1988 – and the socio-political impact of the nascent rave scene became clear, it quickly appeared on the radar of journalists, filmmakers and authors, all keen to use society’s cultural preoccupations as source material for their output. Firstly defining, and then expanding, on the neologism re/presentation, the thesis questions why such cultural artefacts appear – secondary representations that orbit the subculture itself – and what function they may serve. Further focussing on the medium of literature, the thesis then defines the genre of Dancefloor-Driven Literature – stories born of the dancefloor – using new primary input from three key case study authors to analyse three separate ways writers might draw on the pulse of electronic music in their fiction, interrogating that very particular intermedial intersection between the sonic and the linguistic. The thesis explores how such authors write about something so subterranean as the nightclub scene, considers how they write lucidly and fluidly about the rigid, metronomic beat of electronic music, and analyses what specifically literary techniques they deploy to accurately recount in fixed symbols the drifting, hallucinatory effects of a drug experience. The thesis describes two key functions such a literature might serve: firstly, in terms of its enculturative potential within the contemporary society into which it is published and then, almost 30 years since the Second Summer of Love, the importance this collection of texts might have, archivally. Finally, the thesis will propose a theory by which all sonic subcultures might be de decoded, not through the music, but through these secondary literary artefacts. It is there that stories of that subculture are locked, told to a silent beat.

The single-action pedal harp was a fashionable instrument from the Age of Enlightenment to the early Romantic Period. However, the historical performance practice of the single-action pedal harp has been neglected for a long time, and this has consequently influenced our approach to and evaluation of Classical and early Romantic repertoire for the harp. This research seeks to fill a gap in the current knowledge and understanding of the characteristics of the single-action pedal harp and their implications for the performance practice of its repertoire from 1760 to 1830. It will also offer insights by identifying the capabilities of the instrument and will clarify the status of the single-action pedal harp as an independent instrument with its own repertoire. Key aspects of this investigation are analyses of instructional treatises and editions from the period of the compositions. These are relevant to a series of exploratory recordings of harp repertoire from the period in which the differences between current performance practices are explored. Important treatises on the single-action pedal harp, by Ph. J. Meyer and J. G. H. Backofen, together with other relevant sources, provide a basis for investigating Meyer’s own compositions along with those of Backofen and L. Spohr. Guidance for approaching the repertoire and integrating the practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into our current practice is provided, benefitting not only players of the historical harp but also players of modern harps who wish to deliver musical and stylistic performances of repertoire from this period. The dissertation includes three sets of exploratory recordings of compositions by Meyer, Backofen, and Spohr. Short demonstration films, made using authentic harps, demonstrate the historical practices described in the treatises. This will be the first comprehensive film documentation of the performance practices of the single-action pedal harp; the films will be presented on a separate DVD disc. This research seeks to establish the value and indispensability of scholarly research into the hidden meanings that underlie notations and their implications of these meanings for performance. It also seeks to validate the contention that ‘historically informed performance’ does not imply ‘restriction’, but on the contrary, leads to the ‘liberation’ of the music.

This thesis pursues three successive and related areas of research. First, it undertakes a critique of Schoenberg's interpretation of nineteenth-century tonality, and explores the reception history of these ideas and their relationship with other prominent theoretical models, notably that of Heinrich Schenker. Second, it suggests an analytical theory of nineteenth-century tonality which proceeds from the conclusions of this critique. Lastly, it applies this model in the analysis of an extended work from the period: Bruckner's Eighth Symphony. The initial critique seeks to show that Schoenberg's model of tonality in decline is predicated on a self-justifying argument; the necessity of atonality is not an immanent property of nineteenth-century tonality, but is imposed upon the music by Schoenberg's own theoretical discourse. Schenkerian theory associates with this position in a negative sense; the aspects of this music which Schoenberg perceived to be the precursor of atonality are taken by Schenker as evidence of the decline of the musical art. The error in both interpretations is the assumption that a stable system of tonality must of necessity be founded on a fundamental diatonicism. The suggestions of an alternative model starts with an exploration of the properties of a tonal system arising from a fundamental chromaticism. The taxonomies of modal and harmonic properties advanced in this regard by Gregory Proctor and Robert Bailey are extended, and distilled into four categories, being diatonicism and three identifiable modes of chromatic progression. The theoretical exposition then elaborates a quasi-reductive model, founded upon this taxonomy, which replaces the Schenkerian system with a dualistic theory. The foreground level is characterised by the grouping of material into localised units defined by the control of one or more of the categories of progression and possible modalities arising from the total chromatic. Such structures are defined as 'harmonic fields'. A segmental technique is advanced which facilitates the isolation of these structures. The notion of the <I>Ursatz</I> is then revised to accommodate mixtures of diatonic and non-diatonic tonal relationships, and purely chromatic tonal structures, and a taxonomy of background types is provided.

No description available.

No description available.