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No description available.

Thesis (M.Mus. Composition)--University of Waikato, 2006. / Also available via the World Wide Web.

STF is a large ensemble work in three movements: "Fatwa," "Hitchens," and "Albino Sex." It is scored for piano, double bass, cello, viola, violin, French horn, clarinet in Bb, bass clarinet in Bb, flute, baritone, tenor, alto, soprano, narrator, and electronics. Its underlying concept is how religious worldviews can collide with freedom of speech, atheism, and fundamental human rights. In extreme cases, zealots will interpret disease as evidence of divine intervention or even demand the death of blasphemers. The text in the first movement, “Fatwa,” expresses freedom of speech and incorporates passages from Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.” The second movement, “Hitchens,” centers on atheism and incorporates two audio excerpts from Christopher Hitchens’s lecture at the 2009 Festival of Dangerous Ideas. In the final movement, “Albino Sex,” I construct a narrative using media headlines, paraphrased biblical verses, and my own text to depict the human rights crisis during the 1980s A.I.D.S. epidemic. Various organizational approaches to text and pitch distinguish one movement from the other; the three movements cohere through unifying devices that I draw from set theory.

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This study traces the transfer of writing-related knowledge and concepts from the composition classroom into the writing assignments composed by students within the same course. Working in a first-year-composition classroom taught through a writing-about-writing curriculum, the researcher observed students as they navigated from the initial learning of concepts such as rhetorical situations, writing processes, and discourse communities, into an application of these concepts in various writing assignments, including rhetorical analyses and discourse community profiles. By analyzing a composition instructor's objectives for her assignments and observing the interaction between students and their instructor in a single composition course for the duration of one semester, the researcher traced how students operationalized knowledge from the classroom and applied it in their own writing. After tracing this operalization through interviews with the instructor, observation of class activities and analysis of assignment sheets and student papers, the researcher proposes that instructors may encourage transfer within their composition classrooms by adequately presenting assignment objectives to students, and by allowing sufficient scaffolding of writing tasks. In this way, the researcher explains that students may be able to understand the objectives of their writing assignments in a way that may encourage them to apply the knowledge they learned in the classroom to the writing tasks assigned by their instructor.

No description available.

2025 / In Shadow Cathedral, the listener is invited to step into an inverted place—a cathedral not of stone and glass, but of shadow and abstraction. This imagined space resounds not with the shining lights and echoes of people, but with the acoustic and psychological reverberations of solitude. As one might hear an empty chapel "sing" in its stillness, the music seeks to evoke a deeply personal, introspective, and raw resonance. Shadow Cathedral draws inspiration from the Adagio movements of late Romantic symphonies, whose slow, expansive passages evoke a sense of timeless contemplation. However, instead of using traditional triadic harmonies, this piece presents raw “sound icons”—bells, chants, and drums—that serve as focal points around which the music orbits. These icons guide the listener toward moments of ferocious self-exposure, reflecting the composer’s own vulnerabilities. Shadow Cathedral is a meditation on the power of emptiness—a sonic journey that discovers sublimity in raw human expression and the transformative nature of solitude.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy