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<p> Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford, along with most other female creators of musicals, remain in the shadows, in spite of an increased focus by the media on women&rsquo;s contributions to society. The messages of Cryer and Ford&rsquo;s dramatic themes and songs have not been fully understood by many critics and audience members. Scholarly and popular writings on women in theater remain scarce, and literature on Cryer and Ford contains errors and promotes misunderstandings. </p><p> In this thesis, I argue that Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford, a writer and composer of musical theater respectively, tackled contemporary issues in their Broadway and off Broadway musicals, introduced new theatrical forms and musical genres to the stage, and have built a distinguished collaborative career and earned a meritorious position in musical theater heritage by incorporating these issues, in particular, those which pertain to women or those which affect women, into their works. I seek to correct and build upon extant writings and information from media resources. My thesis is the first monograph to detail the lives and works of Cryer and Ford, and to assess their contributions to the musical theater genre. My detailed case studies dissect several Cryer and Ford musicals, which speak directly to prominent images and ideas of the time, and reveal how their works emphasize the importance of interpersonal communication, and endorse humanism and, in particular, feminism. Cryer and Ford are trailblazers for other female musical writers, for whom they have advocated, and for whom I provide a comprehensive overview.</p><p>

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In recent decades, historical concert programmes have emerged as a fascinating resource for cultural study. As yet, however, little detailed work has been done on the programme notes that these booklets contained. This thesis concentrates on the notes written for the Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts between 1865 and 1879. The series held an important place in London concert life during this period, and featured a number of influential authors in the programmes, such as George Grove, August Manns, James William Davison, Edward Dannreuther, and Ebenezer Prout. Grove in particular made use of his notes as part of entries in the first edition of the Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Close critical readings of the Saturday Concert booklets illustrate the complex combination of context, content, and function that the programme notes represented. These readings are supported by short histories of the series, the programme note, and the various authors, along with a study of the audience through booklet construction and advertising. A database covering the repertoire performed and programme note provision during the case-study period is included on the attached CD. Programme notes that outlined pre-existing or newly-invented plots make it clear that one of their functions was to give music a narrative. Even notes that did not contain stories per se were filled with material that served a very similar purpose. The most obvious examples were explanations of how the work was created, and it's place in history. However, all of the language used to describe a piece could signal wider meanings, which then became part of the story being told. References to gender, families, education, morality, religion, politics, or race imbued the works with a wide variety of pre-existing 'texts' (in the broadest sense of the word), and formed social and cultural narratives for music.

Throughout the eighteenth century Italian violinists were praised and admired by London audiences. Though never as feted as the Italian castrati and sopranos, the Italian violinists in eighteenth-century London played a prominent role, featuring as leaders and soloists in every context where music was required. This dissertation focuses on the role the 'Solo' played in the careers of these Italian violinists, and how these artists and this genre fitted in socially, culturally and aesthetically. The 'Solo' was an important tool for them in promoting their careers: it was the repertoire they performed and subsequently published in order to enhance their fame. As a genre, the 'Solo' was uniquely suited to exploring a violinist's artistic invention. Exploring the repertoire provides a new understanding of these artists and the important role they played in eighteenth-century London. First, the Italian violinist is considered through a discussion of the historical and cultural context of eighteenth-century London into which these artists arrived. The cultural scene (including the Italian Opera, the theatres and the emerging public concert scene) is studied, as are various forms of patronage and the tradition of private pupils. The prominence and longevity of the 'Solo' is examined through a consideration of surviving catalogues from the publishers active in London during the century. Concert and publication advertisements support the argument. To understand further why the 'Solo' and the Italian violinist were appreciated, eighteenth-century treatises on aesthetics and musical performance are discussed, exploring the concept of 'Good Taste' and in the process revealing the 'aesthetic of moderation'. Finally, the Solo repertoire itself will be explored, focusing both on contemporary aesthetics and performance practice issues. This will be done both through a general survey of the Solo genre as well as a couple of case studies.

This thesis explores how voice, the body, and gender interact to characterise the eponymous leading roles in Richard Strauss's Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909). Approaching the vocality of the two title characters from the perspective of a performer, I use vocal line as notated in the score as a basis for exploring constructions of women at the time these two operas were composed. Because these operas were created during the fin-de-siècle, they occupy a crucial transitional point between Romantic and Modern vocal writing, when, in contrast to the practices of the bel canto era, the singer was expected to demonstrate ever-greater fidelity to the notated score. Therefore, the voice is largely manipulated by another (the composer) to perform sounds that construct her identity, and hence, her gender. I expand upon this absolute to show how in these operas, gender performativity is manifested in the musical notation. The operatic soprano voice, when manipulated for certain effects, performs 'conventional' aspects of a female character's gender (for example, its pitch range), but I argue it also has the ability to communicate something more visceral, something that transcends gender norms, and also language itself. Building on a wide range of analytical and critical discourses ranging from gender theory to vocal technique, my thesis explores how a soprano singer navigates the extreme vocality present in these two operas, and in the process articulates a range of constructions of identity of women in the fin-de-siècle. In analysing the vocal writing of these two works, it becomes apparent that gender dichotomies are effectively voided in passages within these seminal operas, which nevertheless comment directly on fin-de-siècle 'femininity' or 'masculinity'. My research analyses vocal gestures from a technical standpoint and, in so doing, suggests that gender norms become obsolete at those crucial moments in which voice and body are pushed to physical and expressive limits.

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Richard Wagner's published writings present various topoi to which he returned repeatedly. Often he adopts a historiographic approach in his arguments, and this feature suggested the present study concerning the composer's concepts of history. Wagner's historiographic approach is reflected in his discussions of the Greek influence on music. The contents of his personal libraries, first in Dresden and then in Zurich/Bayreuth, are also considered as further resources for the composer's study of history. Along with these sources, his autobiography, letters, and the extensive diary of his wife Cosima provide further substance for the present discussion. The shifts in Wagner's theories under the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer are also examined as is the composer's eventual realization that much of what he was attempting to do in his own works had already been foreshadowed in the early Italian humanist experiments that led to the birth of opera. Examples from his works, particularly Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, reveal his adoption of traits of various historical style periods in music history in his own compositions. Wagner's reverence for Palestrina and Bach are also highlighted. / text

Minimalist music has now become ubiquitous in film, found in everything from PBS advertisements to big-budget studio movies like A Beautiful Mind. This presents a number of questions: what kind of films use the technique, how does its deployment compare to the classical Hollywood score, and how does it function? This dissertation is intended to address these issues by examining what minimalism has come to mean in films that have become part of popular culture. I detail how the musical technique intersects with the model of the classical Hollywood film score, and, by exploring the film music of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, and "nonminimalist" composers, give a history of minimalism's use on the score from its avant-garde origins in the 1960s to its commercial appropriations in the 1990s and 2000s. Utilizing Nicholas Cook's idea of "enabling similarity" from his book Analysing Musical Multimedia and Rebecca Leydon's minimalist tropes from her Music Theory Online article "Toward a Typology of Musical Tropes," I provide detailed analyses of ten films employing minimalist techniques (Koyaanisqatsi, The Terminator, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Solaris, Kundun, A Beautiful Mind, Proof, The Truman Show, Gattaca, and The Thin Blue Line), showing how musical meaning in these films is tied to minimalism's particular stylistic attributes. Through the repeated linkage of minimalism with the Other, the mathematical mind, and dystopia, these meanings have the possibility--like the socially-encoded meanings of the classical score--of becoming enculturated. / text

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