This thesis is a critical analysis and creative commentary providing research and insight into my 150-minute multimedia exhibition, "Femininity: Ownership and Power," that premiered October 23, 2021. All of my research, composition, and collaboration efforts seek to recontextualize the semiotics of ‘femininity' through ownership and empowerment from varying intersections and identities. The titles of the eight works composed and premiered as part of the exhibition include: a beautiful reckoning; Dust; Moirai; Gaia; Portrait of the American Woman; Shared, In Balanced Contrast; At My Intersection; and I See You. Also included was #pinkcode, an exhibit that features a fuschia graphic user interface for an interactive modulation synthesis application built in Csound designed to bring femininity into computer music spaces. The musical compositions vary in instrumentation including flute, alto flute, voice, guitar, viola, harp, cajon, vibraphone, live electronics, and fixed media. They also vary in medium including live performance, virtual reality video, music video, audio-reactive TouchDesigner video, immersive text projections, light show, and live dance. Feminist texts by women poets and authors recited by women personally connected to me are also included in the fabric of the musical fixed media of multiple pieces in the thesis exhibition. Collaborators of artistic media including film, digital art, music, and dance include Eboni Johnson, Hannah Ottinger, Cami Holman, Miranda Zapata, and Elijah J. Thomas.

Researchers of historic voice pedagogy texts have generally focused their objectives towards reviewing the recommendations of historic voice teachers pertaining to the physiological, acoustical, and musical elements of training singers; however, researchers have given less attention to the evidence of humanistic pedagogical elements presented by historic teachers of voice. This study aims to examine historic resources of vocal pedagogy for qualitative data representing exemplification of or advocacy for character strengths for voice teachers. Additionally, this study explores practical applications of character strengths within the context of the modern applied voice studio. In this context, character strengths are defined as the positive attributes of a personality that influence how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. In this document, historic pedagogical resources (N = 80) represent works published between 1811 and 1975. Using the scientifically validated VIA (Values-in-Action) Classification of Strengths, the relevant data extracted from these resources were categorized first into six virtues – wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. These data were further divided into the subcategories of character strengths based on descriptions located in seminal resources in character strengths research.

Paul Tortelier's How I Play, How I Teach (1975) is an invaluable addition to the limited amount of comprehensive cello methods written during the second half of the 20th century. Although Tortelier's influence on cello performance is still being felt today, the application of his method has not been sufficiently explored. An exceptional performer and devoted pedagogue, Paul Tortelier (1914-1990) can undoubtedly be ranked among the greatest cellists of the 20th century. Influenced by Pablo Casals' (1876-1973) approach to cello playing, How I Play, How I Teach develops his views on intonation, sound production, shifting, and articulation. However, Tortelier also introduces numerous daring inventions of his own into his method. These include playing with a flattened last joint of the finger for a more expressive vibrato, "rolling the stick of the bow" while playing for a wider palette of tone colors, new pizzicato and thumb position techniques, new legato fingerings for double stops, and the "pianistic passing of the thumb," among others. Due to their highly unorthodox nature and often condensed, minimalistic explanations, many of Tortelier's ideas have failed to gain acceptance since their publication and are regularly considered to be types of extended technique, mostly applicable to contemporary music performance. By examining Tortelier's innovations and by employing them in selected excerpts from the cello literature, this research proves that even his most radical ideas are applicable within the standard repertoire. If paired with the other methods, the visionary contents of How I Play, How I Teach serve as a useful resource of technical ideas to any aspiring cellist and pedagogue.

Hendrik Hofmeyr is considered one of the most important and influential living composers in South Africa. His music for solo saxophone is not well-known in the classical saxophone repertoire. His four works for solo saxophone (Concerto per saxofono contralto e orchestra, Concerto per saxofono baritono e orchestra, Partita canonica, and Necromancer) are substantial and terrific repertoire for the instrument. This study is intended to inform a saxophone performer's understanding of these compositions through analysis of form, melodic, and harmonic content relevant to performance; and, demonstrate through example the conclusions determined by the analysis about apparent compositional techniques in the music.

Charlotte Moorman (1933–1991) was a Juilliard-trained cellist whose life and work made an indelible mark on the development of the American avant-garde. In her career, Moorman acted as a performer, collaborator, composer, administrator and muse. She solely founded the inaugural New York Avant Garde Festival, and subsequently directed fifteen of these festivals between 1963 and 1980, the feat for which she is most widely acknowledged today. Yet, her revolutionary performance practice, which blurred the lines between her life, her body, and her work, and brought into focus the dynamics of corporeality, the feminine body, female nudity and sexuality, and gendered politics within the contexts of musical performance, has so far escaped serious consideration in the written histories of the American avant-garde. This dissertation describes the nature of Moorman's practice as one that evolved to become inherently and irrevocably embodied, explores how this approach fell at odds with the pervasive avant-garde philosophies of music, and illustrates how her work troubles even a feminist musicological analysis. Further, through a contemporary critique of Moorman's oeuvre which centralizes the social, cultural, and political implications of her body in performance as integral to the work, this project offers a retrospective visibility to the artist which allows for a reframing of her practice as foundational to the aesthetic development of the postwar musical avant-garde. By way of these efforts, Moorman's legacy is presented as one that is both historically significant and vital to current and future musicological discourse.

While the development of hagiography over time has long attracted the attention of medievalists, scholars have not fully explored the critical role of the liturgy in prompting and transmitting these changes. This dissertation examines the liturgies for the patron saints of three musical and ecclesiastical centers in medieval Aquitaine: the cathedrals of Saint-Trophime in Arles, Saint-Just-et-Saint-Pasteur in Narbonne, and Saint-Étienne in Toulouse. Through the music, texts, and ritual actions of the liturgy, the clerical communities of these three institutions reinforced some aspects of their patron saint's legendary biography and modified others. Yet the process unfolded differently at each cathedral, revealing the particular preferences of the canons of each community as well as their changing circumstances during the Middle Ages. In Arles, the office for St. Trophime, which was likely composed at the cathedral, shows dramatic changes in the saint's hagiography. The clerics in Narbonne also composed an office for their patron saints but did not substantially change the details of Justus and Pastor's legendary biography. In Toulouse, the canons selected from among the preexisting repertoire of chants and texts available for St. Stephen, crafting liturgies that were particular to Saint-Étienne within a clearly Aquitanian context. By revealing the ways in which the clerics of Saint-Trophime, Saint-Just, and Saint-Étienne shaped the legendary biographies of their patron saints, my work provides new insights into the ways in which clerical communities throughout Latin Christendom shaped and reshaped the hagiographic portraits of their patron saints through the creation, compilation, and celebration of new liturgies.

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