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Note: / Karol Szymanowski's music has fascinated me for a long time. The first time I encountered his name was in Artur Rubinstein's autobiography, which recounts how they first met and narrates many anecdotes about their friendship. At the time, I was living in Brazil, and was unable to find any recordings of his music. Nonetheless, Rubinstein's ardent praise of him (“a master!”, “a great Polish composer!”, “a powerful, original personality”) made me very curious, and I did not abandon my desire to keep looking for his music. Then, when I moved to Montreal in order to start my undergraduate degree at McGill University, I was finally able to find many recordings of his works at the school's library.[...]

This dissertation consists of two parts. The first and main part is the score of L 'entreprise de seduction, a 22-minute work for solo cello and instrumental ensemble [1011, 1010, percussion (1 player), piano, 2111], along with a recording on compact disc. The second part is an accompanying analytical text about the work. In the text, after a short description of the project, of its objectives and original contribution, we discuss the theoretical basis of my compositional approach. This approach stands on the fundamental structural independence of poiesis and esthesis, and leads to a musical aesthetics favouring formal transparency and seeking an active listening attitude. Two sets of compositional techniques are then introduced: techniques using the 12-tone row and techniques based on chance operations. We observe that those techniques all endeavour to balance systematicism and intuition to the greater profit of musical expression. We then proceed to a detailed analysis of L 'entreprise de seduction revealing its main musical material and processes. The text concludes with a few overall comments and by a discussion of the possible impact of this composition on my future projects.

The song " Montreal ", by Ariane Moffatt, has achieved a great success in the Summer of 2006. This thesis scrutinizes the causes of this popularity. After a review of the diverse existing methods in popular music research, three modes of analysis are presented. First, the study shown here describes the song through a music-theoretical approach; it observes the rules governing the voice, the melody, the rhythm, the phrases, the bass, the tonality, the chords, and the instruments used, supported by a precise transcription of the song. Then, this paper studies the musical codes that are found in "Montreal". In this section, the musical message of the piece is analyzed, while taking in consideration the sociohistorical context of the Summer of 2006, the national history that preceded the release of this piece, and the lyrics of the song. Finally, this study investigates the issue of national identity in Quebec, the place of "Montreal" into the collective imagination of Quebeckers, and the popular music tradition of the province.

Dereglement passager de corps heterogenes is a work for flute (doubling piccolo and alto flute), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), horn, piano, violin, cello and contrabass which explores the concept of "virus" within a musical form similar to the theme and variations. During its elaboration, I imagined what could metaphorically be the effects of different virus on what I define as "musical organisms". This idea suggested a number of variations that could serve as laboratories to experiment different levels of interaction between the virus and the musical organisms. This thesis consists of the musical score and a detailed analysis.

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In this paper the compositional issues and techniques employed in my D.Mus. Thesis Composition Noite dos Tambores Silenciosos (for symphony orchestra) are discussed. The piece, constituted of three linked parts, exhibits a counterpoint of three distinct kinds of music as the main vehicle of the musical discourse. / Two of these musics are connected with Maracatu de Baque Virado and Maracatu Rural, popular musical manifestations found in Pernambuco, a state in northeast Brazil. In a "defragmentation" process, reference materials from the Maracatus are abstractly fragmented and reconstructed according to a technique I call Zin-Zout, implementing in the music a continuous state of transformation, back and forth between micro and macro dimensions. The third kind of music, free of folk references, follows a transformational process built up according to a "palimpsest" technique. In this transformation the hierarchy of the musical parameters changes along with the units of the musical content. / These procedures involve not only pitch and rhythm, but also other parameters like timbre, density and register in a structural way, as building elements of the content and form of the work. / The defragmentation process establishes some predetermined compositional paths, but permits micro- and macro-level decisions based on intuitive considerations, especially in the manipulation of orchestration and micro rhythms. More systematic, the organization of pitch involves a limited serialism and a variety of modal treatment.