Gena Branscombe (1881–1977) was a Canadian American pianist, composer, conductor, educator, and advocate for music by women and American composers. In her day, she was well-known as a conductor of her own works and regularly performed the music of her contemporaries with her all-women’s chorus, the Branscombe Choral. Although she published hundreds of pieces for piano, voice, violin, orchestra, and mixed voices—among them the 1929 choral drama Pilgrims of Destiny—Branscombe’s music was largely forgotten in the mid- to late-twentieth century amidst a cultural moment in the arts that was dominated by men, those of European descent or training, and post-tonal compositional trends. This research project aims to revive Branscombe’s life, legacy, and music by examining her songs for voice and piano, both tracing their compositional development and suggesting song sets appropriate for recital performance. The paper analyzes dozens of original manuscripts, describes connections between texts and their musical settings, and explores Branscombe’s artistic purpose through her own words, from speeches given at various club meetings to letters written to her publishers. In these materials is revealed an incredible woman who was wrongfully lost to American classical music, a woman who deserves to be reintroduced to the music classroom and to the performance stage.

This dissertation argues for increased scholarly engagement with “vernacular musical knowledge,” or VMK, as a methodological possibility for the burgeoning music-theoretical study of musical theater. I define VMK as a generalist term: it exists for every type of music, both contemporary and historical, and is musical knowledge that is held by (and informally passes between) practitioners within a musical community. This project primarily engages with the VMK of musical theater practitioners in New York City, as part of the Broadway theater community. This study offers a route for musical theoretical inquiry of musical theater that avoids introducing the common problematics that emerge from applying conventional music theory and its analytical techniques to musical theater repertoire. A detailed look at extant music theory literature, both considering musical theater topics and also concerning the pedagogy of music theory for musical theater musicians-in-training, reveals assumptions that often undermine arguments or arrive at misguided conclusions due to a basic incompatibility with the compositional realities of music for musical theater. In particular, this project investigates the socalled “work concept” that pervades western (classical) musical thought and identifies the ways in which it is not entirely applicable to musical theater shows. The latter portion of the project both exhibits the VMK of a sample of musical theater practitioners from New York City and provides an example of the type of scholarship that can emerge from scholarly engagement with such VMK. Investigating how contemporary Broadway music arrangers have influenced modern audiences’ perceptions of the classic “Broadway sound” through their ongoing re-creative work, it becomes clear that (1) the “sound” of so-called “Golden-Era” Broadway music is often an ahistorical fabrication, and that (2) the analysis of this music benefits greatly from the elucidation of musical creatives’ goals and viewpoints, without which one would reach very different analytical conclusions. This project demands critical engagement with the normative methodologies in music theory, especially when those methodologies are applied to popular music styles (and, in particular, musical theater). I argue that the scholarly inclusion of vernacular musical knowledge offers an alternative approach for the next generation of theorists studying musical theater.

This thesis studies the effect of the difference of felt emotion versus expressed emotion on the rate of annoyance in western popular music. It consists of four experiments, the first of which looks at the general effect of the music and change of emotions. The second experiment looks at the effect of lyrics in songs on annoyance, the third at modality and loop type, and the fourth on rhythmic complexity. There is evidence found that points to a difference in felt versus expressed anger predicts an increase in the annoyance rating. The effect of the difference in happy ratings is not as consistent and depends on the song. Familiarity of the song had a slight effect on lowering the annoyance rating. Lyrics, modality, and loop type do not have a main effect on the rate of annoyance. The combination of faster tempos and simpler rhythms reduced annoyance ratings.

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The problem of this study is to set forth some principles of teaching beginning music theory in Texas colleges; to survey and evaluate critically a sampling of standard theory textbooks basing the evaluation on the principles outlined; and to recommend a methodology for teaching beginning college theory.

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This study proposes temporal referentiality—roughly defined as the orientation of substance in its temporal medium—as a theoretical and analytical framework for musical form. Operating on the principle of music as a temporally extended entity, this thesis explores the connections that occur between substance across its medium, suggests an additional interpretation of medium connections (temporality) in terms of language tense, and examines substance connections (referentiality) through different types of filtering. I also propose a means for visual and literary interpretation of temporal referentiality, depicting a network of substance relationships established over a piece’s timespace. Analysis of this type assumes a listener’s complete familiarity with the substance in its temporal boundaries. Visual representations portray the amount and strength of future- and past-oriented musical substance at a given point in time, including which sections are connected to one another (medium connection) and which variables or features of sameness are responsible for this connection (substance connection). Employing an analogy between orientation and tense, it also becomes feasible to construct a “model prose composition” with the same temporal referentiality as a piece of music. Finally, a system of filtering serves to isolate portions of medium and substance and to clarify what elements are responsible for the elusive concept of “sameness.” The possibilities for temporal reference analysis are applied to the first movements of Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet and Brahms’s Violin Concerto, as well as Bach’s Contrapunctus #9 from The Art of Fugue and the Variations movement of Webern’s Symphony op. 21.

Many incoming students have studied piano prior to entering college and receive much of their theory training through music study with a piano teacher. The National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) designed a website page for potential students to answer the question, "How should I best prepare to enter a conservatory, college, university as a music major?" Theoretical concepts they suggest can be grouped into three main categories: Basic Music Theory Rudiments, Ear-Training Skills, and Form and Harmony. This research examines five piano theory method books (Alfred Premier Piano Course, Bastien Piano Basics, Faber Piano Adventures, Harris Celebrate Piano!, and Kjos Fundamentals of Piano Theory) to assess their effectiveness in presenting the theoretical concepts NASM recommends they should know. The five books used for this study provide a basic foundation for many of the concepts undergraduates will be expected to know as they enter college theory courses.

How forgivable is a musicological text on deconstruction two decades after its assimilation by the other "humanities" disciplines? Moreover, how forgivable is a discipline as a whole which has allowed one of the most challenging aspects of post-war critical theory to pass it by to this extent? In no other field are Laing's remarks more likely to resonate today than that of critical musicology. Even the adoption of the critical epithet itself is a relatively recent phenomenon. However, it is indicative of an emergent desire for musicology to finally engage with contemporary critical discourse in general. Such a call has been made from "outside" the profession by cultural critic Edward Said, who calls for an end to "the generally cloistral and reverential, not to say deeply insular, habits in writing about music." [Musical Flaborations, p.58] From "within" the field, Susan McClary laments that the crucial critical debates are "almost entirely absent from traditional musicology." [Feminine Endings, p.54] Likewise, what is increasingly unforgivable according to Ruth Solie is "our customary methodological behindhandedness [sic]" [Musicology & Difference, p.3]. Various routes away from the methodological backwaters have been suggested. For instance, in a conference paper in 1984, Richard Middleton defined a twofold approach which appears to combine aspects of structuralism and Marxism. Middleton called firstly for a move in to "semiology, broadly defined and stressing the social situation of signifying practise: this should take over from traditional formal analysis." [quoted in Shepherd, Music as Social Text, p.209] Secondly, this should be supplemented with an "historical sociology of the whole musical field, stressing critical comparison of divergent sub-codes of the 'common musical competence': this should take over from liberal social histories of music" [ibid., p.209] As a method for introducing this new musicological mode, Middleton recommends the inclusion of popular music as a field of study. Indeed, his implication is that such a challenge to the classical hegemony would naturally entail a move towards this twofold approach, and would by itself open up "a golden opportunity to develop a critical musicology" [Studying Popular Music, p.123]. In this sense, an expansion of the field of study could lead to a necessary adoption of new methodologies.