Contemporary repertoire is not commonly taught or explored by teachers during the intermediate level, when a student's musical training is transitioning to an advanced level. Nonetheless, it is important for piano instructors to be open-minded about contemporary music and have some perspective on the development of music repertoire in the future. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a performance and pedagogical guide to Stephen Chatman's (b. 1950) Fantasies, from both technical and artistic viewpoints. The collection, which consists of eleven pieces, features a wide variety of contemporary idioms, styles, and means of notation. For instance, there are jazz-like syncopated rhythms, asymmetrical accents reminiscent of Primitivism, and Impressionistic or dissonant sonorities. Fantasies is not only a valuable tool for students to explore new sounds and improve their performing techniques while executing nontraditional notations and contemporary idioms, it is also a great teaching resource for instructors to promote students' musicality through hearing, seeing, and thinking. In this study, I provide individual, detailed descriptions for each of the pieces in the score, adding examples on how to address the difficulties they present to the performer. As a result, instructors can better understand how to help students prepare to perform this collection and spark their interest in playing contemporary music.

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Founded in 1967, the Amsterdam-based improvising collective the Instant Composers Pool is one of the longest consistently performing groups in improvised music. This thesis forms an ethnography and musicological study of the ICP Orchestra, which originated when the "pool" developed a more coherent line-up around 1980. With a background in experimental music as well as free jazz, their performance practice differs in many respects from the practices of American forms of jazz. Whereas most accounts of improvisation emphasise orality and creative interaction in opposition to the performance of composed music, 'instant composition' defines improvisation precisely in terms of compositional thinking. Moreover, founding member and orchestra leader Misha Mengelberg composed a very diverse repertoire for the group which draws on styles from Duke Ellington to John Cage and uses various forms of compositional and notational techniques to explore the different improvisatory possibilities that they afford, thus blurring the distinction between improvisation and composition both in name and in practice. Apart from a detailed historical and ethnographic description of a group that is central to a genre that has been underrepresented in music-historical research, this thesis investigates the repertoire of the ICP and its use as an opportunity to reconsider the relation between musical text and performance. Drawing on my observations and interviews with the musicians, and connecting these to theories of material culture and science and technology studies, it develops a concept of compositions as animated and animating objects in performance, tools and materials that participate in the creative interactive process of improvised performance rather than textual representations of 'the music itself'. I substantiate this theory with detailed descriptions of ICP performances recorded during fieldwork. This contributes to a rethinking of musical notation and simultaneously brings new insights into improvisation as a creative practice.

Ce travail a pour but principal de répondre à certaines difficultés de notation rencontrées par les compositeurs. Dans un premier temps, nous nous se proposons de montrer les limites du système d’écriture musicale occidentale (SEMO) dans la notation de certains éléments de la musique et, dans un deuxième temps, de montrer les avantages qu’offre l’utilisation de l’écriture multimédia (EM). Les résultats de ce travail, obtenus à partir de six « expériences-projets de composition », montrent l’efficacité de l’EM : un ensemble de procédés qui permettent l'utilisation simultanée de plusieurs modes de représentation de l'information (tels que textes, sons, images fixes ou animées, entre autres), servant à noter un message afin de pouvoir le conserver et le transmettre du compositeur à l’interprète. Dans le cadre de la composition musicale, l’EM, telle que nous l’avons employée ici, s’est montrée efficace pour noter les éléments suivants : le timbre, des nouveaux modes de jeu, des nouvelles techniques vocales, des instructions pour l’emploi des logiciels ; et aussi l’EM s’est montrée efficace pour l’intégration des éléments suivants dans les œuvres de musique mixte : le jeu d’un musicien de tradition orale, des modes de jeu tirés des musiques de tradition orale et exécutés par un musicien de tradition écrite, une langue tonale (et l’expressivité liée aux genres de musique de tradition orale dans les œuvres écrites. À l’ensemble de notations multimédia déjà existantes et disponibles pour la composition musicale, nous ajoutons deux types de notation qui se sont révélés efficaces dans cette recherche : la notation auditive et la notation d’un savoir-faire au moyen de la vidéo. / The main goal of this work is to solve some of the difficulties that composers encounter when notating music. Firstly, we describe how the Western musical notation (WMN) is limited when attempting to write specific musical elements. Secondly, we show the possible advantages that multimedia writing (MW) could offer on the notation of such elements. To address these issues, we used MW in six “experiments/composition projects” that were conceived to answer specific notation questions. The results obtained thereof allowed us to demonstrate the efficacy of MW for overcoming current limitations in music notation. More specifically, MW constitutes a group of procedures that allows to simultaneously represent information in different ways. This information could be either text, sounds, still or moving images, among others. Such procedures can be used to note down a message to further save it and transfer it from the composer to the performer. In the context of our experimental paradigms, MW has proven to be efficient for: the notation of timber, the integration of musicians from oral tradition in mixed music works, the incorporation of instrumental techniques drawn from oral tradition music into written music, the integration of a tonal language in a music score, the notation of new instrumental and vocal techniques, the guidance at using new software, and the incorporation of expressiveness associated to music styles of oral tradition into written works. We consider that two types of notation that proved to be efficient in this research could be added to the body of already existing MW, namely auditive notation and the notation of a know-how by the means of video.

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is the field of computationally reading music notation. This thesis presents, in the form of dissertation by publication, contributions to the theory, resources, and methods of OMR especially for handwritten notation. The main contributions are (1) the Music Notation Graph (MuNG) formalism for describing arbitrarily complex music notation using an oriented graph that can be unambiguously interpreted in terms of musical semantics, (2) the MUSCIMA++ dataset of musical manuscripts with MuNG as ground truth that can be used to train and evaluate OMR systems and subsystems from the image all the way to extracting the musical semantics encoded therein, and (3) a pipeline for performing OMR on musical manuscripts that relies on machine learning both for notation symbol detection and the notation assembly stage, and on properties of the inferred MuNG representation to deterministically extract the musical semantics. While the the OMR pipeline does not perform flawlessly, this is the first OMR system to perform at basic useful tasks over musical semantics extracted from handwritten music notation of arbitrary complexity.

This dissertation aims to address the pedagogical gap in introductory material for contemporary clarinet instruction. Through examining the most prominent contemporary methods for the clarinet, the pedagogical gap is highlighted, particularly regarding material aimed at newcomers and early undergraduate students. To address these needs, a new collection of etudes is proposed, introducing extended techniques and contemporary notation for newcomers to modern music.

A constantly growing corpus of interdisciplinary studies support the idea that music is a complex multimodal medium that is experienced not only by means of sounds but also through body movement. From this perspective, musical instruments can be seen as technological objects coupled with a repertoire of performance gestures. This repertoire is part of an ecological knowledge shared by musicians and listeners alike. It is part of the engine that guides musical experience and has a considerable expressive potential. This thesis explores technical and conceptual issues related to the analysis and creative use of music-related body movements in instrumental music performance. The complexity of this subject required an interdisciplinary approach, which includes the review of multiple theoretical accounts, quantitative and qualitative analysis of data collected in motion capture laboratories, the development and implementation of technologies for the interpretation and interactive use of motion data, and the creation of short musical pieces that actively employ the movement of the performers as an expressive musical feature. The theoretical framework is informed by embodied and enactive accounts of music cognition as well as by systematic studies of music-related movement and expressive music performance. The assumption that the movements of a musician are part of a shared knowledge is empirically explored through an experiment aimed at analysing the motion capture data of a violinist performing a selection of short musical excerpts. A group of subjects with no prior experience playing the violin is then asked to mime a performance following the audio excerpts recorded by the violinist. Motion data is recorded, analysed, and compared with the expert’s data. This is done both quantitatively through data analysis xii as well as qualitatively by relating the motion data to other high-level features and structures of the musical excerpts. Solutions to issues regarding capturing and storing movement data and its use in real-time scenarios are proposed. For the interactive use of motion-sensing technologies in music performance, various wearable sensors have been employed, along with different approaches for mapping control data to sound synthesis and signal processing parameters. In particular, novel approaches for the extraction of meaningful features from raw sensor data and the use of machine learning techniques for mapping movement to live electronics are described. To complete the framework, an essential element of this research project is the com- position and performance of études that explore the creative use of body movement in instrumental music from a Practice-as-Research perspective. This works as a test bed for the proposed concepts and techniques. Mapping concepts and technologies are challenged in a scenario constrained by the use of musical instruments, and different mapping ap- proaches are implemented and compared. In addition, techniques for notating movement in the score, and the impact of interactive motion sensor systems in instrumental music practice from the performer’s perspective are discussed. Finally, the chapter concluding the part of the thesis dedicated to practical implementations describes a novel method for mapping movement data to sound synthesis. This technique is based on the analysis of multimodal motion data collected from multiple subjects and its design draws from the theoretical, analytical, and practical works described throughout the dissertation. Overall, the parts and the diverse approaches that constitute this thesis work in synergy, contributing to the ongoing discourses on the study of musical gestures and the design of interactive music systems from multiple angles.