This thesis consists of a portfolio of original compositions and a commentary. The portfolio is divided into two major groups: concert music and collaborative music. There are six concert pieces including two solo works, one for guitar and one percussion, one string quartet with electronics, an oboe and percussion piece with real-time electronics, one septet and one orchestral work. Collaborative pieces are represented by the score for a contemporary dance choreography and the music for a theatre play. Other collaborative works not included in the portfolio will be briefly commented upon. The commentary will mainly concentrate on the aesthetics behind my praxis as a composer through the analysis of the works presented on the portfolio. I will also present a philosophical discussion of what musical composition represents nowadays to me in relation to Postmodernism.

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This dissertation is based on an examination of the decline of notions of musical avant-gardism, through a consideration of the parallel apparent decline of its most vital post-war institutional bastion, the <i>Darmstädter Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. </i>This represents the first study of full-scale study of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse in English. Its primary thesis is that, during the 1970s, notions of musical progress, as articulated after 1945, waned massively in their significance. The ‘big name’ composers, whose careers had been created in many cases by success at Darmstadt, increasingly found their compositional modes of thought being considered on the same level as previously marginalised composers. Indeed, I argue that, especially in the case of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the unprecedented centrality of the compositional work and ideologies of the ‘big shots’, as Feldman termed them, was directly responsible for their later fall. As a secondary argument, I suggest that the abandonment of the more famous composers by Darmstadt in the 1970s, though heavily criticised at the time, was directly responsible for the survival of the Ferienkurse in the burgeoning post-modern era. More than that, the seed sown in the 1970s led to Darmstadt’s revival as one of the most important focal points of contemporary music, under a new director, in the 1980s. A further important factor here was the revitalisation of interests in national styles. The German ‘Explosives Romantic’ and French Spectralists are examined in this context. I therefore argue that this decade has a critical significance, ordinarily marginalised by German writings on Darmstadt. The resources of the archive of the <i>Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt </i>(IMD), the convenors of the Ferienkurse, have been exhaustively utilised, integrating correspondence records, recordings of performances and lectures from the Ferienkurse and the IMD’s press archive. In addition, I have conducted a large number of interviews with composers, performers and journalists who were involved with the Ferienkurse. Since I am investing the decline of a cultural construct, rather that any clearly defined musical style, the methodology of the thesis is by necessity multidisciplinary, utilising approaches drawn from cultural studies and sociology as well as from mainstream musicology.

In this dissertation I discuss the development of Arnold Schoenberg's theoretical understanding of music, with particular reference to the period 1906-1935. I thus set out to trace the evolution of Schoenberg's conceptualisation of music as he moves through the two compositional 'revolutions' with which he is associated - first, his renunciation of the tonal system in 1907-8, and, second, his establishment of dodecaphony around 1923. My principal purpose in so doing is to furnish a context within which we can understand what comes to be the key-stone of Schoenberg's late theoretical writing - his concept of the 'musical idea'. I start by discussing Schoenberg's conception of the 'unconscious mind', and I argue that Schoenberg largely holds back from establishing any essential difference in kind between the 'unconscious' and 'conscious' areas of the psyche. Instead, he hopes that a deliberately-adopted practice of 'unconscious composition' will furnish insights into the nature of post-tonal music that can come to be consciously mastered, and thereby form the basis of a non-tonal compositional technique. As he analyses the products of 'unconscious' composition, he indeed sees in them patternings, which he takes to reflect the structures of human thought. Imbued with the conceptualisation of 'thought' set out by his friend Karl Kraus, Schoenberg thus comes to identify the specific process of composition with the general processes of thought. He comes therefore to describe composition as 'musical thought', and the stimulus behind this thought, the inspiration behind composition, as the 'musical idea'. Through this contextualisation we gain insight both into Schoenberg's concept of the 'musical idea' itself, notoriously unexplained in his theoretical writings, and into the relationship between this concept and his earlier theoretical ideas. We come, finally, to understand Schoenberg's own often-disregarded insistence on the fundamental constancy of his conception of music.

This dissertation offers a ‘thick description’ of colonial musical culture in early modern Manila, capital of the Philippine Islands. From the mid-sixteenth century, this most distant colony of Spain was crucial to the establishment of the earliest global networks of trade and culture. After theorising the concepts of ‘colonial musical cultures’ and ‘frontier musicology’, I seek to show how music acted as a mediator for cultural transition and intercultural exchange, and was a key agent in the establishment of Spanish colonial institutions in Manila and the Philippines, from the beginning of the Spanish conquest in 1565 until the cessation of trans-Pacific trade in 1815. Underlying themes of my argument include the role of education and processes of intercultural contact in the dissemination of European musical and religious practices. Evidence is drawn from a wide range of sources such as histories, ethnographies, vocabularies, musical transcriptions, iconography, correspondence, travelogues, inventories, constitutions, decrees, financial accounts, and linguistic treatises. Chapter 1 sets the scene by positioning Manila as a locus for intercultural exchange in early modern Asia; Chapter 2 surveys diverse sources of early modern musical ethnography in the Philippines. Chapter 3 critiques the historiography of musical transculturation, which is investigated further in Chapter 4 by means of case studies of syncretism in three musico-poetic genres: the <i>auit, </i>the <i>loa</i> and the <i>pasyon. </i>Chapter 5 studies musical lives in religious institutions of early modern Manila and employment conditions for parochial musicians throughout the islands, leading into Chapter 6, which explores legislation, regulations and reforms for musical practices in colonial society. Finally, Chapter 7 focuses on public musical performance in civic and religious festivities of Manila.