Not available / text

The romantic piano literature contains three important collections of nocturnes. The nocturnes of John Field (1782-1837) were the first to appear, and were followed by collections from Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) and Gabriel Faure (1845-1924). While the relationship of the nocturnes of Field to those of Chopin is well documented, the corresponding relationship between Faure and Chopin is not. This study contains a detailed examination of this relationship, and shows the precise nature of Chopin's strong influence on Faure's early nocturnes, as well as the nature of Faure's growth from that influence. Chopin's influence was strongest in the area of harmonic language, as Faure carried certain of Chopin's techniques to logical extremes. Faure also adopted ternary form as the important form for the piece from Chopin. Faure's use of this form shows both similarities and differences from that found in Chopin. Faure's early nocturnes employ the same basic textures as Chopin's nocturnes, but Faure's later works abandon this in favor of increasingly contrapuntal writing. Chopin's influence is weakest in the area of melodic construction, as Faure's melodies often show a rigorous motivic construction which is not found in Chopin.

Chopin’s artistic philosophies were heavily indebted to his love of vocal music and his staunch belief that vocal expression represented the supreme essence of musical declamation. To his contemporaries in the Parisian salons, his veneration of the vocal ideal illuminated the expressive significance of Chopin’s musical language. Influenced by the dramatic function of operatic and vocal works, and by interpretive trends that associated literary programs with instrumental (textless) music, Chopin’s contemporaries searched for concealed narratives within his piano nocturnes. This thesis considers the narrative function of Chopin’s late nocturnes within the sociopolitical and musical culture of the Parisian salons, and utilizes a modern approach to narratology that resonates with a prominent facet of historical interpretation. The study reveals a specific reception in which audiences, influenced by the philosophies of Polish messianism, heard national narratives, sung pronouncements of his Polish nationality, and political support for the Polish nation in Chopin’s nocturnes. / Graduate

Both of the Chopin concertos are the earliest of his works to be found in the ordinary piano repertoire, and they possess the direct influences and inherited traits of the composer. Since he did no more orchestral work after completing these two works, it is evident that he thought only in terms of pianistic expression. Probably one of the reasons for Chopin's ineffectiveness as an orchestral writer is due to his inability to conform to the classical form: sonata allegro. The e minor concerto is representative of his treatment of the larger forms. Analyzing the elements of an early work of the composer reveals the degree of maturity in individual traits. Elements of basic chord structure and use of harmony, melodic characteristics, and pianistic expression mark the style of a composer. This concerto demonstrates the beginning of chromatic harmony in his time and in his own writing; it contains melodic beauty and pianistic features which make it acceptable in standard concerto repertoire in spite of its many defects.

This dissertation unites two contrasting phenomena, musical theorizing as practiced on YouTube and dreamlike experiences involving music, under a single rubric: virtual space. While the two phenomena are disconnected in time, geography, and culture, they are nonetheless similar in that they are spatialized in ways that contravene how we typically experience physical space, So, I develop the concept of virtual space as a means of approaching the commonalities underlying these phenomena. Building on a definition of space as a medium in which entities are positionally related, I propose a framework for analyzing virtual spaces that emphasizes a phenomenon’s subjective immersivity and objective relationality. In order to bring out the human dimension of these virtual spaces, I concentrate on the discursive, instrumental, experiential, and generative aspects of embodied virtual spaces that are entangled in social, cultural, and political networks. To that end, in the first half of the dissertation, I discuss how a community of YouTube content creators has carved out a place for practicing, teaching, and learning music theory. I detail YouTube’s affordances as a space for theorizing music and a medium of communication, showing how content creators have leveraged these to great effect in their theorizing of game music. Flitting between the general and the particular, I balance case studies of content creators and close readings of audiovisual content with sociological approaches. In spite of the platform’s self-image and the community’s political positioning, I contend that YouTube’s egalitarian promise has been left unfulfilled in the English-language, Western-centric field of YouTube music theory, which replicates or even exacerbates some of the epistemological issues and unjust social structures that pervade academia and Western society more broadly. The other half of the dissertation concerns the analytical interpretation and precise differentiation of dreamlike experiences centered on music. I demonstrate that much of the discourse on this topic comes from close readings of music as dream. As this perspective locates dreaming in an object, I argue for counterbalancing this discourse towards a dreaming subject, and thus I propose a framework with three interrelated components. First, I carefully distinguish dreaming, as a virtual and spatialized experience, from standard waking consciousness through recourse to neuroscience and phenomenology. After that, I set forth a tripartite scheme that articulates the many permutations of how we might position ourselves, other subjects, and music in this non-dreamer–dreamer dynamic. Last, I classify the various interactions between music, dreamlike experience, and analytical interpretation. Using the music of Fryderyk Chopin as my example, I show that, though this music has accrued much historical and cultural meaning through being read as dreamlike, we have much to gain from the analytical insights unique to our subjective, dreamlike experiences with this music.

The preludes as a whole do not conform to any specific formal mold, but offer a variety of form: binary, ternary, one-part, and five-part. As such, no new formal structures have been introduced by this "first" of the nineteenth century and twentieth century "disconnected" preludes. On the other hand, they are a heterogenous collection of styles, moods, and forms--a precedent that was followed by Debussy, Rachmoninoff, and various others. To determine the degree to which Chopin was harmonically advanced would require comparative analyses of works by his contemporaries and later nineteenth-century composers. Suffice it to say that one would be hard put to locate a collection of compositions of similar length and scope, written in the 1820's, that contains the wealth of harmonic innovations found within Opus 28.

Pianists often have trouble in determining where a phrase ends, or in other words, cadence identification. This is especially true of certain cadences that can be considered either as half cadences or authentic cadences. This analytically ambiguous cadential point can result in different performance decisions, so pianists should make informed decisions about what kind of cadence it is. This study aims to investigate such cadential ambiguity shown at points of phrase boundaries by focusing on Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35, first movement. I offer both possibilities (a half cadence or an authentic cadence) at the phrase ending, suggesting a performance-related strategy based on each possibility. My objective is not to support only one cadential status, but to bring up the cadential problem from the analytical perspective and to demonstrate how cadence identification affects performance results. The dissertation is divided into two parts: analysis and performance, so it relies on a combined method of analytical terminologies and performance-related musical elements. In the analysis, the terminology of William Caplin is employed. The performance part refers to several method books written by prestigious piano pedagogues. After an introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 reviews some literature on cadences. Chapter 3 specifically analyzes the first movement of Chopin's second sonata by means of Caplin's terminologies. Chapter 4 provides a performance-related method and Chapter 5 deals with a practical performance strategy.

One of the difficulties of nineteenth-century form studies is ambiguity in ascertaining which formal types are at work and in what ways. This can be an especially difficult problem when multiple formal types seem to influence the construction of a single composition. Drawing on some recent innovations in form studies proposed by Steven Vande Moortele, Janet Schmalfeldt, and Caitlin Martinkus, I first develop a set of analytical tools specifically made for the analysis of sonata/variation formal hybrids. I then refine these tools by applying them to the analysis of two pieces. Chopin's Fourth Piano Ballade can be understood from this perspective as primarily following the broad outlines of a sonata form, but with important influences from the recursive structures of variation forms; Franck's Symphonic Variations, on the other hand, are better viewed as engaging most of all with multiple variation-form paradigms and overlaying them with some of the rhetorical and formal structures of sonata forms. I conclude with a brief speculation on some further, more general applications of my methodology.