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The dissertation consists of four recitals: one chamber music recital, two solo recitals, and one lecture recital. The repertoire of these programs was chosen with the intention of demonstrating the capability of the performer to deal with problems arising in works of varying types and of different historical periods. The lecture recital, Aaron Copland's Concerto for Clarinet, begins with biographical information, followed by a discussion of various other works of the composer and of important stylistic traits that are contained therein. After thus setting the Concerto in perspective to other major works, an investigation is made into various aspects of form and style which make the Concerto atypical in some respects to the composer t total body of works. Particular emphasis is given to rhythmic and melodic characteristics of the piece which are related to jazz and Latin-American popular music. The formal and stylistic analysis is followed by a discussion of problems involved in performing the Concerto with a piano reduction of the orchestral part, and the lecture concludes with a survey of interpretative problems posed by the work. At the conclusion of the lecture portion of the presentation, the Concerto was performed.

Aaron Copland was born of Russian-Jewish parents on November 14, 1900. Harris Kaplan, his father, had acquired the American equivalent of his name when an immigration official at the British port of entry wrote it on his papers, and from then on the family name was "Copland." Sarah Mittenthal and Harris Copland met at a family social gathering in New York and were married in 1885. They lived in the upper stories of his department store in Brooklyn which remained the family home until 1924 and was where Aaron, the youngest of five, was born.

During Aaron Copland's long and productive life, he has written many compositions of distinction; among his piano compositions are the Passacaglia, Piano Variations, and Four Piano Blues. These three piano works were composed during a span of over twenty years and reflect many different influences in the composer's musical life. The Passacaglia, an early work, was written under the direction of Copland's teacher, Nadia Boulanger. It was strongly influenced by her and the French neoclassic school. The influence of jazz is most prominent in the Four Piano Blues, whereas the Piano Variations were influenced by Arnold Schoenberg and other composers of the twelve-tone school. This study contains an examination of each of three piano pieces mentioned, with emphasis upon aspects of thematic development, harmony, rhythm, and sonority; then a comparison between the pieces is made.

Analysis of Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, and Billy the Kid

Begun in Berlin, completed in exile in Paris, and premiered on both sides of the Atlantic, Kurt Weill's Symphony No. 2 sets up the symphony circa 1933 as both resolutely international and messily interdisciplinary, and spotlights how fundamentally a transnational approach is needed in order more comprehensively to understand both the genre and the localised political and social issues shaping symphonic discourse at this time. Taking the issues raised by Weill's symphony as a starting point, and borrowing fine-grained, historically synchronic approaches from year studies, this thesis examines the symphonic genre in 1933 through four other case-study works composed or premiered in that year. I thus position the symphony as a site of cultural exchange between and within the major contexts traversed by Weill and his work: Berlin, Paris, and a messier U.S. East-Coast nexus that centres on New York and Boston, via Mexico City, looking in detail at Hans Pfitzner's Symphony in C-sharp minor, Roy Harris's Symphony 1933, Aaron Copland's Short Symphony, and Arthur Honegger's Mouvement Symphonique nr. 3. The Germanic genre has long been associated with nationalism, monumentality, and power display, wedded to Germanic Enlightenment philosophical discourses about universalised selfhood and its relationship to society. 1933, the year in which Hitler took power and the Great Depression reached its peak, was politically and economically fraught, concentrating social questions that intersect with symphonic issues about power, selfhood, space, and mass audiences. It is also a neglected year within symphonic surveys. The thesis combines archival work and hermeneutic perspectives to foreground those social and political discourses historically associated with the genre. I argue for the significance of their differing legacies in co-existent contexts, for the complicity of the genre in establishing and perpetuating political and colonial hegemonies, and for the urgency of rethinking the symphony as an international phenomenon.

Este trabalho consiste em investigar as tendências pandiatônicas na obra "Preamble for a Solemn Occasion" para órgão (1953) de Aaron Copland (1900-1990). A análise inclui a busca pelos conteúdos intervalares mais recorrentes, a interação entre a tonalidade harmônica e a tonalidade melódica, e os centros tonais. Os referenciais teóricos utilizados foram os livros Tonality, Atonality e Pantonality de Rudolph Reti (1958), que fundamenta o conceito de pantonalidade, e Analytic Approaches to Twentieth-Century Music de Joel Lester (1989), que elucida acerca da teoria dos conjuntos. / The purpose of this research is to investigate the pandiatonic tendencies of the "Preamble for a Solemn Occasion" for organ (1953) by Aaron Copland (1900-1990). The analysis inc1udes a search for the most recurrent interval collections, the interaction between the harmonic and melodic tonalities, and the tonal centers. The theoretical framework inc1udes the works by Rudolph Reti: Tonality, Atonality e Pantonality (1958) where pantonality is defined, and Analytic Approaches to Twentieth-Century Music by Joel Lester (1989) for set theory analysis.

Este trabalho consiste em investigar as tendências pandiatônicas na obra "Preamble for a Solemn Occasion" para órgão (1953) de Aaron Copland (1900-1990). A análise inclui a busca pelos conteúdos intervalares mais recorrentes, a interação entre a tonalidade harmônica e a tonalidade melódica, e os centros tonais. Os referenciais teóricos utilizados foram os livros Tonality, Atonality e Pantonality de Rudolph Reti (1958), que fundamenta o conceito de pantonalidade, e Analytic Approaches to Twentieth-Century Music de Joel Lester (1989), que elucida acerca da teoria dos conjuntos. / The purpose of this research is to investigate the pandiatonic tendencies of the "Preamble for a Solemn Occasion" for organ (1953) by Aaron Copland (1900-1990). The analysis inc1udes a search for the most recurrent interval collections, the interaction between the harmonic and melodic tonalities, and the tonal centers. The theoretical framework inc1udes the works by Rudolph Reti: Tonality, Atonality e Pantonality (1958) where pantonality is defined, and Analytic Approaches to Twentieth-Century Music by Joel Lester (1989) for set theory analysis.