published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Arts

<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>

Bibliography: leaves 206-220.

This dissertation examines the symphony in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France by way of individual chapters on the period's seven most influential and frequently performed works: Camille Saint-Saens's Third Symphony (1885-86), Cesar Franck's Symphony in D minor (1887-88), Edouard Lalo's Symphony in G minor (1886), Vincent d'Indy's Symphonie sur un chant montagnard franrcais (1886) and Second Symphony (1902-03), Ernest Chausson's Symphony in B-flat (1890), and Paul Dukas's Symphony in C (1896). Beethoven established the primary paradigm for these works in his Third, Fifth; and Ninth Symphonies, and the principal historical issue I address is how French composers reconciled this paradigm with their own aesthetic priorities within the musical and cultural climate of fin-de-siecle France. / Previous critics have viewed this repertoire primarily with limited structuralist methodologies. The results have often been unhappy: all of these symphonies are in some ways formally idiosyncratic and individual, and their non-conforming aspects have tended to puzzle or disappoint. My study draws on recent methods developed by Warren Darcy, Scott Burnham, and others that emphasize the dynamic and teleological qualities of musical form. This more supple approach allows a fuller appreciation of the subtle and sophisticated ways in which individual works unfold formally, and the spectrum of procedures French composers employed. / My study demonstrates that the factors shaping the French symphony in this period included imperatives of progress as well as the popularity of the symphonic poem. Some of the earlier symphonists covered in this study also felt the need to confront Wagner's influential theoretical writings: mid -century he had famously proclaimed the death of the symphony. As many writers have argued, the archetypal heroic "plot" that Beethoven's symphonies express embodies the subject-laden values---notions of individual freedom and faith in the self---that prevailed in his time. Different inflections of this plot by French symphonists, I argue, reflect the variegated ways fin-de-siec1e French culture had received these values.

<p> Dr. Charles Hirt and the Department of Church and Choral Music at the University of Southern California (USC) produced some of America's most successful choral conductors and administrators. Many of those students are conducting or administrating at the finest colleges and universities, secondary schools, churches, and community choral organizations in the nation. From the earliest moments of his career, Charles Hirt himself received a seemingly endless string of accolades. Always focused on the betterment and future of the choral arts, he was a "founding father" of significant choral organizations such as the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA), Choral Conductors Guild of California, and the International Federation of Choral Music. It was also his visionary mindset that served as a hallmark of his tenure at USC and arguably earned him the right to stand as an equal alongside the greatest of American choral conductors. </p><p> It is the aim of this study to examine Hirt's significant contributions to the University of Southern California and his legacy as it continues on in his students and the subsequent generation of choral leaders they generated. </p>

This thesis has supplied source material and critical knowledge in the area of indigenous African music. It has explored veins common to the Afro-American and to his musical culture and has drawn comparisons between this culture and his African heritage. The first eight chapters offer information on tone language-speech melody, function, dance, rhythm, melody, harmony-polyphony, formhomogeneity and instruments, respectively. The ninth chapter is a transference of the African to white American with the intent of supplying a foundation for a wiser understanding of the contemporary black American, his subculture and his cultural contributions. The last chapter offers guidelines for the implementation of the previous material on the elementary, high school general, and high school music major levels. The appendices furnish bibliographical and pictorial information as a supplement.

Among the Dahomey of West Africa, the spirit Legba presides over all transitions, and African-American blues and jazz musicians can be considered his "children," or followers, since their music provides a link between the physical and spiritual worlds, the past and the present, and between cultures. Chapter one provides a cross-cultural perspective on the role of the musician in various societies, with the emphasis on Western Europe and West Africa, including a description of the special status of female musicians. Chapter two considers how the derogatory stereotypes of black musicians created by the nineteenth-century minstrel show allowed performers to cross the racial, sexual, and class boundaries of American society. Only if we recognize the paradox of freedom offered by this vestige of slavery will we be able to make sense of the fact that black performers adapted the minstrel roles after the Civil War. The third chapter describes the social role of the black musician of the jazz age, beginning with the controversy surrounding jazz in the early twenties, and tracing the survival of African musical practices and beliefs in jazz and the blues. The careers of many musicians are analyzed to demonstrate the range of opportunities open to black performers in the period. Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown wrote poetry inspired by the blues, adopting the persona of the musician in order to speak with an authentic folk voice. Chapter four considers how musicians are represented in their writing and compares their blues poems to the recordings of contemporary blues performers. The great jazz musicians of the twenties and thirties fired the imaginations of many modern African-American writers by providing a living link to African spiritual traditions and a new model of what history can be when it breaks free from the academy. Chapter five examines the representations of blues and jazz musicians in novels by Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed, showing that all three writers assume the role of improvising historian by adapting the narrative techniques of the West African griot and the repetition with variation of the jazz musician.

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