Multiculturalism is one of the major trends in the choral education of the Twenty-first Century. Choral conductors attempt to capture diverse repertories from around the world. Japan, a country not very distant from Taiwan, is full of splendid choral development and composing achievements. Ko Matsushita is a Japanese choral conductor, composer, and educator. He is the conductor of ten choirs that have won many international choral competitions in the last decade. He also won the Carl Orff Composer Award two times. Matsushita was awarded the honor of the Robert Edler Prize in 2005 for his outstanding work in promoting choral music. Anthology of Love is a suite for female chorus with piano accompaniment. It was premiered in October 2003, and was published by KAWAI in August 2004. This suite contains four pieces: Somewhere or Other, Malayan Love Songs, A Poem for April, and Last Song of a Poet. These songs trace four different stages of love in human life: innocent, attractive, matured, and heroic love. All the Japanese lyrics in this work are taken from Shuntaro Tanikawa¡¦s poem collections. The piano accompaniment can play an important part in the music but requires a performer with advanced technique to deliver that result. This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is the Introduction. Chapter Two discusses the background of Matsushita: Part One is a biographic sketch of Matsushita¡¦s life; Part Two introduces the musical style and characteristics of Matsushita¡¦s female choral works. Chapter Three focuses on the origin of lyrics and analysis of these four pieces. Chapter Four supplies rehearsal techniques and teaching suggestions for conductors. The diction fundamentals of Japanese and pronunciation of the lyrics are also included in this chapter. Chapter Five is the Conclusion. There are three appendices at the end of this thesis. Appendix A supplies four letters from Matsushita. Appendix B is a list of Matsushita¡¦s published choral works. Appendix C contains the translation and the Romanization of the Japanese lyrics for these four pieces.

The women¡¦s chorus has been a minor category in the bulk of western music history. It was not until the nineteenth century that a female chorus had the opportunity to perform as the same way that a male or mixed chorus had. Only then, did composers start to compose part-songs for female chorus, and Schubert is one of the pioneers. He composed nine pieces for female chorus. Two of them were done as assignments while a student when he was young (1812). Three short pieces were finished in 1815-16. Even in these early pieces his sensitivity to German text and gift for setting the text to music are clearly shown. In 1820-27, Schubert finished four female choral works. Three of them were four-part-- ¡§Psalm 23¡¨, ¡§Gott in der Natur¡¨, ¡§Stänchen¡¨. These three pieces are the best in all Schubert¡¦s female choral works. The tonality is more fully developed, and the length is almost four times longer than before. More imitation is used, composed with homophonic texture than is used in the first five pieces. Schubert had demonstrated a strong desire to express the text freely with all types of musical techniques from the early Romantic Period. This master¡¦s thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction. The second chapter offers some historical background and can be divided into three sections. First is a concise report about female chorus¡¦s development in western music history. The second part discusses the definition of 19th century style and how the contemporary background influenced the part-songs. The third section gives a general review of Schubert¡¦s female choral works. Chapter Three is a detailed analysis of the final three four-part female works. Derived from Chapter Three (i. e. based on the analysis), Chapter four proposes a teaching procedure when a director or a school teacher wants to perform any of these three numbers. Some performance considerations and conducting suggestions are also included. The final Chapter is conclusion for the entire research. Two appendixes are included: one is the translations and IPA phonetics for the German texts; the other is a list of the publishers for Schubert female chorus works.