The multi-movement structures of Beethoven’s instrumental works include some of the most obvious manifestations of his originality as a composer. His very first Viennese publications—the Piano Trios op. 1 and the Piano Sonatas op. 2—adopt the four-movement cycle that had previously been associated primarily with the symphony. And in his last five string quartets he transformed the conventional multi-movement cycles almost beyond recognition, particularly in the seven-movement Quartet op. 131, in which each movement runs directly into the next. This study investigates Beethoven’s compositional approach to multi-movement structure, with the aim of gaining a better understanding of the underlying principles that influenced his musical decisions. Particular attention is given to an aspect of his sketching process that has received relatively little scholarly attention: multi-movement plans. These plans were generally sketched at an early stage in the compositional process, and outline preliminary ideas for the different movements of a work as a whole. Although Lewis Lockwood hypothesised that such plans were particularly frequent amongst Beethoven’s sketches from 1800 to 1804, until now there has never been a detailed study of their role within Beethoven’s sketching process throughout his career. This study reveals that multi-movement plans were a regular feature in sketches for instrumental works from 1800 onwards, and that they served a variety of purposes within the compositional process. Multi-movement plans from all stages of Beethoven’s compositional career are transcribed and examined for what they can reveal about his conception of multi-movement structures.

Description of human activities in videos results not only in detection of actions and objects but also in identification of their active semantic relationships in the scene. Towards this broader goal, we present a combinatorial approach that assumes availability of algorithms for detecting and labeling objects and actions, albeit with some errors. Given these uncertain labels and detected objects, we link them into interpretative structures using domain knowledge encoded with concepts of Grenander’s general pattern theory. Here a semantic video description is built using basic units, termed generators, that represent labels of objects or actions. These generators have multiple out-bonds, each associated with either a type of domain semantics, spatial constraints, temporal constraints or image/video evidence. Generators combine between each other, according to a set of pre-defined combination rules that capture domain semantics, to form larger structures known as configurations, which here will be used to represent video descriptions. Such connected structures of generators are called configurations. This framework offers a powerful representational scheme for its flexibility in spanning a space of interpretative structures (configurations) of varying sizes and structural complexity. We impose a probability distribution on the configuration space, with inferences generated using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo-based simulated annealing algorithm. The primary advantage of the approach is that it handles known computer vision challenges – appearance variability, errors in object label annotation, object clutter, simultaneous events, temporal dependency encoding, etc. – without the need for a exponentially- large (labeled) training data set.

La version intégrale de ce mémoire est disponible uniquement pour consultation individuelle à la Bibliothèque de musique de l'Université de Montréal (www.bib.umontreal.ca/MU). / Ce mémoire expose les résultats de mon projet de recherche, qui consistait à élaborer et tester ma démarche compositionnelle s’appliquant aux musiques de pratique électroacoustique, instrumentale et mixte. Mon intention était d’uniformiser et de systématiser mon approche s’inscrivant essentiellement dans l’esthétique des romantiques. J’y combine musique à programme, partitions graphiques et autres techniques modernes de composition. Le premier chapitre est consacré à la description détaillée et commentée des trois étapes qui constituent mon travail de création : le programme, l’analyse ainsi que la structure et la forme. Pour expérimenter cette approche, j’ai composé trois pièces : Le chat noir, pièce mixte pour gamelan, bandes et traitements en temps réel et inspirée d’une nouvelle d’Edgar Allan Poe, La nébuleuse de la tour, pièce électroacoustique basée sur une partition graphique exécutée par une guitare et un trombone et, comme troisième pièce, Le livre de Thot, pour trio à cordes et piano, présentée en quatre mouvements inspirés d’autant de cartes du tarot. Les trois pièces sont décrites et analysées en fonction de ma démarche aux chapitres deux, trois et quatre, respectivement. / This thesis presents the results of my research project which consisted in elaborating and testing my compositional approach in three musical forms, namely, electroacoustic, instrumental, and mix. My aim was to systematize my approach—which belongs essentially with romantic aesthetics—and to make it uniform by combining program music, graphic partitions, and other modern compositional techniques. The first chapter is devoted to the detailed and commented description of the three stages of my creation process : program, analysis, as well as form and structure. To test my approach, I have composed three pieces, 1- Le chat noir, a mixed piece for gamelan, recording and real-time processing inspired by a novel by Edgar Allan Poes, 2- La nébuleuse de la tour, an electroacoustic piece based on a graphic partition and performed on guitar and trombone, and 3- Le livre de Thot, for string trio and piano and performed in four movements inspired by four tarot cards. These three pieces are described and analyzed in chapters two, three, and four respectively.