The study of popular music has experienced an astonishing growth in the past two and a half decades; however, the detailed analysis of musical texts has lagged far behind other areas, such as the sociology of the youth audience and analysis of the visual components of music video. This thesis undertakes a survey of recent approaches to popular music at the textual level, before examining the construction of an individual song, the Beach Boys' 1964 recording of "All Summer Long". While many parameters affecting the creation of the cultural significance of the text in question are discussed, ultimately the exegesis serves to problematize larger issues in scholarly work on popular music, particularly the dominance of the paradigms of rupture, rebellion, and authenticity in relation to the historiography and criticism of the formation known as "rock".

This thesis investigates the theory and practice of song criticism from a primarily literary perspective. It maintains that much contemporary song criticism deals inadequately with the complex relationships between verbal, vocal and musical texts that comprise the three basic elements of the modern song. To justify this claim, and to grasp how the current situation might have arisen, the thesis delves into the history of song and traces its developments. It concludes that modern and classical song differ in ways that the "serious vs. popular" debate do not address: autonomy of authorship, frame of reference, and proper context for interpretation. To remedy this situation, the thesis anatomizes modern song and outlines a "top-down" approach to song criticism with lyrics as the primary frame of reference, supplemented by emotive cues found in the music and vocal performance. Concurrently, the anatomy is put into practice, using examples from the unofficial canon of modern song.

This dissertation traces the history and development of algorithms in musical composition from ca. 1957 to 1993 and attempts to clarify related terminology from the contexts of computer science, information science, and music theory and composition.The first of three sections begins with an extensive definition of the term algorithm. Because this term is relatively new to musical vocabulary, the definition appearing in this dissertation will include both musical and non-musical applications.Historically and currently, there are three major approaches to algorithmic composition with computers: 1) algorithms for sound synthesis; 2) algorithms for compositional structure; and 3) algorithms for the correlation of sound synthesis with structure. Consideration will be given to the latter two approaches, algorithms for the generation of the micro- and macrostructural elements of musical composition.Several different processes exist under the umbrella of algorithmic composition. Included in the body of this dissertation are detailed explanations and descriptions of specific software and hardware from the following processes: stochastic, chaotic, rule-based, grammars, and artificial intelligence.Second, an historical survey of musical compositions and related written literature covering musical and non-musical resources organized into three chapters: 1957-1972, 1973-1982, and 1983-1993. These compositions and written resources have had significant impact on determining how subsequent composers made use of computers for composition.In the third section an annotated study of the algorithmic compositions from ca. 1957-1993 will be presented. Special emphasis has been placed on information garnered from personal correspondence and interviews.Five appendices are devoted to relevant cross-disciplinary information from the fields of computer science, information science, and music theory and composition; included are: 1) a list of terms; 2) an alphabetical listing of algorithmic compositions; 3) a discography; 4) a bibliography of relevant information from the disciplines discussed; and 5) a list of algorithmic computer systems, languages, and programs covered in this research. There is significant overlap in the use of computer algorithms by the scientific and the musical communities, therefore, the inclusion of definitions and terminology is necessary for a deeper understanding of the musical applications. / School of Music

This study is framed by questions about the wider implications of a belief in Boulez's independent indeterminate aesthetic for divergent trends such as Europeanism vs. Americanism, modernism vs. postmodernism and serial structure vs. non-serial structure. In conclusion it suggests that an ongoing tendency toward historical revisionism in Boulez's texts may be a function of the difficulty in articulating an intentional indeterminate aesthetic in light of the serial inheritance.

The concept of World Music is important for the explanation of various twentieth-century musical phenomena but its application to virtually every genre of music creates an inevitable confusion. In the 1980s, World Music was a term useful for describing popular music in fusion with ethnic music. That fact has lead many to an association of the term exclusively with that new genre. In this study I define World Music in Western art-music---from an historical perspective as well as with regard to musical style, ideology, and aesthetics and give examples of various composers' approaches. In the ideological discussion, the debate over "exotic" music and musical borrowings turns out to have many points of contact with the notions of modernism and postmodernism. I exemplify and test my ideas by using the stylistic development of Swedish-Canadian composer Bengt Hambraeus as a case study and discuss ideological and musical applications to the concept of World Music in relation to Hambraeus's piece Nocturnals for Chamber Ensemble (1990).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 14, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4519. Adviser: Ruth M. Stone.

Thesis (D.M.A)--Boston University.

<p> <i> Ondo</i> was written for my grandmother&rsquo;s 88th birthday. The composition comprises six sections based on a popular folksong, called &ldquo;<i>Tanko-Bushi</i>,&rdquo; which can be heard in every Japanese town during the <i>Bon</i> festival. Obon is a holiday in August, when we return home once a year to pay respect to our elders and ancestors. &ldquo;<i>Tanko-Bushi</i>&rdquo; became popular in Japan around the end of the Second World War and was based on a popular song from the early part of the twentieth century, around the time my grandmother was born, and has taken many forms since; it continues to do so under varied contexts and the versions I encountered there as a child, while attending the summer festivals with her, would have been but a small sample of these. As I worked on <i>Ondo</i>, I tried to imagine what it might have been like to live through all of the changes that took place in Japan over the past century. I think of the composition as a commentary on the westernization that has been taking place there and on the orientalization of Japanese identity&mdash;as an act of harmonizing disparate values. Between and within the sections, I explore varying degrees of fragmentation as they relate to, or disrupt, unifying threads that run through the four main sections (1, 3, 5 and 6). Above all, I wanted the piece to be enjoyable for my grandmother to listen to. The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra gave a reading of the four main sections of <i> Ondo</i> on 28 January 2011 at the SPCO Center in Saint Paul, MN. Subsequent to the reading, two interludes (sections 2 and 4) were added as contrasting materials and as expansions upon the relationships explored between the diverse approaches to formal considerations in the piece.</p><p>

The serpent, an extinct musical instrument, was important to the development of contemporary low brass. Its characteristics, performance problems, and literature give insight into its development as well as reasons for its ultimate demise and replacement with technically more advanced instruments.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / Literary movements, in one way or another, have influenced music throughout the history of art. The interaction between these two forms of art, however, is nowhere so prominent in the history of music as in Germany durinq the years, 1800-1850, the so-called "golden age" of Romantic music. Indeed, German Romantic literature and German Romantic music were so closely interwoven during this period that it is difficult to separate one from the other. In truth, a new literary-musical art had developed in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century. The synthesis between German Romantic music and German Romantic literature has been appreciated more by literary scholars than by scholars of music. George C. Schoolfield's The Figure of the Musician in German Literature (The University of North Carolina Press, 1956) is, for example, a significant study. In music, however, there is no one work which deals adequately, to my knowledge, with the interaction between these two arts. Even in articles relating to the subject two prominent figures have been neglected, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck. It is due to the belief that German Romantic music cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of German Romantic literature and their interrelationships that this study was undertaken. The dissertation concentrates on the six German Romantic writers who have exerted the qreatest influence on German Romantic music: Wackenroder, Tieck, Navalis, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Heine, and Jean Paul Richter. The first chapter deals with two works by Goethe, Wilhelm Meister and Faust. Other Romantic writers, such as Marike and Eichendorff, have also been included whenever a comparison was possible [TRUNCATED]. / 2031-01-01