The purpose of this study is to investigate how to choose, adapt, and arrange music for school full orchestras with incomplete instrumentation that are not yet ready to perform unarranged standard literature. The literature suggests that while school full orchestra directors may be able to find some published arrangements that include generous cues for missing instruments and parts for substitute instruments, the most effective approach is to alter and arrange music as-needed. When arranging, it is important for teachers to make choices that allow for their students to be successful, but also preserve the original octaves, timbres, form, and tempo of the piece, as intended by the composer. Arranging options that accommodate incomplete instrumentation are demonstrated in an arrangement by the author for school full orchestra of Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 82, Movement I. Further examinations of arranging techniques and abridgement considerations are provided in an additional arrangement by the author of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Movement I, for school string orchestra. Two different published arrangements of “Dance Bacchanale,” from the opera Samson and Dalila by Camille Saint-Saëns, are compared to each other and to the original, to observe how existing arrangements anticipate and accommodate incomplete instrumentation in school full orchestras. A brief history of the full orchestra ensemble in American schools is also included.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Music / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

The use of similar musical material from one work to another in Beat Furrer’s works is what unites them in an unmistakable identity. What makes each work unique, however, is the way new networks of meaning for the material become established as the composer reworks his material for a given work. I argue that in Furrer’s Hörtheater FAMA, composed in 2004-2005, the reworking of the glissando as a compositional resource is strongly influenced by the textual subject matter, Arthur Schnitzler’s monodrama Fräulein Else. Furrer’s presentation of the musical material acts as a musical staging of the title character. And like Schnitzler’s novel, FAMA can be viewed as a comment on political and cultural issues.

Umberto Eco states that the list is the origin of culture, a way of making infinity comprehensible. Lists and catalogues are a way of creating order though history. I am currently, as a composer, working on a piece for choir using a list of angels as its text. Lists of angels deal with infinity, the list as such converges the three different monotheistic religions under the same roof. In my research I have tried to create a short overview of the history of lists in music, along with the musical presentation of angels in music - a subject that has fascinated many composers. Composers of last century such as Arnold Schoenberg, Oliver Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen, to mention just a few, dealt with the representation of the angelic and divine in their music. Their different religious backgrounds suggested different strategies in their works dealing with angelic subjects.

This paper describes the development of OM-Darwin, a generalized system for composing with genetic algorithms (GA), realized as a library for OpenMusic. It provides a simple GA engine, along with sophisticated devices for genotype encoding, phenotype mapping and modular fitness function design, while offering a collection of objects that represent common musical forms and rules. A comparison with other optimization methods reveals some advantages in the GA approach, in particular the capability of defining frequency-based rules and producing partial solutions to difficult musical problems. Reference is made to the author's Future Perfect (2010) for 13 instruments, composed entirely using OM-Darwin.

This essay offers both a historical analysis of twentieth century avant-garde practices relating to representation in music, and a prescriptive model for contemporary methods of composition. I address the taxonomy problem in classical music, clarifying the ontological divide identified by German musicologist Michael Rebhahn Contemporary Classical music and New Music. I demonstrate how neoliberalism has developed a Global Style (Foster 2012) of "Light Modernity,” evident in both contemporary architecture and music alike. The central problem facing composition today is the fetishization of materials, ultimately derived from music's refusal to allow the question of representation to be addressed. I argue that composers have largely sought to define noise as sound-in-itself, eliminating the possibilities of representation in the process. Proposing instead that composers should strive to tackle representation head-on in the 21st century, I show how Jacques Rancière provides a model in which noise and sound—representation and abstraction—function in a conjoined, yet non-homogenized aesthetic regime. Governed by what he calls the "pensiveness of the image,” it allows for a renewed art form that rejects repetition and neoliberalism, re-connecting to the spirit of the avant-garde without slavishly echoing either its outmoded aesthetics or dogmatic philosophies.

The musical portion of this dissertation is comprised of my two compositions: Agnosco Veteris, a fifteen-and-a-half-minute work for orchestra, written in 2015 for Robert Spano and the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra; and its partner and template Vestigia Flammae, a fourteen-minute work for sinfonietta (fifteen musicians) written in 2014 for the Nouvel Ensemble Modern. The written portion of this dissertation is an accompanying essay that provides a conceptual and musical analysis of the partnered pieces. The essay situates the compositions within the context of my recent musical output by specifically focusing on a method I have heartily employed from 2011-16: the reuse of musical/sonic material through repetition, computer-aided manipulation, reorchestration, composed reinterpretation, and self-appropriation. Agnosco Veteris and Vestigia Flammae are partner works that engage with personal musical memories. I explain the desires behind, and the process of, transforming one piece into another. A section of the essay places this concept in the historical context of other composers who employ appropriation of material and methods of reorchestration to generate new works. I discuss my compositional process and style as an alloy of my musical genetic makeup – a mixing ground of my experience as a performer of the classical canon in dialogue with my affinity towards minimalism, modernism, romanticism, spectralism, Slavic folk and liturgical musics, electronic music, and popular music production techniques. The latter portion of the essay provides a theoretical analysis of the two pieces in terms of poetic genesis, form, motivic material, harmonic structure, orchestration, texture, and rhythmic development.

Microtonal pitch systems have musical implications beyond the organization of pitch, suggesting the possibility of functioning symbiotically with orchestration, rhythm, and form in a musical work. This essay focuses on three compositions, each of which approaches tuning and microtonality in a unique way: The Delusion of the Fury (1969) by Harry Partch, Limited Approximations (2010) by Georg Friedrich Haas, and Asking Ocean (2016) by Marc Sabat. After a general analysis of the pitch materials in these three works, passages of music are examined and compared to illustrate how pitch systems, especially those in extended just intonation, inform orchestration, rhythm, and form, exploring how these composers balance the practical considerations of writing microtonal music with artistic intent. This essay argues that the success of these three works relates to a sensitivity toward the limitations and possibilities of their novel approaches to microtonal pitch organization.

Thesis--Cologne. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 200-214).