This dissertation concerns the musical psalm settings of Claude Le Jeune (<i>c</i>. 1530-1600), their texts and melodies. The majority use the French psalm paraphrases of Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze, accompanied by the tunes of the Genevan Psalter (1562). The remainder set French and Latin <i>vers mesurés </i>by Jean-Antoine de Baïf and Agrippa d’Aubigné, employing a mixture of pre-existent and unknown melodies. This study analyses the texts and their music within the context of the religious and social history of France, as well as contemporary theories of poetry, rhetoric, religion and music. It is divided into two parts. The first comprises three chapters: (i) an introductory chapter which provides a contextual background for the remainder of the thesis; (ii) the second examines the psalm texts as poetry; and (iii) the third considers the psalm tunes, their musical characteristics, and their relationship to the texts. The second part contains four chapters: (i) the first considers accent, quantity and rhythm in the texts and music, in light of the rhetorical theory of <i>pronuntiatio</i>, the experiments as the <i>Académie de poésie et de musique,</i> and the <i>De Francicae linguae recta pronuntiatione tractatus</i> (1584) by Bèze; (ii) the second notes their responses to the structural elements of the texts and melodies, including an apparent observance of the rhetorical principle of <i>rhythmus</i>; (iii) the third investigates different levels of meaning in the texts, and analyses the responses of the poets, the composers of the psalm tunes and Le Jeune; and (iv) the final chapter summarises my conclusions. The dissertation is accompanied by: (i) a volume containing an edition of the 150 psalms from the Genevan Psalter; and (ii) a CD containing recorded examples of Le Jeune’s music.

This thesis participates in the study of the 'birth of the author', the positioning of the category of authorship as a historical and social construct. In particular, it examines how ideas of authorship are developed in the production and presentation of printed music books. Music is not just a different, but a distinct way of approaching this issue. Composers were professionals, for whom financial considerations and the importance of enhancing their reputations outweighed gentlemanly concerns with the 'stigma of print'. The difficulties of setting and proof-reading music also encouraged printers to involve composers in the production of their own printed texts. Musicians had both the desire and the opportunity to create fixed, authorised texts in print. The first chapter of this thesis discuses the traditions of the compilation and transmission of music in manuscript, and the way in which 'authorised texts' were those edited by scribes, rather than those created by composers. The second chapter traces the emergence of the authorising individual out of traditions of public music and imitative practices. It also examines the extent to which imitators and anthologisers of Italian music, such as Thomas Morley, developed a concept of the 'work' as an entity which could survive translation and musical imitation. Chapter three discusses the development of the printed music book as a coherent collection, distinct from miscellaneous gathering of individual items. With particular reference to the <I>Psalmes, Sonets and songs </I>of William Byrd (1588), it follows the development of the form and presentation of printed music books out of traditions of the printed miscellanies of lyric verse. Chapter four moves away from the printed musical text to examine issues of patronage and the figurative ownership of the work. Musical texts also require performances; the text itself is incomplete. Composers thus begin to attempt to control performances to establish a definition of their 'work' as an entity beyond the printed page.

Using 'music as drama' as a starting point for a thesis on an operas by Janáček directly confronts two challenging issues. First, the literature on Janáček is very one-sided. The overwhelming majority of writers emphasise Janáček's realism, and a significant portion go so far as to question seriously the extent to which he is a 'good dramatist'. Second, the concept of 'music as drama' has been used as one of the central ways of canonising opera, especially since Wagner. The notion of an operatic canon is something of a critical anomaly, and is inherently biased not only in terms of the works it extols but also in the type of things it encourages us to look for in opera. As a composer who stands apart from the 'mainstream' as it is generally understood, and as a composer whose operas span the cusp of nineteenth and twentieth-century styles, analysts find it doubly difficult to approach Janáček's music. This thesis approaches Janáček's penultimate opera, <i>Věc Makropulos</i>, from the point of view of a multimedia model. Although it uses Nicholas Cook's work on this subject as a background, it is developed as a method of exploring this particular work and is self-consciously designed to be as specific to that work as possible. The intention is to redress the imbalance caused by the lacunae in Janáček criticism. Separate analysis of the different parameters that go together to make up the opera are presented, followed by an analysis of how they interact with one another. It becomes apparent that the different parameters have competing, contrasting and sometimes even conflicting claims on the attention. The multimedia model enables an analysis that follows the intermittent nature of each of the parameters involved, and is able to trace and to theorise the aesthetic effect of a theatrical presentation where the attention is continually transferred from one parameter to the next.

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The music of Debussy has always proved exceptionally intractable to conventional analytical approaches. This dissertation combines traditional methods of analysis with consideration of some musical factors normally given little analytical consideration as structural formants, the principal one of these being dynamics. The result is to demonstrate the consistent presence of logical and precisely executed proportional structure, based on the two ratios of bisection and 'Golden Section', in many of Debussy's musical forms, in ways which account both for the precise nature of these forms and for the difficulty of defining them from more traditional standpoints. In doing so the analyses trace ways in which the music's formal organization is influential in defining and conveying the music's dramatic and expressive qualities. The largest work analysed is La mer of 1905, to which Chapter 5 is devoted. Other works analysed in detail include Lisle ioveuse and 'Reflets dans l'eau' of 1904-5. Chapter 1 discusses the theoretical principles and technical problems involved in this approach. Chapter 2 includes critical evaluations of existing proportional studies of musical form, before taking up the first Debussy analysis. Chapter 3 traces the origins and development of these structures in Debussy's earlier works. Chapter 6 shows, more briefly, further parallels in other Debussy works to the proportional structures already seen, and finishes by illustrating Ravel's use of a very similar technique in 'Oiseaux tristes' from Miroirs. Chapter 7 discusses how conscious Debussy is likely to have been of his application of those devices.

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