The focus of this study is on the relationships among three basic auditory representations as well as their interaction with a measure of overall musicianship (sight-singing) among a group of classical and non-classical university music students (N = 112) selected from three different universities. Students were enrolled in level one of an aural skills course at the time. Basic auditory representations included were tonic centrality, measured by Colwell’s (1968) Feeling for Tonal Center, tonal grouping, measured by Colwell’s (1968) Auditory-Visual Discrimination, and harmonic function grouping, measured by a revised version of Holahan, Saunders and Goldberg’s (2000) assessment. I evaluated relationships by correlating scores on each measure and also compared these relationships among classical and non-classical music students. The participants in this study were the most skilled at forming auditory representations of tonic centrality and non-classical musicians significantly (p = .002) outperformed classical musicians in this area. Tonic centrality was also most strongly correlated with overall musicianship (τ = .45, p < .001) within the sample, and this relationship appeared to be stronger among non-classical musicians (τ = .52, p < .001) than among classical musicians (τ = .39, p < .001). This difference may be accounted for by the increased reliance on grounding in a tonal center required by the musical activities of a typical non-classical music student. Given the changing balance of musical endeavors present in tertiary music schools today (Lehmann, Sloboda, & Woody, 2007), educators are encouraged to better understand the particular strengths non-classical musicians may bring to the classroom in terms of ear-based musical abilities. Likewise, music educators on each level are encouraged to incorporate ear-based activities such as improvisation and playing by ear to the benefit of musicians of all genres.

abstract: A New Home is a multi-movement musical composition written for a chamber orchestra of flute, oboe, clarinet in B-flat, bassoon, horn in F, trumpet in C, trombone, bass trombone, percussion (1), pianoforte, and strings. The duration of the entire piece is approximately fourteen minutes (movement 1: four minutes; mvt. 2: four minutes and thirty seconds; mvt. 3: five minutes and thirty seconds). As an exercise in compositional experimentation, some of the musical techniques explored throughout the piece are harmonic planing or parallelism, ostinati, modality, chromatic dissonance, thematic transformation, mixed meter, and syncopation, as well as issues of orchestral blend, balance, and color. The first movement, ironically titled “Don’t Panic,” highlights my initial anxieties on experimentation by creating hectic textures. The movement is structured around two main alternating sections of chromatic, chordal dissonance with more modal, melodic syncopation in addition to a developmental section, but a sense of rhythmic groove is prominent throughout. The second movement, “Still Here,” is a darker, more sensitive music as it explores various settings of its main thematic material interspersed with march-like episodes and a related secondary theme. The themes are organized around a diatonic scale that omits one pitch to comprise a six-note scale. The third movement, “Change of State,” recalls the modality and rhythmic liveliness of the first movement, and it bears a thematic relationship to the second movement. Much of the material also revolves around scales and mediant relationships to comprise an opening theme, a groove section, and an ethereal, glassy texture which ends the movement. Essentially, the piece closes with a calmer music in contrast to the brute force that opened the piece. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Music 2016

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:27:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2006-06-28Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:35:55Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 bloes_cca_me_ia.pdf: 228923 bytes, checksum: 52a61c28147b60972276fc37ba2c2776 (MD5) / Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) / Com esse trabalho busca-se compreender o processo de integração da música popular urbana à música de concerto representada pelos pianeiros que surgiram no Brasil a partir da segunda metade do século XIX. Os pianeiros foram representantes de uma nova geração de pianistas que se profissionalizaram e se desenvolveram para atender às necessidades de entretenimento das diversas classses sociais da época em detrimento de um efetivo crescimento econômico e urbano. Além de pianistas profissionais, foram também responsáveis pelo desenvolvimento de elementos fundamentais para uma nova concepção de música popular urbana, participando da formação e fixação dos gêneros musicais populares da época e incorporando-os ao piano. A abordagem desse processo estabeleceu-se, tendo como pano de fundo, a dicotomia cultura popular-cultura de elite que é analisada sob a ótica da circularidade de Baktin e seu conceito de dialogismo e polifonia. O problema é, então, estruturado em um pensamento que não propõe a exaltação ou domínio de uma cultura sobre a outra, mas um processo de reciprocidade e circularidade, no qual dialogam diferentes vozes que constituem o dircurso polifônico. Assim, diante desse processo de integração de culturas, o pianeiro assume o papel de intermediário cultural ou seja, passa s ser um elo de ligação entre a música erudita e a música popular, ampliando os conceitos e influenciando a cultura e a sociedade da época, tendo em vista que, até então, o piano pertencia exclusivamente à musica erudita restrita às camadas da elite. / The aim of this work is to understand the process of integration between the urban popular music and the concert music represented by the pianeiros that have emerged in Brazil since the second half of the 19th century. The pianeiros represented a new pianists generation that have professionalized and improved themselves in order to chieve the entertainment needs of the different social classes of that period that were exclused of the real economic and social growth. Besides being professional pianists, they were also responsible for developing the crucial elements of a new concept of urban popular music, taking part in forming and settling the popular music kinds of their yers and taking these ones to be played on the piano. The apporach of that process had as backgound the tichotomy between popular culture and elite culture, which will be unterstood using Bakhtin's idea of the optics of ciecularity and the concepts of dialogism and polyphony that it brings. Then, research question is structured in a line of thought that does not see superiority or mominancy of any culture above other cultures, but in the other hand proposes a process of reciproity and circularity in which dialog is held by the different voices that constitute the polyphonic discourse. Though this integration of cultures, the pianeiro played the role of cultural intermediate, acting as a link between classical and popular music and then changing musical concepts and influencing their own cultures and societies in a moment that piano belonged exclusively to the classical music restricted to the social elites.

This study explores the possible contribution of art, specifically of classical music as high art, to the constitutional ideal of creating a society based on freedom and dignity. Although the government publically exhibits a keen interest in the arts there seems to be no constitutional right to art or duty to financially support it in any way. This results in a lack of urgency from government’s side to make good on undertakings to fund and financially assist the arts and consequently forces most western art forms into financial adversity. Art and entertainment differ inherently from each other and require different financial contributions from government. Hannah Arendt proposes a two-fold test to ascertain what constitutes high art and what amounts to ‘vulgamusik’ as suggested by Theodore Adorno. Where low art wallows in the ‘mundaneness’ of everyday life, high art offers a promise of longevity and of transformation with every encounter. Traditionally government support for high art is justified as contributing to an overall ‘upliftment’ of the general community, but as South Africa is already in the compromised position of not providing in the basic needs of its citizens funding for the arts needs to be re-visited. When exploring the nature of the fundamental rights to freedom and dignity it becomes apparent that the system of rights constitutes, similar to high art, a complex system and that exposure to complex systems will develop the imagination and a level of creativity when attempting to understand something of their intricate nature. In order to improve our perspective on what constitutes a better future an enhanced imagination is needed. The notion of complex systems and developing the imagination comes from an article by Mark Antaki and Paul Celliers and links with Arendt’s notion of understanding also the other with an ‘enlarged mentality’. It is through Drucilla Cornell’s concept of the imaginary domain as a space wherein one is constantly conceptualizing the ‘becoming’ of a better self, a better world and better future that the right to freedom and dignity can be realized. The encounter with high art makes it possible to integrate and ‘dream up’ that which seemed impossible into becoming a reality. F / Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Jurisprudence / unrestricted

Music ensembles have made a concerted attempt to reach out through social media platforms to the communities surrounding their concert venues in order to attract young adults to replace aging audiences. By observing opera and symphony orchestra audience members’ social media engagement through Twitter and Facebook Live, this dissertation endeavors to better understand how technology has changed the culture of classical music concert attendance. The music organizations utilizing social media considered for this study include the Los Angeles Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Boston Lyric Opera for Tweet Seats, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on Facebook Live. Consideration of live-tweets, Facebook Live concerts and comments, and personal interviews with social media users and music ensemble personnel provides insight to the changing experience of concert attendance. Interviews with online users who are actively participating in Tweet Seats on Twitter and chatrooms on Facebook Live during live-streamed concerts reveal that integrating social media during live performances enhances their sense of community, and their musical and social experiences. Participants indicate that prior classical music experience affects their motivation to participate and engage with other users. For many interviewees, affordability and VIP perks were initial incentives for their online involvement, but the overall experience for these users is complex. Interacting online allowed classical music fans to connect and/or reconnect to the ensembles and their music, and to an existing wired community, while negotiating with changes to the long-standing conventions of classical music culture. These alternative concert-going experiences made possible by social media reconstruct liveness within a digital world, cultivate classical music fandom, and enrich the live listening experience through collective engagement.

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Recent scholarship has revealed that the representation of Karnatic music as a “classical” art form in South Indian society was a complicated process bound to the agendas of larger early twentieth-century nationalist projects in India. This thesis explores the notions of classicalness as they are enacted in Karnatic music society through the oral transmission process from guru to shishya, or disciple. Still considered one of the most important emblems of the “classical,” the gurukula (lit. “guru-family”) system has been transformed to accommodate more contemporary lifestyles and reinscribed within many other social and musical processes in South Indian classical music society. This thesis examines the everyday interactions between members of Karnatic music society, particularly the clapping of t?la during a Karnatic music concert and the musical exchanges between percussionists onstage during the tani ?vartanam (Karnatic percussion solo), as public performances reminiscent of the relationship between guru and shishya.

Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies are uniformly considered highly challenging in terms of technical execution. However, their artistic value is frequently questioned. This dissertation examines the compositional elements that are often overlooked in these virtuoso works, and provides a viewpoint into their interpretative characteristics. Furthermore, it pursues a claim that besides being excellent performance pieces, these works also make an intriguing contribution to Liszt scholarship, and deserve meaningful consideration in terms of their artistic quality. Following the Introduction (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 provides a brief historical perspective of the critical affirmation Liszt the composer encountered from the musical society. It also includes a short background on Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, as well as the general reactions these works evoked from pianists, audiences, and scholars, during the time they were composed to the present day. As the main body of the dissertation, Chapter 3 investigates the three primary compositional concepts found in Rhapsodies Nos. 6, 10, and 12. These concepts are divided into three subchapters: Transformation of Themes, Controlled Pianistic Textures, and Coloristic Effects. Each of these subchapters provides explanatory information, as well as some of the most characteristic passages presented.

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Syftet med den här kvalitativa intervjustudien är att undersöka vilken relation lärare inom den högre klassiska instrumentalundervisningen har till improvisation, såväl deras tankar kring konceptet som deras praktiska applicering av improvisation i undervisningen. De forskningsfrågor som studien har ämnat finna svar på är: Hur uppfattar lärarna inom den högre klassiska instrumentalundervisningen improvisationens roll i deras undervisning? Varför har lärarna dessa uppfattningar? Vad får dessa uppfattningar för konsekvenser för lärarnas undervisning? Studien tar sin utgångspunkt i det hermeneutiska perspektivet och genomfördes genom kvalitativa fallstudier då jag vill göra en djupare tolkning av de intervjuades livsvärldar. Jag använde mig av så kallade halvstrukturerade intervjuer vilka liknar vardagliga samtal men har ett tydligt syfte att ta reda på. Resultatet visar att respondenterna har väldigt olika syn på vad improvisation egentligen är vilket påverkar deras syn på hur mycket av undervisningen som ska läggas på improvisation. Samtliga ansåg dock att det fanns en plats i undervisningen för improvisation, även om två respondenter uttryckte oro för de negativa effekter som en mer fri improvisation kan ha på den tryckta musiken den interagerar med. En majoritet av dem har dessutom sett ett ökat intresse för improvisation bland sina studenter, men med så vitt skilda syner på improvisation från lärarnas håll blir konsekvensen att studenterna får vitt skilda kunskaper och erfarenheter kring improvisation beroende på vilken lärare de får och vilket instrument de spelar. / The purpose of this qualitative interview study is to investigate the relationship teachers in higher classical instrumental teaching have to improvisation, both their thoughts on the concept and their practical application of improvisation in their teaching. The research questions that the study has intended to find answers to are: How do teachers in higher classical instrumental teaching perceive the role of improvisation in their teaching? Why do teachers have these perceptions? What are the consequences of these perceptions for teachers' teaching? The study is based on the hermeneutic perspective and was carried out through qualitative case studies as I want to make a deeper interpretation of the interviewees' lifeworlds. I used so-called semi-structured interviews which are similar to everyday conversations but have a clear purpose to investigate. The results show that the respondents have very differing views on what improvisation actually is, and that affects their view of how much of the teaching should be spent on improvisation. However, all considered that there was a place for teaching improvisation, although two respondents expressed concern about the negative effects that more free-form improvisation can have on the printed music it interacts with. A majority of them have also seen an increased interest in improvisation among their students, but with such widely differing views on improvisation from the teachers' side, the consequence is that students gain widely differing knowledge and experience about improvisation depending on which teacher they get and which instrument they play.