This thesis is concerned with popular music's working of time. It takes the experience of time as crucial to the negotiation of social, political or, more simply, existential, conditions. The key example analysed is the funk style invented by legendary musician James Brown. I argue that James Brown's funk might be understood as an apprehension of a minor temporality or the musical expression of a particular form of negotiation of time by a minor culture. Precursors to this idea are found in the literature of the stream of consciousness style and, more significantly for this thesis, in the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the cinema in his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. These examples are all concerned with the indeterminate unfolding of lived time and where the reality of temporal indeterminacy will take precedence over the more linear conventions of traditional narrative. Deleuze???s Cinema books account for such a shift in emphasis from the narrative depiction of movement through time the movement-image to a more direct experience of the temporal the time-image, and I will trace a similar shift in the history of popular music. For Deleuze, the change in the relation of images to time is catalysed by the intolerable events of World War II. In this thesis, the evolution of funk will be seen to reflect the existential change experienced by a generation of African-Americans in the wake of the civil-rights movement. The funk groove associated with the music of James Brown is discussed as an aesthetic strategy that responds to the existential conditions that grew out of the often perceived failure of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Funk provided an aesthetic strategy that allowed for the constitution of a minor temporality, involving a series of temporal negotiations that eschew more hegemonic, common sense, compositions of time and space. This has implications for the understanding of much of the popular music that has followed funk. I argue that the understanding of the emergence of funk, and of the contemporary electronic dance music styles which followed, would be enhanced by taking this ontological consideration of the experiential time of minorities into account. I will argue that funk and the electronic dance musics that followed might be seen as articulations of minority expression, where the time-image style of their musical compositions reflect the post-soul eschewing of a narratively driven, common sense view of historical time.

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This thesis is concerned with popular music's working of time. It takes the experience of time as crucial to the negotiation of social, political or, more simply, existential, conditions. The key example analysed is the funk style invented by legendary musician James Brown. I argue that James Brown's funk might be understood as an apprehension of a minor temporality or the musical expression of a particular form of negotiation of time by a minor culture. Precursors to this idea are found in the literature of the stream of consciousness style and, more significantly for this thesis, in the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the cinema in his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. These examples are all concerned with the indeterminate unfolding of lived time and where the reality of temporal indeterminacy will take precedence over the more linear conventions of traditional narrative. Deleuze???s Cinema books account for such a shift in emphasis from the narrative depiction of movement through time the movement-image to a more direct experience of the temporal the time-image, and I will trace a similar shift in the history of popular music. For Deleuze, the change in the relation of images to time is catalysed by the intolerable events of World War II. In this thesis, the evolution of funk will be seen to reflect the existential change experienced by a generation of African-Americans in the wake of the civil-rights movement. The funk groove associated with the music of James Brown is discussed as an aesthetic strategy that responds to the existential conditions that grew out of the often perceived failure of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Funk provided an aesthetic strategy that allowed for the constitution of a minor temporality, involving a series of temporal negotiations that eschew more hegemonic, common sense, compositions of time and space. This has implications for the understanding of much of the popular music that has followed funk. I argue that the understanding of the emergence of funk, and of the contemporary electronic dance music styles which followed, would be enhanced by taking this ontological consideration of the experiential time of minorities into account. I will argue that funk and the electronic dance musics that followed might be seen as articulations of minority expression, where the time-image style of their musical compositions reflect the post-soul eschewing of a narratively driven, common sense view of historical time.

When one realizes how little the harp of the 1700's had advanced from its Biblical predecessors, its neglect by such masters as Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven does not seem remarkable. Why should a serious composer waste his time in writing for an instrument with no facilities for modulating, an instrument the weak tones of which would be lost in an orchestra?

The AIDS Quilt Songbook was a musical response to the shame surrounding the outbreak of the HIV virus and was one of the first art song publications to deal with the topic of HIV and AIDS. This DMA thesis documents the significance and history of the AIDS Quilt Songbook, traces the progression of the project up until December 1, 2008, and documents the work, experiences, and words of the composers who have been inspired to contribute to the AIDS Quilt Songbook Project. In 1981, the medical and popular press reported the first cases of a quickly spreading virus among homosexual males. This virus is currently diagnosed as HIV and AIDS. Lack of funding consumed the early years of what grew to become a national pandemic. The artistic community was one of the major catalysts for funding and education. Cleave Jones and other gay rights activists developed the NAMES Project as a memoriam for those lost to the pandemic. The AIDS Quilt Songbook was created to parallel the AIDS Quilt as "a never-ending work whose meaning and spirit is renewed and redefined with every addition." This concept of additions has continued the expansion of the AIDS Quilt Songbook Project from 1993 to the additions premiered on December 1, 2008 (World AIDS Day) at The Court Theater in Chicago, Illinois, entitled the "Chicago AIDS Quilt Songbook: A Benefit for Season of Concern." The AIDS Quilt Songbook project has sixty-seven documented additions, but only eighteen of the sixty-seven additions are collected. This thesis examines the events, compositions and experiences of the composers: Chris DeBlasio, Ricky Ian Gordon, Daniel Kallman, Cary John Franklin, and Evan Kuchar, who submitted compositions to the AIDS Quilt Songbook between 1991 and 2008. The compositions examined are: Walt Whitman in 1989 by DeBlasio, I Never Knew by Gordon, When I am dead, my dearest by Kallman, As Imperceptibly as Grief by Franklin, and Death Spiral by Kuchar.

This dissertation examines the role of noise in shaping the form of several recent musical compositions. This study demonstrates how the contrast of noisy sounds and harmonic sounds can impact the structure of compositions. Depending on context, however, the specific use and function of noise can vary substantially from one work to the next. The first portion of this paper describes methods for quantifying noise content using FFT analysis procedures. A number of tests on instrumental and synthetic sound sources are described in order to demonstrate how the analysis system may react to certain sounds. The second part of this document consists of several analyses of whole musical works. Works for acoustic instruments are examined first, followed by works for electronic media. During these analyses, it becomes clear that while the use of noise in each work is based largely upon context, some common patterns do exist across different works. The final portion of the paper examines an original work which was written with the function of noise specifically in mind. The original work is put through the same analysis procedures as works seen earlier in the paper, and some conclusions are drawn regarding both the possibilities and limitations of noise analysis as a compositional tool.

Beginning in 1939, the Concours International d'Exécution Musicale de Genève (CIEM; Geneva International Music Competition) is unique among international music competitions in its multidisciplinary approach. To date, fifteen works have been commissioned for clarinet for the years in which the clarinet was involved. The most well-known of these works is the unaccompanied work by Heinrich Sutermeister, Capriccio for Solo Clarinet in A, written in 1946 for the 1947 competition. This work is a staple in the unaccompanied clarinet repertoire. However, the other fourteen works commissioned for the competition are little known and to date no document has been prepared that examines each of these works in the context of the competition and clarinet literature. While perhaps less notable, works were also commissioned for a sight reading portion of the competition for many of the years in which the clarinet was a discipline chosen for the competition, two of which were published. These works are examined as well. This survey provides a critical, analytical, historical, performance-related and biographical review of the published and unpublished works commissioned for the clarinet by CIEM. The composers, competitors and the significance of these works and winners in the clarinet literature and history are included. A chapter is dedicated to each piece which includes performance considerations, critical, analytical, and historical information as well as biographical information regarding the composer and the competitors where available.

The evolution of the role of the trombone as a solo instrument in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be traced most effectively through four schools of playing, with the music of today's avant-garde being a logical historical culmination of these four schools. It will be demons t rated that the avant-garde's use of the solo trombone has merely continued the evolutionary process started in the early nineteenth century. The contribution of the early nineteenth-century virtuosi was the establishment of the idea that the trombone could compete on its own terms with other instruments as a solo instrument. In addition to expanding the technical capabilities, they also left a basic solo repertoire. With the death of the virtuosi the trombone as a solo instrument went into a decline. For the remainder of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century the Paris Conservatoire was influential. Standards of solo performance were brought to new heights by excellent study material and contest solos. The next important step came from the late nineteenth-century American band virtuosi. Their influence helped the public to accept the idea of the trombone as a solo instrument. The American jazz trombonists of the 1930's and 1940's also further widened the technical capabilities of the trombone and also further encouraged acceptance of the Instrument in its solo capacity. However, their most important contribution was in new tonal colors. The music of the avant-garde takes all these previous historical achievements and makes use of them in its own unique way.

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