Thesis (D.M.A.)--Boston University / Tonight we will recreate musical moments from the plays of Don Pedro Calderon De La Barca, who lived from 1600 until 1680. During his long span of life he dominated the brilliant Baroque playwrights and poets for several generations. He took the rich heritage of drama forms which Juan Del Encina, Tirso De Molina, Lope De Vega and many others had created, and under the magnificent patronage of the Hapsburgs--Philip III, Philip IV, and Carlos II--Calderon brought the one-act sacred plays, called autos sacramentales, to their definitive form. For us he is particularly interesting for the enormous amount of music he employed in his plays, and the creative ways in which he used the musical forms , and because he wrote the first librettos for Spanish opera and for the musical comedies, called zarzuelas. Calderon produced three types of plays: the one-act sacred plays, the three-act comedies and three-act dramas [TRUNCATED]

Paul Creston (1906-1985) was one of the most significant American composers from the middle of the twentieth century. Though Creston maintained elements of the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition and was categorized as a “Neo-Romantic” or “20th-century traditionalist,” many of Creston’s compositions contain elements of Baroque music. His Piano Sonata, Opus 9 provides significant examples of Baroque elements, while already foreshadowing his mature style. The purpose of this study is to explore Baroque elements in the compositional language of Paul Creston’s Piano Sonata, Opus 9. All four movements of the Piano Sonata will be examined in regards to its stylistic features associated with Baroque practices. These features mainly consist of rhythm, texture, imitative writing, and repeated phrase structure. Each category of the study will include comparisons of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas with Creston’s sonata. Through an examination of the Piano Sonata and its Baroque elements, this study hopes to inspire renewed interest in the work among musicians and to help the performer give a more stylistically coherent, and accurate, performance.

This thesis explores how the harmonic structures of J.S. Bach's triple fugues interact with their formal, contrapuntal designs. It attempts to explain how each of these elaborate fugues is supported by a single, uninterrupted structure that holds the entire work together. In Bach's fugues one generally encounters large-scale goal-directed motion towards the concluding tonic; this continuous harmonic motion towards the final tonic is consistent with the aesthetics of the Baroque style, which valorizes constant motion or dynamism.

This diploma thesis deals with portraits of František Antonín Count Špork. The paper presents graphic and painted portraits (all of them - except one miniature - are found in collections in the Czech Republic), that were made mainly for the purpose of the Count's presentation. A part of the thesis is devoted to the life of Count, his hobbies and legal disputes, that are reflected in individual works of art ( heraldic motto "True and Justice", hunting order of Saint Hubert, spa and hospital Kuks, etc). The main emphasis is put on presentation of surviving portraits of Count Špork as well as newly found and yet unpublished paintings and graphics, their authorship, dating and iconographic analysis. This lets us meet different authors with their Fine Quality. Thus a diverse, but complex collection of Count Špork portraits is formed for the first time. A catalogue, an important part of the thesis, comes at the end to summarize all the previous data in a transparent way and to add some more information, concerning especially oil-paintings. Keywords Baroque-Graphics-Paintings-Portrait-Špork Počet znaků (včetně mezer): 237606 Počet znaků (bez mezer): 201697

The aim of my work is to explore the motives of racial and national prejudice in the drama of the Spanish Golden age. On selected examples from the late Renaissance and early Baroque plays, I reflect on the frequency and expressiveness of racially defaming allusions and attitudes based on delegitimization and discrimination of ethnic groups in the religiously and nationally consolidating state. I also notice the development of contemporary xenophobic motives, targeted at members of nations professing Islam and Judaism, as well as other "pagan" ethnic groups. Using literature I try to classify these motives, alternatively to set them into a contemporary historical and biographical context.

El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha sits at the crossroads of two defined Spanish early modern contexts, combining Renaissance ideals with Baroque elements into one Golden Age masterpiece. The theme of duality present throughout the work finds true expression in Cervantes’ well-educated protagonist, Alonso Quijano. In him, the reader glimpses the struggle between antiquity versus early modernity, ideality versus reality, instability versus sanity, and unhealthiness versus healthiness. These medical themes and the underlying sociocultural facets will be investigated by thoroughly evaluating Cervantes’ treatment of human consciousness. In doing so, this study aims to explore the following questions: to what extent does Cervantes present relevant medical knowledge applicable to the Renaissance and Baroque periods of Spanish history? How do these medical allusions and references influence the reader’s perception of Don Quixote as insane? Could/Would a medical diagnosis of some neurologically or psychologically based disorder be applied? Finally, to what extent of the protagonist’s behavior may be medically attributed and to what extent may be the result of sociocultural disconnection? Following an in-depth review of Spanish literature and medical knowledge, it will be necessary to examine the work for episodes in which Don Quixote experiences pronounced fatigue, forgetting spells, head trauma, sleep disturbances, and headaches. This psychoanalytical process of interpreting Spanish medicine through the lens of literature illuminates the scientific background inherent in the novel and establishes a foundation for uncovering the connections between medicine, culture, and literature in Golden Age Spain.

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This thesis examines, details, and evaluates the process used while executing the costume design for Temple University's 2013 production of The Liar by David Ives. I will discuss each part of the design process from pre to post production and reflect on the process and choices made. / Theater

The Forum, once the most central and sacred part of the ancient city of Rome, evolved over the course of centuries into a cluttered space at the threshold of the built-up city and its more rural periphery. Among the rubble of antique monuments--destroyed by earthquakes, flooding, or purposeful spoliation--livestock grazed at the site, giving it the appellation Campo Vaccino, or cow pasture, in the early modern period. Despite these obstacles, the Forum remained a vital part of the spiritual life of Romans after several of its structures were Christianized beginning in the sixth century. It became the province of the Catholic Church, and underwent a significant rehabilitation through papal patronage in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The seven churches ringing the Forum's periphery were restored or rebuilt over the course of about fifty years, allowing the patrons to harness the symbolism of the pagan and Christian past of the site to promote the glorious reviving Church. In this dissertation, I examine the Forum from a variety of vantage points, in order to reconstruct the antiquarian understanding of the site, its monuments, and history in the seventeenth century. The first chapter examines the historiography of the Forum and its churches, while outlining the issues at stake in the refashioning of this urban center. Chapter Two provides an overview of the Forum's history up to the sixteenth century. In Chapter Three, I consider the phenomenon of the Paleochristian Revival of the Counter-Reformation, and the ways in which it manifested itself at the Campo Vaccino. Chapter Four begins a series of case studies, organized by papacy, to elucidate the state of the Forum and its churches. Clement VIII Aldobrandini's direct patronage and other projects dating to his papacy initiated the wave of renovations that continued over the next several decades. The papacies of Paul V Borghese and Gregory XV Ludovisi are the subject of Chapter Five, when the urban environment at the edge of the Forum underwent new developments, in addition to works at the churches themselves. In Chapter Six, I focus on the two projects commissioned by Urban VIII Barberini: SS. Cosma e Damiano and SS. Luca e Martina, which demonstrate two very different approaches to ancient buildings. Finally, Chapter Seven considers works in the Campo Vaccino during the reign of Innocent X Pamphili, and the unification of these disparate renovations by the dramatic remaking of the central space by Alexander VII Chigi. These numerous projects carried out between 1592 and 1656 completely remade the Forum, renewing its historical importance in the city while highlighting its connection to Rome's dual history. The imperial and Early Christian past at the Forum now stood alongside the monuments of early modern Rome. The seventeenth century project added a new layer to the palimpsest of this eminently historical site. / Art History

Theoretical constructs latent in thoroughbass treatises of the 18th century can serve students of thoroughbass today. In the following work, I draw from Johann David Heinichen’s Der General-Bass in der Composition (1728), David Kellner’s Treulicher Unterricht im General-Baß (2nd edition, 1737), Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg’s Handbuch bey dem Generalbasse und der Composition, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (part 2, 1762), and recent scholarship in the areas of Partimento theory, Musica Poetica, and early music theory in general, to demonstrate how the many thoroughbass figures can all be contextualized in an historically informed theoretical framework. In the first two chapters, (1) thoroughbass figures are analyzed as having an internal hierarchy of primary and auxiliary intervals, allowing chords to be understood both vertically and linearly; (2) chords are localized in the major and minor modes according to bass scale steps; and (3) the various contrapuntal procedures associated with dissonant chords used in both the strict style (stylus gravis) and freer styles (stylus luxurians communis and stylus luxurians theatralis) are analyzed as German musical-rhetorical figures. In chapter 3, these three theoretical constructs are used to organize an extensive collection of dissonant chord progressions derived from the aforementioned treatises of Heinichen, Mattheson, Marpurg, and Bach. In chapter 4, I draw from basic elements of partimento theory—namely cadences, sequences, and the Rule of the Octave (regola dell’ottava or règle de l’octave)—to construct a series of exercises; most of these exercises use a relatively strict four-part texture and are illustrated from multiple righthand starting positions to promote flexibility in the student. Finally, in chapter 5, practical matters of thoroughbass realization, namely pragmatic and expressive concerns, are discussed and illustrated with examples from many treatises of the 17th and 18th centuries.