published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Gothenburg, 1979. / Errata slip inserted. Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-208).

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-98).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1968. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2009. / Principal faculty advisor: Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Dept. of Art History. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis explores the transformation of the mirror's symbolic role in the poetry and visual art of late nineteenth-century Paris. For centuries the mirror has been associated with both truth and artifice, whether in religion, popular culture, art, or theories of aesthetics. In the context of nineteenth-century literature, M.H. Abrams uses the mirror to represent the age-old idea of the artist as an objective reflector of the world, juxtaposing this with the nineteenth-century notion of the artist as a subjective lamp. However, this thesis shows that, far from being abandoned as a symbol of artistic expression, the mirror motif was reclaimed and reinterpreted by Baudelaire and his artistic and poetic successors. The thesis argues that their works highlight the distortions and ambiguities that the mirror can produce, using it as a motif to challenge and alter our mode of vision. This thesis focuses on the visual and poetic culture of Paris between 1850 and 1900, when mirrors were increasingly visible in a range of public and private settings. Building on Walter Benjamin's descriptions of Paris as a city of mirrors and a locus of multiple, shifting gazes, the thesis examines how the perceptual experiences of modernity feed into the development of the mirror's symbolic role. Through a series of close readings, the thesis analyses the dynamics of mirror-vision and explores the shared preoccupations of art and poetry in their treatment of subjectivity, vision, and self-reflexive artistic practices. The thesis is arranged into three sections, examining texts by Charles Baudelaire, Henri de Régnier, Jules Laforgue, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Marie Krysinska, and artworks by Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt. The first section assesses Baudelaire's works as a turning point for the mirror's symbolic significance, particularly examining how Baudelaire reinterprets the association between mirrors and femininity. The second section explores this latter connection in the art and poetry of Baudelaire's late nineteenthcentury successors. The third section examines the mirror's appearance in various ambiguous or ill-defined spaces, assessing how this affects the reader's or viewer's perceptions. I conclude that in the art and poetry of this period, the mirror becomes an emblem of self-reflexivity. Through works that prioritise mobility, multiplicity, and fragmentation, these artists and poets subvert the mirror's associations with mimesis in order to expose the dynamic uncertainty of vision and artistic representation.

abstract: Musical Impressionism has been most significantly reflected through the works of Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). These two key figures exhibit the essence of this art and their piano music remains substantial, influential, and frequently assigned and played today. Nevertheless, from a pedagogical perspective, important factors required in achieving a successful performance of Debussy and Ravel's piano music--delicate tone production, independent voicing, complicated rhythm, sensitive pedaling, and a knowledgeable view of Impressionism--are musically and technically beyond the limit of early advanced students. This study provides a collection of short piano pieces by nine lesser-known European and American composers--Edward MacDowell (1861-1908), Charles Griffes (1884-1920), Marion Bauer (1887-1955), Cyril Scott (1879-1970), Arnold Bax (1883-1953), Selim Palmgren (1878-1951), Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), Jacques Ibert (1890-1962) and Federico Mompou (1893-1987). They were influenced by impressionistic aesthetics or composed at one time in an impressionistic manner over a span of their lifetimes and their music provides a bridge to the more advanced impressionistic pieces of Debussy and Ravel for early advanced students. These composers' selected short piano pieces display richly colored sonority through the use of impressionistic techniques such as non-functional harmony (parallel chords and free modulation), exotic setting (e.g. modality, pentatonic and whole-tone scales), ostinato figures, bell-sound imitation, and extended texture. Moreover, personal interpretive elements, such as poetic and folklore references, were incorporated in some piano works of MacDowell, Griffes, Bauer, Scott, and Bax; among them MacDowell and Bax were particularly inspired by Celtic and Nordic materials. Mompou infused Spanish folklores in his individual naïve style. Most importantly, these selected short piano pieces are approachable and attractive to early advanced pianists. These works, as well as other largely undiscovered impressionistic piano character pieces, ought to be a great source of preliminary repertoire as preparation for the music of Debussy and Ravel. / Dissertation/Thesis / D.M.A. Music 2011

Throughout an adult life that witnessed drastic cultural upheaval between the Civil War and World War I, Bertha Honoré Palmer (1849-1918) was continually called on to deploy her Victorian values in response to modern events. Being a woman only complicated this negotiation. But being a child of the American frontier granted her a latitude and mobility that were rare for women of her class and era – allowing her to challenge gender boundaries and occupy more than one cultural space at a time. Most of what has been written about Bertha Palmer’s life has been exceptionalist in approach and tone, ascribing her outsized social and political successes to her physical beauty and perfection of temperament. I believe Bertha Palmer’s importance as a crucial transitional bridge between True Woman and New Woman has been underestimated in this discourse. Near the end of her life, a move to Florida offered her the potential to resolve the inside/outside, domestic/public, feminine/masculine dialectics that lay at the heart of her restless movements. These contradictions and dichotomies that Bertha Palmer embodied on a grand scale do more to make her knowable to us today than the record of her words and actions can accomplish. Both her Victorian reticence and her modernistic construction of a seamless public façade have a way of hindering our best efforts to understand her motivations – especially the choice to move to Florida – despite a wealth of biographical material, including her correspondence housed in Chicago and Sarasota history centers, and contemporary news accounts. In the end, the cultural history of the Gilded Age gives us the only reliable lens for penetrating the veneer of Bertha Palmer.

This master thesis has two main objectives, the first is to develop a list of impressionistic key features and the second is to apply those key features when writing idiomatic music for the guitar. The composers of the impressionist era tried to capture the sense of an emotion through the musical language, something this master thesis investigates further. During the process of gathering information about impressionistic key features, I found important building blocks that made me aware of the impressionistic musical language. The four methods I used were arranging and analyzing sheet music, interviews with composers, literature studies and video interpretation. When I found enough material, I started to write music using the impressionistic key features. It resulted in three impressionistic sounding pieces. The pieces are presented with sheet music and an audio recording. As a reader and musician, one can gain knowledge about the impressionistic sound, how to write idiomatic music for the guitar and methods how one can intertwine these two subjects. The discussion part of the thesis addresses problems I struggled with during the process and how I could move away from these difficulties using composing methods and utilizing the impressionistic key features in a creative manor.