Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester, 1957. / V. 2: Musical examples. Bibliography: leaves 237-240. Digitized version available online via the Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music http://hdl.handle.net/1802/6096

Thesis (M.M.)--University of Florida, 2004. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 77 pages. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Irish born British composer, teacher, conductor, and organist Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), is today best known for his choral works and as teacher to some of Britain's most successful composers of the twentieth century. Stanford was a prolific composer of numerous genres of music, and his chamber works for strings comprise a significant portion of his total compositional output. A great many of Stanford's chamber compositions were never published and are absent among today's standard chamber music repertoire. Until now, Stanford's String Quartet No. 4 in G minor, Op. 99 has never been published. This project comprises the first published edition of the String Quartet No. 4, making the work more readily available to performers and scholars. The String Quartet No. 4 is the last of Stanford's string quartets to be published, and this project makes the publication of his works in this genre complete. The author hopes that this project will help generate interest in Stanford as an important figure in British music history and bring his works to a greater public awareness through performance and study.

Writing in 2001, musicologist Axel Klein concluded that Stanford’s reception history has been significantly impacted by the complicated national identities surrounding both the composer and his music. A lifelong devotee of the nineteenth-century Austro-Germanic tradition, Stanford’s status as an Irish-born leading figure of the ‘English’ Musical Renaissance has compromised the place that the composer and his musical output occupy within the history of Western music. Stanford is well-known for being an outspoken critic on matters musical and Irish. Although his views seldom appear ambiguous, there is still a sense that the real Stanford remains partially obscured by his opinions. Through an examination of his symphonic works, this thesis seeks to readdress our understanding of Stanford and his relationship with Ireland and the musical community of his time. Although A. Peter Brown has stated that the symphony was not a central genre for the composer, it is my argument that, on the contrary, the symphony was a pivotal form for him. Considering these works within the broader history of the symphony in Europe in the nineteenth century, and through a critical examination of Stanford’s relationship with Ireland, this thesis seeks to demonstrate that these seven works can be read as an allegory for the composer’s relationship both with his homeland and with the musical community of his time. His struggle to combine the universality of symphonic expression with a need to articulate his Irish identity parallels Stanford’s own attempts to integrate himself within both British and European musical communities, and further demonstrates, in his eventual rejection of it, that it was only when he attempted to forge a more individualistic path through his music that he found a way of expressing his individual Irish identity.