Studies of Italian opera in London during the first half of the eighteenth century have focussed on George Frideric Handel (1685-1759). As the most prolific composer of this genre in the English capital, this is unsurprising, but it has meant that other composers, contemporaneously active in this field, have been relatively neglected. This is especially true of the period 1733 – 1737, during which time two Italian opera companies attempted to co-exist in the city. Leading one of the companies was Handel, with the Neapolitan, Nicola Porpora (1686-1768), recruited to compose the works for the rival opera company, the so-called ‘Opera of the Nobility’. This study therefore discusses Porpora’s contribution of five operas to the London operatic stage during his three year residency between 1733 and 1736, in opposition to Handel’s company. This has required an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the formation of the rival opera company, its operation in terms of repertoire and the influence of its librettists on Porpora’s works. Detailed analysis of the music has been undertaken to consider Porpora’s style, establish how he adapted this in London for an English, rather than Italian audience, and determine the efficacy of his communication of the drama through his music. This thesis is the first large-scale detailed study of Porpora and his operas. Although the primary focus of this work is his London operas, the necessity of providing a context for these has resulted in a contribution to greater knowledge of Porpora’s overall style. There is still much work to be done on a full study of all of Porpora’s 44 operas and other compositions. This study also significantly adds to the current knowledge of operatic rivalry in London between 1733 and 1736, for the first time evaluating the fabric and importance of Porpora’s operas within this period.

My recent practice-based research explores the creative potential of physical manipulation of sound in the composition of sound-based electronic music. Focusing on the poietic aspect of my music making, this commentary discusses the composition process of three musical works: Comme si la foudre pouvait durer, Igaluk - To Scare the Moon with its own Shadow and desert. It also examines the development of a software instrument, fXfD, along with its resulting musical production. Finally, it discusses the recent musical production of an improvisation duet in which I take part, Tout Croche. In the creative process of this portfolio, the appreciation for sound is the catalyst of the musical decisions. In other words, the term \musique concrete" applies to my practice, as sound is the central concern that triggers the composition act. In addition to anecdotal, typo-morphological and functional concerns, the presence of a \trace of physicality" in a sound is, more than ever, what convinces me of its musical potential. In order to compose such sounds, a back-and-forth process between theoretical knowledge and sound manipulations will be defined and developed under the concept of \sonic empiricism." In a desire to break with the cumbersome nature of studio-based composition work, approaches to sound-based electronic music playing were researched. Through the diferent musical projects, various digital instruments were conceived. In a case study, the text reviews them through their sound generation, gestural control and mapping components. I will also state personal preferences in the ways sound manipulations are performed. In the light of the observations made, the studio emerges as the central instrument upon which my research focuses. The variety of resources it provides for the production and control of sound confers the status of polymorphic instrument on the studio. The text concludes by reflecting on the possibilities of improvisation and performance that the studio offers when it is considered as an embodied polymorphic instrument. A concluding statement on the specific ear training needed for such a studio practice bridges the concepts of sound selection and digital instruments herein exposed.

This thesis aims to explore the musical style of Elton John by taking an interdisciplinary approach to popular music analysis. In addition to analysing Elton John’s musical style, the approach taken will itself be assessed to ascertain whether it can be beneficial for future research into popular music. The introductory chapter defines the key concepts and considers who or what Elton John is. With a career spanning over 45 years and in excess of 300 million albums sold, Elton John is a major popular music artist. However, the Elton John brand is not confined to popular music records. Elton John has been involved with films and stage shows, and he is a celebrity as well as a popular music star. Issues relating to gender have been relevant to Elton John throughout his career and provide appropriate contextualisation for an analysis of his musical style. These extramusical aspects are discussed in the two chapters following the introduction, and their impact upon Elton John’s role as a popular music artist is considered. Four periods of Elton John’s music career have been identified, and a case study from each period follows the chapters concerning gender and related issues and stardom and celebrity. Each case study draws upon established methods of music analysis, and evaluates elements of the music such as instrumentation, melody, and harmony, as well as instrumentation and how the listener interacts with the music. Both the recording and a sheet music score are used as the musical text. Their use is dependent upon which is most suitable for the specific analysis task. A range of computer software is used to produce quantitative data about Elton John’s musical style, and this complements the analysis undertaken using more traditional methods. The interdisciplinary approach taken enables an Elton John formula for writing pop songs to be devised. The thesis concludes by examining how Elton John’s musical style can be interpreted in light of the cultural issues highlighted, the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary approach, and how this research is situated within the wider popular music field.

This commentary presents my compositional work of the last two years. It consists of musical pieces that follow a formal approach emphasising static, self-enclosed musical situations. Designed to avoid processual ways of formal organisation, these pieces present collections of rich instrumental textures that do not evolve; they point toward a music of 'being' rather than 'becoming'. Drawing on conceptual traces from discussions of Karlheinz Stockhausen's 'moment form' and Helmut Lachenmann's ideas of 'sound as state'; on musical traces from Morton Feldman and Aldo Clementi, and reflecting on similar approaches by contemporary referents such as Harald Muenz and Bryn Harrison, I seek to contextualise the formal aspects of my own compositional practice comprised in what I call a 'situational' approach. A detailed observation of the musical material and modes of inner organisation used in the construction of these pieces will be necessary in order to reveal the features that give situations their characteristic sense of stasis. I also seek to explore different effective ways of formal organisation based on the co-existence of situations. I do this by means of juxtaposing either single such situations, or several instances of them, reoccurring in different combinations. Both formal approaches seek to emphasise the syntactic independence and lack of relations of consequence between such segments.

This dissertation provides the conceptual and aesthetic background of the compositions composed throughout the course of my doctoral studies. I will introduce Korean philosophies and aesthetics and then expand upon these elements to demonstrate how they have influenced my approach to music composition. Furthermore, I will demonstrate how I intertwine the use of colour and Korean philosophies. Chapter 1 delineates the elements of Korean philosophies and aesthetics that have influenced my musical language. The chapter focuses on how the Korean handcraft art Jogakbo and the Korean philosophies of Yin-Yang, Ohang and Meak are related to each other. Additionally, I examine the origin and structure of Jogakbo, with a particular focus upon the key variables of shape and colour. The examination of Jogakbo causes me to establish how form and structure are linked in Jogakbo, and then how I apply this form and structure to my composition. Furthermore, I will describe how the aesthetics of Yin-yang, Ohang and Jogakbo form the core of my musical language by examining the function and unplanned approach to the different coloured scraps of material in Jogakbo. Drawing upon this examination, I describe how I have taken the colours from these scraps to form the colours in my music. In relation to this, I investigate the musical techniques of spectral composers, with an emphasis on musical colour, looking at specific composers’ techniques and establishing how they have influenced my own compositional techniques. Finally, I will discuss the role of the philosophy of Maek generating linearity on the horizontal structure of music. Chapter 2 discusses individual portfolio pieces composed throughout the doctoral course chronologically. I will demonstrate how selected Korean philosophies, aesthetics, and the techniques of Jogakbo have gradually evolved to play a larger role in the composition of my pieces. In particular, the colours used in Jogakbo and the philosophy of Ohang play a more direct role in creating the structure and form of the pieces composed in late course. In the conclusion, the research throughout my doctoral course has been summarised, and limitations and other challenges reached while applying the research to my compositional process are examined. Finally, the conclusion ends with a discussion of potential directions to further this research.

Digital technology has revolutionised music composition over recent years and continues to develop at a rapid pace. It has become increasingly accessible providing creative opportunities for, not only a wider society of users, but also music education contexts. However, recent evidence suggests that the full creative potential of digital technology for music composition is not being fully utilised at Key Stage 3 (KS3) music education in England and this has been the case for some time. This research implements a mixed methods approach in music departments in the North of England, UK. It provides fresh insight into how digital technology is currently being used in the KS3 music curriculum, if it’s full creative potential is being utilised in KS3 classroom composing and shows how it’s creative potential could be further realised in classroom composing activities. The findings suggest that KS3 pupils can learn alternative approaches to music composition through using digital methods of sound sampling, sound manipulation and sound structuring as part of a creative thinking cycle in ways rarely seen in music educational studies at this level. Music teacher education and training needs addressing to help teachers develop specialist knowledge and expertise in integrating digital technology in their music teaching. This might help facilitate teachers to explore new methods of composition and thinking about sound in the music classroom. The original knowledge, specialist software and pedagogic resources from this research are therefore intended as Continual Professional Development (CPD) materials aimed at KS3 music teachers and the broader international community concerned with this emerging field of digital technology, composing and music education research in the 21st century.

Masters of Commerce / This study aims at determining the m-Readiness of a Province for m-Government from a context of its Provincial Government (PG), the underprivileged citizens of the region and the mobile fluency thereof. In answering the research question, i.e., “What is the extent of readiness of the government and that of the underprivileged citizens for introduction of m-Government within the region under study”, literature was reviewed and existing models synthesised, and from that, a conceptual model was presented which acted as a reference point. The research process used a quantitative method and utilised a stratified random sampling method in determining and adequately representing the populations under study, namely, underprivileged citizens and IT managers and specialists from the PG’s office. Descriptive statistics were adopted in analysing the collected data used in answering the research questions and findings presented. The findings show that the Province is m-Ready for m-Government services, from the studied contexts of the PG, underprivileged citizens and mobile fluency. The reference model, that is, the Provincial Mobile Readiness Measurement Model (PMRMM), was developed from a perspective of the Province under study, therefore, its theoretical generalizability to other Provinces has to be first studied before being implemented. Secondly, the study only looked at three segments of the government service delivery value chain, which are the Government-to-Citizen (G2C), Government-to-Employee (G2E) and Governmentto- Government (G2G). The contributions of the study are twofold, firstly as a practical decision-making guide regarding introduction of m-Government and secondly, it adds to the conceptual understanding of government readiness for introduction of government services via ICT mobile platforms.

There is increasing evidence that creativity is the result of a dynamic system of interaction where the individual is only one part. Csikszentmihalyi describes a ‘creative system’ that includes three main elements: the domain, the field and the individual (Csikszentmihalyi: 1988, 1997, 1999 & 2004). During creative work, the individual must draw from the domain in order to select a suitable arrangement of ingredients from this body of knowledge and symbol system. This selection of ingredients is then presented to the field, the social organization that recognises, uses and alters the domain, to decide upon its creativity and inclusion into the domain (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). In the context of rock music this occurs when the completed record is released to the public and the field of rock record production (TV, radio, popular music press, other musicians, engineers and producers etc.) decides upon the record’s novelty and its relevant addition to the domain through an often complex and iterative process. However, little has been written from a creative system’s perspective about what happens inside the recording studio before the record is released. Consequently, the interaction of the creative system’s main elements during smaller acts of creativity, such as the individual generation of ideas, and the collaborative exchanges that take place during group creativity, have been relatively underexplored. This thesis explores the creative process of making a rock recording inside the recording studio using the framework of the creative system. Ethnographic methods such as participant-observation, video and sound recording were used to observe the interaction between the performing musicians, the engineer and the record producer as they collaborated during the recording process. This helped to reveal the complex interaction between the participants and the creative system’s main elements during the creative tasks of performing, engineering and producing. Importantly, it helped to show for the first time that this interaction occurred on both an individual level and a group level, and highlighted how a creative-systems approach can be used to gain a more detailed and in-depth understanding of musical creativity more generally.

In this thesis I aim to uncover the nature, quality and implications of audience engagement with popular music in everyday life. Specifically, I look at two post-war generations in modern Japan and analyse their listening practices and interpretations of music encounters. To investigate this, a mixed-method approach is used based on focus group and individual interviews, questionnaires, participant observation and expert interviews with industry representatives – 100 study participants overall. Emerging patterns and themes are identified through qualitative thematic analysis. In two case studies – of idol groups and vocaloid music - I focus on how audiences, especially fans, and producers interact, with a close bond emerging over a process of cultural co-evolution of production and reception. Then, I position this map of engagements within the experiences of two Japanese cohorts, “the lost” and “the relaxed”. I argue that their generational experiences and localities guide the frames through which they interpret music. I argue that listening to music is a complex social practice whose significance has been undervalued in audience research. Audiences make music choices and engage with musical texts according to specific modes and routines which should be analysed together. Following the legacy of literary and television audience studies, I propose an account of music listening in terms of a spectrum of audience engagements linked to texts, contexts, performances and authorship. The concepts of proximity (cultural proximity and the proximity between performers and audiences) inform the analysis of the circuit of culture, offering new insight into modes of engagement and production processes. Japan, home of the Walkman and karaoke, emerges from the analysis as not only the land of technological innovations in music, but also as a culture with wider implications for media and audience research.

This thesis builds a conceptual framework that enables the creation of synergetic audiovisual works which is “fundamental to the nature of complex interactive dynamic sound and light systems and their resulting forms.”1 Utilising electroacoustic Schaefferian principles and applying them to a new media, I propose that objects can be established synergistically as an audiovisual whole, greater than the sum of their parts. The portfolio develops several tools to aid the creation of the video stream and they are further explored to allow for real-time parametric mapped audio and video manipulations. Throughout the portfolio the concept of an associative audiovisual tripartition is created and refined, thus allowing for the exploration of the media as well as a discursive approach to the auditory and visual streams. The set of works offered in this portfolio aims to raise the video medium from mere visual commentary to an audiovisual stream within a new synergetic audiovisual media. This portfolio comprises seven audiovisual compositions for digital media and a written commentary that describes the aesthetic concerns, technical features, and compositional approaches addressed in the portfolio as a whole and in each work in particular. The pieces are submitted on USB Flash drive and optical media, along with accompanying software patches. Compositions are organised as follows: Sketches. Duration: 7 minutes and 38 seconds. Mutations. Duration: 11 minutes and 24 seconds. Evolution. Duration: 11 minutes and 53 seconds. Emergence. Duration: 6 minutes and 26 seconds. Insomnia. Duration: 5 minutes and 5 seconds. Xpressions. Duration: 7 minutes and 19 seconds. Ut infinitio quod ultra. Duration: 13 minutes.