Looking at current African music studies, one notices an interesting shift from the `norm' to a fresh engagement and analysis. Fresh perspectives are increasingly being presented to position African music dialogue in the arena of the so-called `established music fields'. While these developments are noticeable, the unmentioned, unsung and uncelebrated indigenous African music practitioners, composers, performers, poets, praise singers and so forth must not be forgotten. This work does not claim novelty in terms of the latter gap, but takes the debate further to highlight, though in a small way, such a need. Mme Rangwato Magoro, from Malatane village in the greater Ga-Seloane community, is included as the main research collaborator in this brief piece of work. The work may come as a shock to any established researcher in music and music science. The author could not help but attempt to allow the voice of Mme Magoro to determine the format and content of this piece of work. In addition, the Maila-go-fenywa performance group is linked with the compositional and performance work and the praise poems of Mme Magoro. In conclusion, discussions and debates on musical arts education are addressed in terms of implementation, with examples drawn from the work of Maila-go-fenywa. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Musicology)

Today’s leading brass chamber ensemble is the brass quintet, whose inception was relatively late compared to the string quartet or woodwind quintet. The first modern brass quintet formed in the 1950s, while the first string quartet can be traced to the 17th century. Compositions for woodwind quintet were written as early as 1811 during the Classical Period. The New York Brass Quintet, American Brass Quintet, and Annapolis Brass Quintet commissioned a large portion of the currently existing brass quintet literature. The literature grew exponentially as the brass quintet became popular in the 1960s. Also during this time, a new genre of works emerged for brass quintet with orchestral accompaniment. The paper references fifty-seven works for the brass quintet with orchestral accompaniment that were found through music catalogues, reviews, recordings and searching JSTOR, World Cat and Google. Since the author was not able to discover any scholarly treatment of this genre, this paper will address the gap and unearth the quantity of literature available. Many of these works are unrecorded. While there are many existing scores in the literature, there is a resurgence of compositions currently being written for brass quintet with orchestral accompaniment. This document is presented in two parts: Part I, “Overview of Brass Chamber Music in the Twentieth Century,” “Earliest Music in the United States for Brass Chamber Ensembles,” “A Brief History of the Modern Brass Quintet,” “Annapolis Brass Quintet,” and “A Survey of Existing Works for Brass Quintet and Orchestra.” The second part of this dissertation contains materials which are pertinent to the Doctor of Musical Arts Degree which include recital programs, program notes, and vita.

A popularização das redes de computadores, o aumento da capacidade computacional e sua utilização para produção musical despertam o interesse na utilização de computadores para comunicação síncrona de conteúdo musical. Esta comunicação pode permitir um novo nível de interatividade entre máquinas e pessoas nos processos de produção musical, incluindo a distribuição de atividades, pessoas e recursos em um ambiente computacional em rede. Neste contexto, este trabalho apresenta uma solução para comunicação síncrona de fluxos de áudio e MIDI em redes de computadores. Além de permitir a comunicação, a solução proposta simplifica a conexão de recursos musicais e permite a integração de sistemas heterogêneos, como diferentes sistemas operacionais, arquiteturas de áudio e formatos de codificação, de forma transparente em um ambiente distribuído. Como meio para alcançar esta solução, mapeamos requisitos e características desejáveis para este domínio de aplicação, a partir da interação com músicos e da análise de ferramentas relacionadas. Com base nestes requisitos e características projetamos uma arquitetura de sistema para o domínio específico de comunicação síncrona de conteúdo musical. Utilizando esta arquitetura como referência, implementamos uma biblioteca que compreende as funcionalidades essenciais para este domínio específico. A fim de integrar esta biblioteca com diferentes bibliotecas de áudio e MIDI, desenvolvemos um conjunto de ferramentas que correspondem aos requisitos propostos e que permite aos usuários a utilização de conexões de rede em diversas ferramentas musicais. / The popularization of computer networks, the growth in computational resources and their use in music production have raised the interest in using computers for synchronous communication of music content. This communication may allow a new level of interactivity between machines and people in music production processes, including the distribution of activities, resources and people within a networked music environment. In this context, this work presents a solution for synchronous communication of audio and MIDI streams in computer networks. Besides allowing communication, the proposed solution simplifies connections of music resources and allows the integration of heterogeneous systems, such as different operating systems, audio architecture and codification formats, transparently in a distributed environment. As a means for accomplishing this solution, we mapped requirements and desirable features for this application domain, from the interaction with musicians and the analysis of related software. Based on these requirements and features, we designed a system architecture for the specific domain of synchronous communication of music content. Using this architecture as reference, we implemented a library that comprises the essential functionalities for this specific domain. In order to integrate this library with different Audio and MIDI libraries, we developed a tool set that matches the proposed requirements and allows users to use network connections in several music tools.

This dissertation studies the musical activities of the Venezuelan pianist and composer Teresa Carreño (1853-1917) during her formative years in Caracas. It examines the sources that pertain to her musical environment, early piano training, and first compositions in the context of the growth in Caracas of the practices of recreational sociability, the increasing influence of virtuosic music, and the tradition of private concert-making sponsored by devoted music amateurs. This study argues that Teresa Carreño’s musical upbringing occurred in a social and cultural context in which Enlightenment-framed ideologies of civilization and social progress, shaped in fundamental ways the perceptions of the value of music and women in society, and their role in the newly-founded republic. This study is aimed at reconstructing Teresa Carreño’s musical activities in Caracas as a means for elucidating the values, aspirations, and contradictions of Caracas’s musical culture and how these were articulated within the broader context of the nation-building process that was shaped and promoted by the progressive intelligentsia since the early nineteenth-century.

My research interest in the upcoming paper is the increased need for promotion of schools. I. e. the individual school´s needs to be able to show its existence, in the huge flow and availability of information; schools and universities, study circles, streamed lectures on the Internet, public schools and private schools, different educational directions, et cetera. The schools’ needs to market itself, make good PR and sell their pedagogical idea, and that has become increasingly important.   My purpose is to clarify how music teachers, in the Swedish primary and secondary school, skills and competences are used in outreach activities within but also outside, the school premises. With outreach activities I mean here the kind of official events that have cultural, tradition-bearing moves and where music teachers often have an additional responsibility for implementation, such as Speech Days, Lucia celebrations, “Open School days”, PTA meetings, et cetera.   Research issues 1) What is the significance of outreach activities expressed by music teachers and principals?   2) Which motives are expressed by the two occupation categories when it comes to outreach activities arranged by the school and how they can be related to the current governing documents?   3) To what extent are these activities and music teacher's work with these integrated in music as a school subject?   Results Outreach music activities play a big role in getting students to develop and demonstrate the basic knowledge and the breadth to which they dedicated themselves through the school’s music classes. As a consequence of that all students have been able to assimilate basic music skills outreach activities has been important to show the excellence of the pupils which they are happy to show, both for their own lifelong and life-wide learning and the school's ability to do PR for it’s well-functioning music activities. This allows the school to continue the good pedagogical work when new students secure the economic basis for the future. If outreach activities are used to give students control over their learning in the right way, it can additionally help to ensure that students stimulates to take an active part in school development at various levels, locally, nationally and internationally.   Music Teachers' motives for carrying out outreach activities varied between unequivocally curriculum-related goals, didactic goals at the individual level as well as PR and marketing-related reasons, with strong emphasis on the curriculum. A concrete motive for music teachers in the study was that all outreach activities are considered as good opportunities to "jam" with students, to gain experience through music situations similar to those that you can meet as a professional musician in the future, such as "master-apprentice" meetings. The strongest motive was to conduct outreach activities in relation to the substance in the curriculum, such as solo singing, choir, accompaniment, melody playing and to reflect on and discuss the importance of music, different genres, sound engineering, et cetera. For a couple of the principals the promotion of the school was of greater importance than for the others. They simply had to be so well performing that they each fall semester can attract a new first year class with students. Several of the principals in the study made a connection between the schools’ outreach activities and its work with values.   There was an almost unanimous agreement that outreach music activities are an integral and very important part of school music education, both among music teachers and principals. However, there were a couple of principals and even music teachers, who argued that the very large outreach activities were not optimally timed opportunities for assessment. Especially the music teachers in the study were in this respect divided into half’s, where the majority on the contrary argued that outreach activities are very important formative and stimulating opportunities for assessment. Even in this respect, i. e. when it comes to how outreach activities can be integrated in music as a school subject, strong arguments can be made to have requirements of curriculum related issues like singing, ensemble playing, accompaniment, melody playing, sound engineering and really almost everything in the curricula.   A polarization or loyalty conflict between prioritizing curriculum-related goals or PR did not seem to be verifiable, empirical data rather told that the participants in this study saw it as two activities in symbiosis. In contrast, some of the experienced music teachers spoke about the importance of "peeling off" unnecessary and costly project, and instead prioritize things that create greater opportunities for the student's musical learning.

L’objectif de notre recherche est de comprendre les bases cérébrales de l’interaction sociale dans un contexte de performance musicale grâce à des outils issus des neurosciences (électroencéphalographie : EEG) et du traitement du signal. Ce manuscrit présente tout d’abord un état de l’art des études récentes dans le domaine de l’hyperscanning. Nous offrons une réflexion sur les prérequis et la méthodologie à adopter pour concevoir une expérience prédisposant à l’émergence d’une synchronisation neuronale. Nous explorons ensuite les processus cérébraux mis en jeu lors de la pratique de la musique au travers d’études réalisées en neurosciences. Par la suite nous présentons plusieurs méthodes permettant de calculer des indices de couplage cérébral sur les données récoltées lors d’expériences en hyperscanning. Nous y décrivons en particulier les méthodes de séparation de source conjointe (jBSS) dont l’avantage est de se rapprocher d’une réalité anatomique et physiologique, ainsi que de prendre en compte l’information inter-sujets lors de l’estimation des sources. Enfin, nous détaillons notre contribution au champ des neurosciences sociales sous la forme d’une expérience longitudinale en hyperscanning-EEG. Elle étudie l’interaction sociale de pianistes à quatre mains lors de l’apprentissage d’un morceau de musique sur une période de deux mois. Nous mettons en évidence qu’il existe une corrélation entre l’augmentation de la performance musicale au cours du temps, la synchronisation cérébrale et la qualité de la relation entre les musiciens. / The aim of our research is to understand the neural bases of social interaction in a musical performance context with tools from neuroscience (electroencephalography: EEG) and signal processing. This manuscript first presents a state of the art of recent studies in the field of hyperscanning. We introduce our recommendations on the prerequisites and methodology to design experiments facilitating the emergence of neuronal synchronization. We then explore the cerebral processes involved in the practice of music through studies in neuroscience of music. Subsequently we present several methods to calculate brain coupling on data collected during experiments in hyperscanning. We describe in particular the methods of joint blind source separation (jBSS) whose advantages are to approach anatomical and physiological reality, as well as taking into account inter-subject information when estimating sources. Finally, we detail our contribution to the field of social neuroscience with a longitudinal experience in hyperscanning-EEG. We studied social interaction from musicians playing four hands piano over a two-month period. We highlight a correlation between increased musical performance over time, cerebral synchronization and quality of the relationship between the pianists.

The present work has as object of investigation the understanding of rap songs as voco-hybrid musical expressions in the Northeast, bring the dialogue between the African-American oral sources and the Northeast. The result of this meeting is built by the analyses of the eighteen songs from Northeastern, and included groups from the design of the poet zumthoriana voice. The identity mapping of MC/a listener of rap has made it possible to deepen looks that were conducted by hybridization, performance considerations, and utopia and, in turn, subsidized a broad approach on textual complexity of rap songs. / Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Alagoas / O presente trabalho tem por objeto de investigação a compreensão das canções de rap como expressões voco-musicais híbridas que, no nordeste, trazem o diálogo entre as fontes orais afro-americanas e a cantoria nordestina. O resultado deste encontro é construído pelas análises das dezoito canções, oriundas de grupos nordestinos, e compreendidas a partir da concepção de poeta da voz zumthoriana. O mapeamento identitário do/a MC e do/a ouvinte de rap tornou possível aprofundar olhares que foram conduzidos pelas considerações sobre hibridação, performance e utopia e, por sua vez, subsidiaram uma abordagem ampla sobre a complexidade textual das canções de rap.

Looking at current African music studies, one notices an interesting shift from the `norm' to a fresh engagement and analysis. Fresh perspectives are increasingly being presented to position African music dialogue in the arena of the so-called `established music fields'. While these developments are noticeable, the unmentioned, unsung and uncelebrated indigenous African music practitioners, composers, performers, poets, praise singers and so forth must not be forgotten. This work does not claim novelty in terms of the latter gap, but takes the debate further to highlight, though in a small way, such a need. Mme Rangwato Magoro, from Malatane village in the greater Ga-Seloane community, is included as the main research collaborator in this brief piece of work. The work may come as a shock to any established researcher in music and music science. The author could not help but attempt to allow the voice of Mme Magoro to determine the format and content of this piece of work. In addition, the Maila-go-fenywa performance group is linked with the compositional and performance work and the praise poems of Mme Magoro. In conclusion, discussions and debates on musical arts education are addressed in terms of implementation, with examples drawn from the work of Maila-go-fenywa. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M.A. (Musicology)

The thesis is a critical reading of pedagogical and biographical texts by and on violinists, written in the early twentieth century. It contributes to historical and discursive studies by providing a limited engagement with a largely neglected group of historical sources relating to musical performance, and further advances the historical research on subjectivity, the body, pathology, and erotics, in relation to discourses of music. The thesis also contributes to studies of performance practice, and empirical and psychological studies of musical performance, in that it engages with discursive notions of theoretical and performance categories, such as tempo, melody, vibrato and portamento. By taking a hermeneutic approach to detailed discussions of performative practices, primarily found in pedagogical texts, the project aims to provide a more nuanced assessment of many of the topics that have played a central role in the ongoing research on early twentieth-century performance (which principally consists of recordings analysis). The project does this by demonstrating the extent to which these practices are culturally and historically mediated. Following an introduction, chapter 2 demonstrates that notions of consciousness inform writers’ notions of musical virtuosity, and shows that Nietzschean and Wagnerian notions of self underpin the idea of the violinist as a superior producer of art. Chapter 3 argues that these ideas combine with metaphysical notions of melody to make the concept of ‘tone’/Ton the cornerstone of string playing during this period, which in turn has important implications for how writers conceive of tempo, rhythm, vibrato, portamento and dynamics. Chapter 4 demonstrates that writers perceive their ideal of tone to be threatened by moral and physiological disease, manifested in individual/social bodies, which leads to a very different articulation of these same practices. Chapter 5 explores traces of notions of intersubjectivity, arising from metaphors of erotic desire, which challenge the hegemonic ideal of universal mind. The conclusion frames the discourse as a problematic attempt to posit an authoritarian model of string playing. It also includes a preliminary study of early twentieth-century discourses of cello playing, and engages with the research to date on national styles of violin playing in the same period.

This study contributes to practical discussions on the composition of dynamic music for video games from the composer’s perspective. Creating greater levels of immersion in players is used as a justification for the proposals of the thesis. It lays down foundational aesthetic elements in order to proceed with a logical methodology. The aim of this paper is to build upon, and further hybridise, two techniques used by composers and by video game designers to increase further the reactive agility and memorability of the music for the player. Each chapter of this paper explores a different technique for joining two (possibly disparate) types of gameplay, or gamestates, with appropriate continuous music. In each, I discuss a particular musical engine capable of implementing continuous music. Chapter One will discuss a branching-music engine, which uses a precomposed musical mosaic (or musical pixels) to create a linear score with the potential to diverge at appropriate moments accompanying onscreen action. I use the case study of the Final Fantasy battle system to show how the implementation of a branching-music engine could assist in maintaining the continuity of gameplay experience that current disjointed scores, which appear in many games, create. To aid this argument I have implemented a branching-music engine, using the graphical object oriented programming environment MaxMSP, in the style of the battle music composed by Nobuo Uematsu, the composer of the early Final Fantasy series. The reader can find this in the accompanying demonstrations patch. In Chapter Two I consider how a generative-music engine can also implement a continuous music and also address some of the limitations of the branching-music engine. Further I describe a technique for an effective generative music for video games that creates musical ‘personalities’ that can mimic a particular style of music for a limited period of time. Crucially, this engine is able to transition between any two personalities to create musical coincidence with the game. GMGEn (<b>G</b>ame <b>M</b>usic <b>G</b>eneration <b>E</b>ngine) is a program I have created in MaxMSP to act as an example of this concept. GMGEn is available in the Demonstrations_Application. Chapter Three will discuss potential limitations of the branching music engine described in Chapter One and the generative music engine described in Chapter Two, and highlights how these issues can be solved by way of a third engine, which hybridises both. As this engine has an indeterminate musical state it is termed the intermittent-music engine. I go on to discuss the implementation of this engine in two different game scenarios and how emergent structures of this music will appear. The final outcome is to formulate a new compositional approach delivering dynamic music, which accompanies the onscreen action with greater agility than currently present in the field, increasing the memorability and therefore the immersive effect of the video-game music.