Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document Please note that the text on pages 6-19 to 6-22 was removed, due to an error in the script / Dissertation (MMus)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Music / unrestricted

In this thesis I’m writing about Dmitri Shostakovich’s only Viola Sonata. I’ve read about Shostakovich life and analysed the sonata. Shostakovich’s Sonata is one of the first pieces from the composer that I have listened to and gotten familiar with. It’s one of the most played viola sonatas and a one of a kind in Russian modern music. The purpose is to dig deep into the music and to understand it. Questions like “why am I playing this like this?” or “how should I do this?” regarding the interpretation of the music is the core of this study. The research is also trying to be of help to get an image of viola music overall and what is the place of Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata in this world. How the piece was reacting to the world around it and how it was affected by the history of viola music and what is its position in the future.

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The study of the twenty-four preludes of Shostakovitch [sic] has a three-fold significance. First, it deals with a body of music literature representing important aspects of twentieth-century music. Secondly, it is an original study since no detailed analysis of these preludes has been made. Very little has been written about this collection of short pieces, and no material is available along the line of a technical, scientific analysis. Thirdly, our subject deals with a collection of compositions written by one of the foremost living composers of today, not only of Russia, but of the entire musical world -- a man who is in the public eye at present, and in whose works the Soviet ideology is reflected.

The aspiration of this dissertation is to bring forth the significance of Shostakovich's Piano Sonata Op.12. This sonata is a hybrid of the German musical tradition, Russian Modernism, and Liszt's thematic transformation technique. It demonstrates Shostakovich's highly intellectual compositional skills influenced by the education that he received at St. Petersburg Conservatory as well as the exposure to modern music in the 1920s. This dissertation discusses composition techniques, such as the harmonic piers adapted from Alexander Scriabin, neighboring-tone technique, which involves the application of semitone cell throughout the piece, as well as the technique of thematic transformation borrowed from Liszt. These all come together by Shostakovich's design in the most controversial sonata form. The Piano Sonata Op.12 also sheds light on Shostakovich's early compositional style and proves its contribution to the evolution of sonata genre in the twentieth-century.

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In 1950-51, for the bicentennial of the death of J. S. Bach, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his collection of Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. This thesis is a study of the fugal technique of Shostakovich as observed in Op. 87, in light of the fugal style of Bach as observed in The Well-Tempered Clavier, Volume One. Individual analyses of each of the twenty-four Shostakovich pieces yield the conclusion that Op. 87 is an emulation of Bachian fugal methods as observed in The Well-Tempered Clavier, Volume One.

Master of Music / Department of Music / Frank C. Tracz / This document is constructed on the comprehensive examination question based on the Graduate Conducting Recital of Gavin W. Smith. The theoretical and historical analysis includes Spring Wind – Weather Movement I and Storm Warning and Dance – Weather Movement II by Steve Riley, Prelude Op. 34, No. 14 by Dmitri Shostakovich, and Tempered Steel by Charles R. Young. Along with the analysis, this document contains the rehearsal plans and procedures for the preparation of the literature. The recital was performed by Kansas State University’s Symphony Band on March 13, 2007 in McCain Auditorium at 7:30pm.

This diploma thesis deals with Dmitry Shostakovich and his works. Its aim is to map the life of the composer and to further characterize his two works, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1 a minor op. 77 and String Quartet No. 8 in C minor op. 110. The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is about composer's life in the difficult living and creative conditions of the Soviet Union of that time and about selected compositions of his. In the following two chapters, the analyzes of the two above-mentioned works and the historical context in which they were create are presented. The thesis also provides an interpretative analysis of the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1 a minor, which is also an interpretative comparison of the concert recordings of David Oistrach and Julian Rachlin.

The censorship of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is a familiar story to musicologists, but reception of the opera is not frequently mentioned. Examining the reception of a work can bring a work's relative importance into focus. In this thesis, German literary and reception theorist Hans Robert Jauss's model of the horizon of expectations is applied to reviews of American productions of Lady Macbeth. Curiosity about communism following the Great Depression in 1930s, America and American music critics' knowledge that Soviet composers worked for the Soviet regime led to the belief that Lady Macbeth was officially approved export from the Soviet Union. When the article condemning the opera as a Western formalism appeared in the Soviet magazine, Pravda, Americans needed to adjust their understanding of Lady Macbeth as a socialist expression. Following the work's revival in San Francisco in 1981, the influence of Solomon Volkov's Testimony is prevalent in many reviews. Many reviewers use Volkov's narrative of Shostakovich as covert dissident of the Soviet Union to assert that the censorship of the opera was about the content of the plot and not the music. Following the Soviet rejection of the work, American critics tried to claim Shostakovich for the West based on the values of individual freedom and feminism set forth in Lady Macbeth.