Musical culture is increasingly globalised and technology allows us to engage with an evermore diversified range of musical approaches, traditions and sound-worlds. How composers react to this diversity of musical approaches is an important theme in contemporary composition. My approach to composition within this globalised situation has been to focus on the notion of ‘integration' and creating structurally consistent score-based frameworks. I have composed a portfolio of work that reflects the central focus of ‘integration', concentrating on three inter-related research areas: 1. Exploring how one can integrate or frame improvisation and/or electronics into notated structural frameworks. 2. Exploring the use of technology to translate or integrate material generated through improvisation into notational practice. 3. Developing a coherent and individual technique and aesthetic that draws on structural influences from a range of musical idioms, but never resorts to cliché or pastiche. My exploration of integration in writing the compositions in this portfolio has been primarily technical. I am fundamentally interested in the ‘nuts and bolts' of composition, how musical materials can fit together and interact. Therefore although the character and substance of the different materials I engage with is important, my foremost preoccupations when composing are the formal and technical aspects such as: structure and proportion; pitch and rhythmic organisation; orchestration technique; the use of extended notations; and compositional processes such as abstraction, permutation and rotation. As I outline in my commentary the composition in this portfolio reflects my aesthetic position that working with an eclectic range of musical materials and diverse methods of expression such as improvisation and electronics is not an end-in-itself. By integrating diverse musical influences I am not trying to create a pluralist synthesis of different semantic paradigms, but aim to find my own innovative, coherent and consistent compositional approach.

As a social practice, being part of the school band stylizes our lives—individually and collectively. The pedagogical band world, a world made up primarily of school and university wind bands, is in many ways similar to the world of community/civic bands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on an examination of professional discourses, however, I argue that processes of institutionalization have altered the nature of music making via band participation. The pedagogical band world, like other bounded worlds, operates according to what Michel Foucault calls “regimes of truth”—the regulative norms that delimit what can be said and done. The specific ways in which the subject is fashioned, in other words, are a function of the truths we endorse about ourselves and, in the present case, about music making. Studying the discourses in the disciplinary practice of large ensemble (band) music making is of paramount importance for music educators to better understand the effects of disciplinary practices. Employing a conceptual framework based on the work of Michel Foucault, the following question guided this inquiry: “What ‘regimes of truth’ are fashioned in school music (bands) discourse, how did they come to be, and what are their potential effects on the subject?” Methods from the field of corpus linguistics were used to concordance the journal of the Canadian Band Association, 1978-2008. Concordance lists were used to introspectively examine each occurrence (approximately 25,000 in total) of a downsampled set of words related to subject formation in order to generate statements making truth claims. While there is no mistaking that a primary goal in music education discourse is to foster a “love of music,” this investigation suggests the kind of musicality fashioned in today’s pedagogical discourse has become a relationship to music (based on the study of music; music as something to know) rather than the kind of relationship fashioned in band participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which I describe as a relationship with music (music as something to do).

As a social practice, being part of the school band stylizes our lives—individually and collectively. The pedagogical band world, a world made up primarily of school and university wind bands, is in many ways similar to the world of community/civic bands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on an examination of professional discourses, however, I argue that processes of institutionalization have altered the nature of music making via band participation. The pedagogical band world, like other bounded worlds, operates according to what Michel Foucault calls “regimes of truth”—the regulative norms that delimit what can be said and done. The specific ways in which the subject is fashioned, in other words, are a function of the truths we endorse about ourselves and, in the present case, about music making. Studying the discourses in the disciplinary practice of large ensemble (band) music making is of paramount importance for music educators to better understand the effects of disciplinary practices. Employing a conceptual framework based on the work of Michel Foucault, the following question guided this inquiry: “What ‘regimes of truth’ are fashioned in school music (bands) discourse, how did they come to be, and what are their potential effects on the subject?” Methods from the field of corpus linguistics were used to concordance the journal of the Canadian Band Association, 1978-2008. Concordance lists were used to introspectively examine each occurrence (approximately 25,000 in total) of a downsampled set of words related to subject formation in order to generate statements making truth claims. While there is no mistaking that a primary goal in music education discourse is to foster a “love of music,” this investigation suggests the kind of musicality fashioned in today’s pedagogical discourse has become a relationship to music (based on the study of music; music as something to know) rather than the kind of relationship fashioned in band participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which I describe as a relationship with music (music as something to do).

Despite being ubiquitous within the Classical style, pedals have received little attention in the scholarly literature. This dissertation adopts a form-functional approach to understanding them with an eye toward distinguishing their normative and non-normative functions. A form-functional approach begins by parsing the musical surface into formal and temporal functions. William Caplin has identified five distinct temporal functions: 1) "before-the-beginning"; 2) "the beginning"; 3) "the middle"; 4) "the end"; and 5) "after-the-end." Appearing mostly in locations 2) and 5), tonic pedals express two primary functions, formal initiation and postcadential closing for a theme. Dominant pedals also express postcadential function, but close less stable areas like transitions. They also appear in location 3), most notably in contrasting middles, where they bring harmonic contrast or uncertainty and anticipate a recapitulation. Because they frequently mediate between the home and subordinate key, I have devised four categories of dominant pedal that bring a sense of clarity to the range of functions dominant pedals can serve. V[supercript d] => V[supercript d] pedals normally express a postcadential standing-on-the-dominant or a contrasting-middle function. V[supercript t] => V[supercript t] pedals express the same functions, but in a more stable way. V[supercript t] => V[supercript d] pedals express a retransition function or a contrasting-middle function that enacts a harmonic transformation. The V[supercript d] => V[supercript t] pedal also expresses a contrasting-middle function, but reverses the direction of the harmonic transformation. Finally, with regard to their non-normative functions, pedals can loosen their formal contexts by generating form-functional overlap and expansion. / text

published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

This paper studies the formal ambiguity that arises when a closing gesture occupies a beginning location in the instrumental works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Accordingly, I am interested in those formal areas within a piece that are concerned with the functions of either "beginning" or "ending." / I first present a systematic survey of the theoretical principles underlying the formal functions of beginning and ending in this style. I then show some specific examples of typical cadences and of initial units that imitate them. Next, I focus on the "main theme," observing how the function of "beginning" is performed by a "closing initial idea" and then, how the main theme's cadences express their proper function. Finally, I study what happens in other locations such as the return of the main theme, the cadence closing the form, and post-cadential material.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

This composition is arranged for string ensemble (first and second violin, viola and cello), flute, oboe, piano, electric guitar, electric bass guitar, drum set and auxiliary percussion. Overall, the work follows a standard four-section format in a fast-slow-fastfast order. However, the individual sections experiment with the nested repeats form and with bifurcation of the Fibonacci Sequence to determine the length of the cells which make up the form. The individual sections display various styles including a Webern-like pointillism and Latin rhythms. The concept of non-narrative performance instructions is also experimented with in the work. Throughout the piece, projected (or otherwise displayed) words are to shown to the audience. These words along with the music are intended to comment upon the nature of the search for knowledge. The accompanying narrative details each of the four sections in regards to form, instrumentation, harmonic material and melodic content. The discussion at the end of the narrative covers the composer's impressions about the success of this musical experiment. / School of Music