This thesis investigates the development of the recorder's microtonal repertoire from 1961 through to 2013. The artistic impulses for the use of microtones are discussed and selected pieces studied and performed. An investigation is also undertaken into the relationship between pitch, dynamic, and tone colour. This leads to the development of a method for objectively identifying the changes in tone colour that result from using various microtonal fingerings. Very little substantial research has been undertaken into the recorder's contemporary repertoire, and even less so with regard to its engagement with microtones. The skills for producing the expressive effects of dynamic and tone colour, and thus microtones, were known in the early 16th century, lost, and then revived during the period of musical experimentation in post-war Europe. The application of this knowledge, however, has remained limited. This thesis addresses these shortcomings. Following consideration of intonation and interpretation in Chapter 2 a survey of writings analyzing changes in tone colour and dynamic, and the relationship between them, is undertaken in Chapter 3. These include a number of foreign language texts, whilst others appear in American journals, or conference papers not generally available to the British reader. They highlight the tendency for writers to discuss tone colour and dynamic in vague and subjective terms, and in relation to the performance of early music but rarely in the context of contemporary music. This strand of my inquiry is brought to fruition in Chapter 5, where research leading to the development of a method for identifying and quantifying changes in tone colour, through the application of different fingerings, is applied for the first time. The results of an investigation into the evolution of microtonal repertoire composed since the 1960s are recorded in Chapter 4. Different compositional approaches to both instrument and microtonality are reflected in my choice of seven pieces, plus my own composition, that are the subject of detailed study in Chapter 6. The analyses of the pieces discussed in this thesis, and the contexts in which they were composed, represent a significant step forward in the understanding of the instrument and the use of microtones in compositions of the period. My thesis concludes with a live performance in which a selection of microtonal pieces is presented. This serves as a demonstration and confirmation of the principles discussed in this thesis, drawing together the threads of my research, and applying the insights gained in the course of this study.

This research looks at contemporary understandings of performance arts in India, specifically Karnatic Music and Bharatnatyam as ‘religious’ arts. Historically, music and dance were performed and patronized in royal courts and temples. In the early 20th century, increased nationalist activities led to various forms of self-scrutiny about what represented ‘true’ Indian culture. By appropriating colonial discourses based on the religious/secular dichotomy, Karnatic Music was carefully constructed to represent a ‘pure’ Indian, specifically ‘Hindu’ culture that was superior to the ‘materialistic’ Western culture. Importantly, the category called divine was re-constructed and distinguished from the erotic: the divine was represented as a category that was sacred whilst the erotic represented ‘sexual impropriety.’ In so doing, performance arts in the public sphere became explicitly gendered. Feminity and masculinity were re-defined: the female body was re-imagined as ‘sexual impropriety’ when in the public sphere, but when disembodied in the private sphere could be deified as a guardian of spirituality. Traditional performing communities were marginalized while the newly defined music and dance was appropriated by the Brahmin community, who assumed the role of guardians of the newly constructed Indian-Hindu identity, resulting in caste-based ‘ownership’ of performance arts. Mechanical reproduction of Karnatic Music has created a disconnect in contemporary Indian society, in which Karnatic Music is disembodied from its contexts in order to be commodified as an individual’s artistic expression of creativity. This move marks a shift from substantive economics (music was performed and experienced within a specific context, be it royal patronage or Indian nationalist movements) to formal economics (music as a performer’s creative property). I question the understanding of Karnatic Music as ‘religious’ music that is distinguished from the ‘secular’ and seek to understand the colonial patriarchal mystification of the female body in the private sphere by deconstructing the definition of the ‘divine.’ In doing so, I also question the contemporary understanding of Karnatic Music as an item of property that disembodies the music from its historical context.

Harmony is the aspect of music concerned with the structure, progression, and relation of chords. In Western tonal music each period had different rules and practices of harmony. Similarly some composers and musicians are recognised for their characteristic harmonic patterns which differ from the chord sequences used by other musicians of the same period or genre. This thesis is concerned with the automatic induction of the harmony rules and patterns underlying a genre, a composer, or more generally a 'style'. Many of the existing approaches for music classification or pattern extraction make use of statistical methods which present several limitations. Typically they are black boxes, can not be fed with background knowledge, do not take into account the intricate temporal dimension of the musical data, and ignore rare but informative events. To overcome these limitations we adopt first-order logic representations of chord sequences and Inductive Logic Programming techniques to infer models of style. We introduce a fixed length representation of chord sequences similar to n-grams but based on first-order logic, and use it to characterise symbolic corpora of pop and jazz music. We extend our knowledge representation scheme using context-free definite-clause grammars, which support chord sequences of any length and allow to skip ornamental chords, and test it on genre classification problems, on both symbolic and audio data. Through these experiments we also compare various chord and harmony characteristics such as degree, root note, intervals between root notes, chord labels and assess their characterisation and classification accuracy, expressiveness, and computational cost. Moreover we extend a state- of-the-art genre classifier based on low-level audio features with such harmony-based models and prove that it can lead to statistically significant classification improvements. We show our logic-based modelling approach can not only compete with and improve on statistical approaches but also provides expressive, transparent and musicologically meaningful models of harmony which makes it suitable for knowledge discovery purposes.

Bien que le courant musical « spectral » soit à la source de nombreuses recherches, il apparaît que les percussions y tiennent une place particulière qui n’a été que trop peu étudiée. L’évolution de disciplines comme l’organologie, l’anthropologie ou l’ethnomusicologie a contribué à l’inclusion dans le vocabulaire des compositeurs de nombreux nouveaux instruments à percussion. Si on remarque que les spectres fournis par les percussions servent bien souvent à composer le timbre, c’est l’intérêt pour la perception qui pousse les compositeurs à considérer la sonorité globale des pièces par phénomènes de mémoire ou de seuils. Ceci amène une nouvelle manière de forger des sons sur certaines caractéristiques inhabituellement mises en avant comme la densité, la plage fréquentielle, la rugosité, ou la granulation. Le langage des percussions apparait comme vecteur immédiat de l’expression des compositeurs et des interprètes, et le courant spectral semble bénéficier de cette exploration sonore. / Although the musical style called « spectral » is the source of much research, it appears that the percussion family holds in it a special place that has been too little studied. Developments in disciplines such as organology, anthropology or ethnomusicology contributed to the inclusion of many new percussion instruments in the vocabulary of composers. If one notice that the spectra provided by the percussion often serve to dial tone, it is the interest towards perception that pushes composers to consider the overall sound of pieces through memory and threshold phenomena. This brings a new way to craft sounds from some unusually highlighted characteristics such as density, frequency range, roughness, or granulation. Percussion appear as immediate expression vectors to composers and performers, and the spectral movement seems to benefit from this exploration of sound, made possible by the diversity inherent to percussion alloys spectra.