This paper discusses the historical background of the Rapsodie for Orchestra and Saxophone by Claude Debussy and includes a comparison of two piano performance editions. Chapter I includes information on Elise Hall, her work with the Boston Orchestra Club and the circumstances of her commission of Claude Debussy which yielded the Rapsodie. Chapter II discusses the Editions Durand piano reduction and the reasons for its neglect by saxophone performers. This chapter includes a study of the techniques used by Eugene Rousseau to create his arrangement of the Rapsodie for saxophone and piano. The study concludes that the arrangement by Rousseau is more attractive to saxophonists and will be performed more frequently than the Durand reduction.

The main purpose of this study will be to analyze the impressionistic style and techniques of Debussy, how the idiom came to be, and the influence of this particular idiom on two American composers. For thorough understanding, the poetic and artistic backgrounds of impressionism must be brought out; the biography of the man who originated the idiom, as well as his aesthetic theories, must be briefly covered. More objectively, from biographies and various other studies the techniques peculiarly impressionistic will be listed, and analysis will be made of several of the Debussy songs from various periods of his composition.

The purpose of this study is to acquaint the reader with certain scales, not merely as they are used to provide the theoretical "building stones" of all music, but as they have been used as actual scale passages in the piano music of two twentieth century composers. This is a study of the use of various scales in the piano music of Debussy and Ravel. A list of the piano music of these composers which was available for the present investigation is given in the Bibliography. A careful analysis of the music has been necessary in order to determine: First, the types of scales the composer uses; second, the interpretation of the scale in its context; third, the ways in which some scale passages are employed to help project musical thought in the composition; and fourth, the frequency of occurrence of types of scale passages.

This dissertation comparatively examines musical nostalgia, particularly nostalgia for childhood, in video games and post-Romantic classical music. An introductory chapter lays out several key concepts drawn from video games—loops, gameworlds, and role-play—and suggests the correspondences these have in Romantic music and thought. The central chapters offer case studies of pieces by Robert Schumann, Brahms, Debussy, and Ravel, each along with a corresponding concept drawn from video games. Each chapter articulates ways that works by these composers provide analogies for practices in contemporary role-playing and adventure video games and, conversely, suggests that features drawn from those games might illuminate how these pieces create musical meaning out of dwelling on the past or imagining distant places. The central chapters draw video games and classical music more closely together over their course. In an analysis of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, I suggest that Schumann’s music could be conceived as offering the player a form of role-play, allowing its players and listeners to play as an imagined child and gain access to otherwise inaccessible space. Brahms’s works often dwell in the past (and are often analyzed as such), especially when that past is metaphorically conceived as childhood or the classical tradition. I suggest that we might hear Brahms’s music as preoccupied with the “unrevisitable location,” a feature of video games in which certain spaces are visitable only a fixed number of times and therefore charged with melancholy and loss. Debussy’s Children’s Corner extends role-play to an extreme degree, while at the same time suggesting distant, unreachable vistas. In particular, I borrow Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s ideas on mediation and Christopher Goetz’s notion of “nostalgic travel” to suggest ways that Debussy’s music incorporates impossible distance into its sound and structure. Video games and classical music converge as much as possible in an analysis of Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye, which I read alongside Nintendo’s open-world game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I suggest that Ravel’s music offers space for its players to explore similar to this video game. In particular, we might hear the music as allowing linear narrative to give way to a freer, open-ended exploration, suggesting the opening of a world. Finally, a concluding chapter examines nostalgia in video games themselves, specifically Undertale, Final Fantasy VII, and Final Fantasy VII Remake, while revisiting elements of the Romantic musical past as they have accrued in the dissertation so far. The argument in this final chapter is that of the dissertation as a whole: that the same desires for fantasy and adventure animate both traditions, and that the two provide meaningful contexts for each other, in ways that studies of the two have until now overlooked.