<p> The composer John Cage adopted Indian aesthetics, Zen philosophy, and anarchism to underpin his music and aesthetic. Although his interest in each ideology has been studied, the reason why he incorporated ones from disparate values remains unclear. Considering the trajectory of his intense quest for the theories that reinforced his music and aesthetic, elucidating the commonalities and differences among Indian aesthetics, Zen philosophy, and anarchism should reveal what he ultimately pursued. This dissertation explores comparative analyses of his interests in order to detect the notion of the coexistence of independence and interdependence. </p><p> Cage drew on Indian aesthetics first to dispel his doubt about his attitude relying on self-expression. The aesthetics denied expression of individual emotion, centering on the interdependence between a divine realm as an artistic source and art as its manifestation. Because Indian aesthetics contains no independent aspects, he turned to other philosophies. He next turned his attention to Zen. This philosophy is interested in discovering the independent, innate self not disturbed by delusion caused by self-centered thinking. That is, Zen believes that the purified self is directly connected with the world. The Zen tenet associates the interdependent nature with its teachings of salvation of others. </p><p> Under the tumultuous social circumstances in the 1960s, Cage was fascinated by anarchism. Buckminster Fuller advocated the world in which people could achieve comfortable life, not by national politics, but by the redistribution of wealth allowed by the improvement of technology. Such a society, he believed, could realize global welfare with its improved technology. Henry Thoreau&rsquo;s social theory has been regarded as an alternative to Fuller&rsquo;s. However, Thoreau&rsquo;s orientation toward connections with others and the notion of welfare was very limited in comparison with his special emphasis on the independent self. It was with Emma Goldman&rsquo;s anarchism that Cage eventually found the coexistence of individual freedom and supportive environment that allowed welfare for all human beings. </p><p> Cage engaged with these theories in order to discover independence and interdependence within his aesthetic. The pursuit centered on the concept of the self; more specifically a pure self that accepted the universe as it was and is. His exploration of the literature can be referred to, then, as the journey to self-identity. My dissertation is based on a close reading of primary sources, including the treatises by Indian aesthetician Ananda Coomaraswamy, Zen master Huang-Po, Zen scholar Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Fuller, Thoreau, and Goldman as well as Cage&rsquo;s writings and interviews. Scholarship of religious studies and political theory, in addition to musicology, supports the interpretation of their various sources.</p>

<p> I (Andrew Jamieson) discuss my creative process, centered around the transcendence of structures, or the dialogue between them. I define structures broadly, from musical meter and texture to political structures and life circumstances. My core inspiration is black Pentecostal worship. I illustrate black Pentecostalism with examples from City of Refuge United Church of Christ in San Francisco. Visiting this church, I experienced music and communal interaction with a clear structure that facilitated presence of the Holy Spirit and even the ability challenge oppressive circumstances. In a similar way, experimental musicians, such as Sun Ra and John Oswald, present and challenge established structures, from jazz grooves to preexisting recorded music and the institutional structure it represents.</p><p> My own work, <i>Where Perhaps It's Worse,</i> presents structures from preexisting musical material against which musicians perform their own material and express my own ideas. The primary structural backdrop is the third movement of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia, itself a quote collage. I explore the various ways my work challenges both musical and extramusical structures.</p>

<p> The music of Scott Walker (b. Noel Scott Engel, January 9, 1943) continues to influence multiple generations of respected figures in popular music from David Bowie to Radiohead, yet Walker has not set foot on stage to perform since the 1970s. Instead, the singer-songwriter-producer's latter-day reputation has instead thrived upon the basis of his recorded works. Following a radical self re-invention on the Walker Brothers' farewell album <i>Nite Flights </i> (1978) Walker has pushed the boundaries of his chosen media to the extent that his recorded tracks belong more to the aesthetic sphere of fixed art forms such as films rather than performance-oriented forms such as music as it is traditionally categorized among the liberal arts. In the same manner that Sergei Eisenstein and Orson Welles abandoned the rules of theatrical formalism to create works native to the cinematic medium itself, Walker has likewise approached his work in recording studios as a Phonographic Auteur. To abstract Walker's works by discussing them as "songs" detached from their recorded "track" form would be as detrimental to their analysis as would the discussion of <i>Citizen Kane</i> outside of the form language of the cinema. As deconstructions of the binary opposition between track and song the problems surrounding the analysis of Walker's post-1978 works are largely those confronting the analysis of Euro-American popular music that arise from its troublesome relationship with the recorded format. Further, Walker's career evidences how a number of artists in Euro-american contexts have come to regard the recorded, studio intensive format of music as a solution to the problems they are confronted within the the modern public concert spectacle. In doing so these individuals have given birth to a burgeoning autonomous art form, and by extension, a new model of the composer-listener-performer dynamic.</p>

<p> The concept of emergence, and/or emergent properties, is one that has gained resurgence within the realm of various branches of science and the humanities. Emergence is an idea that explains to/for us how dynamical systems, complexes of elements, bodies, and even concepts, begin to exhibit properties and behaviors that are at least seemingly greater than the sum of their parts- how irreducible, novel, complexities arise from constructs of fundamental entities. I argue that in some music of 20th and 21st century American experimentalists, we have music that is under-theorized and lacking in an appropriate contextualization in regards to emergent properties within music. I claim that a careful distinction between indeterminate forms and emergent properties is needed to further develop how we think about these works, and examine them in light of more recent philosophical and aesthetic developments. This paper does not aim to lay out a fully ontology or metaphysics of what emergence is in general, but rather works towards a working definition of a kind of emergence present within the music of various American experimental composers (John Bischoff, Tim Perkis, Chris Brown, David Tudor), and how to apply such a definition of emergence to an aesthetic framework of understanding live electronic music.</p><p>

In recent decades, the pianism of Robert Schumann's compositions has increasingly gained recognition. What was previously seen as dense and mid-keyboard centric is now recognised as ground-breaking in terms of sonorous invention, informed by an intimate understanding of the instrument and its playing techniques. Yet, as pianist Schumann has received little credit, primarily due to a short-lived and relatively unsuccessful career. This thesis aims to explore this seeming paradox. I shall argue that Schumann developed rarely discussed concepts of imagined sound and tactile feedback during his days as aspiring pianist (1828-1831), and that these became integral to the pianistic style of his earliest published compositions. Following a general overview of the historical and biographical contexts for this study, I will trace Schumann's piano practice to establish his overall artistic aims and the primacy of sonority in this regard. This leads to an investigation of his ideals of tone to locate Schumann within prevailing schools of piano playing and of piano making around 1830. Acknowledging his comprehension of playing mechanics, I observe that during an 1831 crisis which preceded his much-debated hand injury, his technique suffered from a series of insurmountable issues relating to the right hand. Disabled as performer, Schumann realised his virtuoso aspirations in his capacity as composer. Two case studies featuring the Abegg Variations op. 1 and Papillons op. 2 demonstrate his use of sound-audible and imagined-to elevate the mechanical virtuosity of piano playing into a virtuosity of the imagination. Not only does this demonstrate a transfer of sound concepts from performance to composition; it offers a timely reassessment of Schumann's pianistic merits and presents new interpretational paths for future performances of his piano music.

Live music has the ability to unite individuals and affect them on both cognitive and emotional levels. Its time-honored tradition remains the true test of a musical work?s strength and longevity. Electronic music in particular has had some difficulty in establishing well-formed performance practices in its relatively short life span. The problem may not be one of sonic, but rather visual inhibition and general discontinuities between the audience and performers. In this paper I raise three questions of aesthetic value concerning live performance. Why do we go to live musical performances? How do we perceive sound? How do we correlate physical gestures? To answer, I make observations on selected works spanning the continuum of the field.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Boston University, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 283-293).

Critical review of performance is today one of the most common professional and commercial forms of music written response. Despite the availability of representative material and its impact on musicians' careers, there has been little structured enquiry into the way music critics make sense of their experience of performances, and no studies have to date broached the key question of how music performance is reviewed by experts. Adopting an explorative, inductive approach and a novel combination of data reduction and thematic analysis techniques, this thesis presents a systematic investigation of a vast corpus of recorded performance critical reviews. First, reviews of Beethoven's piano sonata recordings (N = 845) published in the Gramophone (1923-2010) were collected and metadata and word-stem patterns were analysed (Chapters 3 and 4) to offer insights on repertoire, pianists and critics involved and to produce a representative selection (n = 100) of reviews suitable for subsequent thematic analyses. Inductive thematic analyses, including a key-word-in-context analysis on 'expression' (Chapter 5), were then used to identify performance features (primary and supervenient) and extra-performance elements critics discuss, as well as reasons they use to support their value judgements. This led to a novel descriptive model of critical review of recorded performance (Chapters 6, 7, and 8). The model captures four critical activities - evaluation, descriptive judgement, factual information and meta-criticism - and seven basic evaluation criteria on the aesthetic and achievement-related value of performance reliably used by critics, plus two recording-specific criteria: live-performance impact and collectability. Critical review emerges as a highly dense form of writing, rich in information and open to diverse analytical approaches. Insights gained throughout the thesis inform current discourses in philosophy of art and open new perspectives for empirical music research. They emphasise the importance of the comparative element in performance evaluation, the complexity and potentially misleading nature of the notion of 'expression' in the musical discourse, and the role of critics as filters of choice in the recording market. Foremost, they further our understanding of the nature of music performance criticism as a form of reasoned evaluation that is complex, contextual and listener specific.

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.