This paper presents an analysis of my composition Love, Crystal and Stone, a forty-five minute song-cycle for soprano, violin, flute, clarinet and percussion, written in 2017 for TAK Ensemble of New York. Based on a selection of lyric poems by Federico García Lorca, Love, Crystal and Stone explores the core question, “How can the lyric poetry of Lorca be re-experienced by critically rethinking the poetic potentials of the formal construction of the music?” In my dissertation, I will discuss the various ways that my music, in its formal construction, attempts to incorporate Lorca’s text in order to capture and reiterate the essence of the text. In my essay, I will also explore the choices of material and my compositional processes, including a description of how I continuously rework and re-contextualize my musical material not only throughout the span of the piece, but through the arc of my catalogue of works. The theoretical analysis of the piece involves an in-depth explanation of the musical elements of Love, Crystal and Stone including form; pitch, timbral, and rhythmic structures; the incorporation of musical gestures; and orchestration choices. Finally, I will conclude with a brief discussion of my approach to the analysis of Love, Crystal and Stone.

This thesis studies the elegy that Federico Garcíia Lorca wrote to commemorate the death of his friend Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, fatally gored in mid-August 1934. Because the poem celebrates an historical event attention is first directed to the life of Ignacio and to the details of his fatal injury and its repercussions. Because some of these details have heen incorporated into the poem there follows a commentary on the poem which seeks to explain these references, as well as some of the images and metaphors. Some lines lack a convincing explanation but their obscurity does not hinder to any great extent an overall comprehension of the poem. The second part of the study looks at the history of the Spanish Elegy, tracing its formation and development from the eleventh-century 'Planctus' to the form used by Lorca. It is in the final chapter that Lorca's debt to history and tradition is assessed, at the same time pointing out that the poem, although based on an historical event and drawing from a long tradition of the Elegy, is very much an example of the work of a sophisticated and talented twentieth-century poet. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.