The title, "... the river flows, shaping a changing landscape," visualizes what I am trying convey through the contrapuntal nature of this piece. It is movement of the lines upon which the listener is transported from one aural perspective to the next. A constantly changing landscape shaped by the will and strength of the flowing river.

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“Get hold of portable property!” says one of the great Dickens characters in Great Expectations. The notion of “portable property” strikes me as deeply analogous to that of pieces of art, which are their creators’ “properties” exported to anyone who will take hold of them. Some of my most valued possessions are the portable properties handed down to me by musicians, painters, writers—most of whom I have never met. Often it is one specific aspect of an artwork that makes it important to me. Several months ago I was struck by how the ethereal coda (actually, the cadenza) of Elgar’s Violin Concerto simply stops the “music” of the piece, leaving the listener with just…music. The “redeemed” codas found in Bruckner’s symphonies similarly affect me as a listener, in their orchestration of the musical dust as it settles. These endings resonated in my head with that of the Dickens novel quoted above, in which an older, wiser Dickens even admits to not knowing how the story ends by writing his own divergent “codas.” Great Expectations has been a treasured “portable property” to me personally, and continues to haunt and humble me, as it did particularly while writing this piece. The Old Forge at Satis House is thus a welding of many “portable properties,” but in my mind at least, it is foremost a musical pondering of Dickens’s marshes and forges, and what they reveal about the difference between “great expectations” and great satisfaction.

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Federico Mompou (1893-1987) was a Catalan composer known primarily for his piano compositions. In addition to his piano works, Mompou also composed thirty-seven songs for voice and piano, a ballet, a few choral works, and a guitar suite. Mompou's songs and piano pieces were well-received by critics and audiences in France, Spain, and even the United States during his lifetime, but since the mid-1970s, majority of his songs have been overlooked by Western performers and scholars. Mompou's songs, composed between 1915 and 1971, are settings of Catalan, Spanish, and French texts. They are characterized by their simplicity, expressiveness, and evocative style. The poetry represents a variety of subjects that range from expressions of simple, childlike pleasure, to those of a highly reflective and emotional mind. Federico Mompou's songs represent an important contribution to Catalan art song of the twentieth century. The songs are deserving of performance and study in any voice studio because they contain a variety of technical, linguistic, and interpretive challenges for a wide variety of singers. The purpose of this doctoral essay for limited distribution is to provide a style analysis of thirty-five songs of Federico Mompou. The analysis divides the songs into three groups based on technical difficulty, progressing from the least difficult to the most difficult. Information about each song will include date of publication, language, poet, poem and translation. Prose analysis of each individual song is based on Jan LaRue's Guidelines for Style Analysis. Musical examples demonstrate important aspects of each individual song.

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Sunday after Sunday, liturgical organists are faced with the challenge of providing music for liturgy. While hymns, psalms, musical settings of liturgical texts, choral anthems and responses are often made clear in their choice due to the marriage of text and music, choosing music outside of those parameters is a challenge. Music that happens prior to worship as the community gathers, music to accompany ritual actions such as the presentation of the offering or the distribution of the Eucharist, and music that sends people on their way at the end of the service is not something to be taken lightly. Such choices are important and can have a significant effect on the over-all tenor of the liturgy. Many organists have concluded the most efficient and effective solution is to seek pieces which are based on the hymns sung by the assembly and trust that a cohesive liturgical whole has been created. This essay attempts to move beyond that notion into the realm of solo organ literature that is not derived from a chorale or hymn melody. Each piece of music carries its own aesthetic characteristics, and the task of the liturgical organist is to determine how those characteristics can best be incorporated into a given religious celebration.

Many theorists have connected information content in music with the listener's perception of the passage of time. This thesis uses the construct of information theory entropy, developed in the 1940s by Bell Labs engineer Claude Shannon, to describe the passage of time in Webern's music. Entropy scores are computed based on pitches, intervals, CSEGs, and pc-sets; these scores are then used to examine the first of the Five Canons, op. 16, and the fourth of the Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5.

This essay is about the life and works of Nickolai Medtner; with emphasis on his collection of Fairy Tales.