<p>This thesis examines aesthetics, sonic characteristics, and performance practices of zydeco music as heard in south Louisiana today. The first chapter describes the roles of instruments in a zydeco band, focusing specifically on the importance of the kick drum and the snare drum. It also details the evolution of the modern zydeco sound and how certain instruments, their modifications, and their timbres came to characterize the style especially prevalent among a group of artists who play for zydeco trail rides. The second chapter examines the tempo of modern zydeco music through quantitative analysis of musical recordings. This chapter also elucidates the use of beat patterns and drumming techniques within the genre, providing evidence for a current preference for the boogaloo beat over the on-the-one and the double beats. The third chapter discusses sonic goals and values of the sound engineer in zydeco music in live performance. This chapter also includes analysis of the frequency spectrum profiles of live zydeco recordings which depict how sound reinforcement practices, instrument modifications, and playing techniques discussed in the thesis are manifested in these performances. Research methods employed for this thesis include interviews with zydeco musicians, empirical analysis of live musical recordings, and examination of spectrograms.

<p> Mozart&rsquo;s concert aria <i>Ch&rsquo;io mi scordi di te</i> K. 505 bridges the genres of piano concerto and opera seria aria by combining elements of sonata rondo, sonata concerto, and ritornello. Mozart&rsquo;s experimentation with Classical form emerging in the late eighteenth-century is characterized by unique transitions and retransitions, surprising modulations to secondary keys, and polarization of tonic and dominant tonalities. K. 505, a two-tempo rondo for soprano with piano obbligato, is the only one of its type in Mozart&rsquo;s oeuvre and shares many of the same ritornello form and dialogue between the soloist and the orchestra found in Mozart&rsquo;s piano concerti. Composed as a duet for himself, an accomplished pianist, and his close friend Nancy Storace, a highly regarded opera singer, as part of her farewell concert in Vienna, K. 505 highlights their virtuosic abilities celebrating artistic kinship. </p><p> After establishing the historic contexts for its composition, this study applies the theories and models developed by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy (2006), Martha Feldman and Rosa Cafiero (1993), John Irving (2003), and Simon P. Keefe (2001) in order to analyze K. 505 as a work in a composite genre utilizing compositional techniques later associated with more conventional applications of sonata-form. K. 505 is one of several compositions rooted in Mozart&rsquo;s tonally adventurous <i>Idomeneo</i> (1781/1786). An analytical comparison of K. 505 with related works&mdash;the concert aria <i> Non piu tutto ascoltai&hellip;non temer amato bene</i> K. 490 for soprano and violin obbligato, a replacement aria in the revised <i>Idomeneo</i> (1786) and the Viennese piano concerto no. 25 in C Major K. 503 (1786) demonstrate how Mozart&rsquo;s syncretic genres played a part in the creation and expansion of the maturing conventions of sonata-form in the late eighteenth-century. </p><p>

<p> This study presents a detailed analytical examination of formal organization in Anton Bruckner&rsquo;s early instrumental slow movements: from the String Quartet, WAB 111, to the Third Symphony, WAB 103. It proposes an analytical methodology and conception of the formative process of musical works that seeks to 1) reappraise the development and idiosyncrasies of his slow movements&rsquo; form, and 2) turn the textual multiplicity often associated with Bruckner&rsquo;s large-scale works (a scholarly issue often referred to as the &ldquo;Bruckner Problem&rdquo;) into a Bruckner Potential.</p><p> In addressing traditional and innovative formal aspects of Bruckner&rsquo;s music, critics have tended to overemphasize one side or the other, consequentially portraying his handling of form as either whimsical or excessively schematic. By way of a reconstruction of Bruckner&rsquo;s early experiments with slow-movement form (1862&ndash;1873), this study argues that influential lines of criticism in the reception history of Bruckner&rsquo;s large-scale forms find little substantiation in the acoustical surface of Bruckner&rsquo;s music and its dialogic engagement with mid- and late-19th-century generic expectations. </p><p> Because the textual multiplicity often associated with Bruckner&rsquo;s works does not sit comfortably with traditional notions of authenticity and authorship, Bruckner scholarship has operated under aesthetic premises that fail to acknowledge textual multiplicity as a basic trait of his oeuvre. The present study circumvents this shortcoming by conceiving formal-expressive meaning in Bruckner&rsquo;s symphonies as growing out of a dual-dimensional dialogue comprising 1) an <i>outward dialogue,</i> characterized by the interplay between a given version of a Bruckner symphony and its implied genre (in this case, sonata form); and 2) an <i>inward dialogue,</i> characterized by the interplay among the various individualized realizations of a single Bruckner symphony. The analytical method is exemplified through a detailed consideration of each of the surviving realizations of the slow movement of Bruckner&rsquo;s Third Symphony, WAB 103.</p><p>