Thesis (Ph. D.)--Auburn University. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-101).

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on March 1, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Dissertation advisor: Dr. Wendy Sims. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 281-285). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Diss.--Würzburg--Phil. Fak., 1998/99. / Description, analyse critique et édition du manuscrit conservé à Vérone, à la Biblioteca Capitolare (Ms. MCXXVIII). Bibliogr. p. 59-105 (t.2). Index.

Este trabalho estuda a obra de Itamar Assumpção, investigando os principais procedimentos de composição musical utilizados, bem como a relação que possuem com suas vivências pessoais de aprendizagem musical e teatral. Sua obra promove algumas sínteses de materiais musicais e poéticos da tradição popular brasileira e internacional, referencias que são reelaboradas no processo de criação de suas canções. São demonstradas e analisadas a confluência e a atrelagem que existe entre a ação da performance e oito matrizes composicionais identificadas ao longo das diferentes fases de sua obra. / This paper studies the music of Itamar Assumpção, exploring not only the compositional procedures employed, but also their relation to the artist\'s musical and theatrical life experiences. Assumpção\'s work harmonizes musical and poetic material from the Brazilian and international popular tradition, a synthesis that is reconstructed in the process of songwriting. This paper demonstrates and analyzes the confluence and interconnection between the act of performance and eight compositional structures identified throughout different phases of his work.

From the mid nineteenth century onwards, musical form has primarily been defined in terms of predetermined paradigms, which ostensibly provide a framework for hierarchically ordered materials. Despite its pervasive presence in theoretical literature, however, this Formenlehre tradition is not universal in musical thought. Since antiquity, theorists have resorted to images of dynamism, change, process, energy, intensity, and narration to denote a more elastic conception of (musical) form. However, most of them – such as, for instance, Kurth, Asaf’yev, or Maus – have not recognised that it is ultimately performers – not composers – who individually shape musical materials on the basis of the structural relations that they perceive within the music and then project in performance. This dissertation explores how such apparent incompatibility between theory and practice might be bridged. To that aim, the first part discusses how ‘dynamic’ notions of musical form might realise their full explanatory potential by accounting for the reality of performance. It also reviews previous investigations of performers’ strategies to project their structural understandings of musical works, with a special focus on their handling of timing, dynamics, articulation, intonation, and timbre. Using recorded interpretations of Brahms’s Cello Sonatas as sources for three case studies, the second part evaluates dynamic ideas of musical form from an analytical viewpoint. Through their personal approaches to these works, I show how select performers create a wide range of structural connections, which are never alike across their different recordings. Likewise, these performers neither resort to the same parameters nor ‘shape’ the select movements in the same manner or with the same intensity. I ultimately posit that musical structure is inferred, created, and experienced in a unique way on every occasion a given piece is performed – and also whenever it is composed, analysed, or listened to. This research does not dismiss music theory as having no explanatory potential in the investigation of abstract notions such as musical structure as we sense them in performance. Rather, it aims to contribute to the dialogue between theory and practice by showing how, and why, music theory should reconceptualise musical form as a set of possibilities affording multiple choices and interpretations, that is to say, as a ‘multiverse’ that emerges across time and in sound.

Este trabalho estuda a obra de Itamar Assumpção, investigando os principais procedimentos de composição musical utilizados, bem como a relação que possuem com suas vivências pessoais de aprendizagem musical e teatral. Sua obra promove algumas sínteses de materiais musicais e poéticos da tradição popular brasileira e internacional, referencias que são reelaboradas no processo de criação de suas canções. São demonstradas e analisadas a confluência e a atrelagem que existe entre a ação da performance e oito matrizes composicionais identificadas ao longo das diferentes fases de sua obra. / This paper studies the music of Itamar Assumpção, exploring not only the compositional procedures employed, but also their relation to the artist\'s musical and theatrical life experiences. Assumpção\'s work harmonizes musical and poetic material from the Brazilian and international popular tradition, a synthesis that is reconstructed in the process of songwriting. This paper demonstrates and analyzes the confluence and interconnection between the act of performance and eight compositional structures identified throughout different phases of his work.

Humans are a musical species and every culture has its music. However, twenty individuals out of a cohort of twenty-nine participants in this study judged themselves to be 'not musical'. Through their words, silences and responses, the story of music in the lives of these self-perceived non-musicians uncovered a musical world where concepts of performance, judgment and talent dominate. My investigation into individuals' perceptions of their musicality revealed a pervasive societal belief that individuals were either born 'musical' or they were not; their everyday reality was one where music was perceived as a performance, an object, something that only talented people can 'do'. I planned conversations with participants that aimed to reveal clues that could help to unravel a paradox that lies within music in our Western culture: every young human is intrinsically musical but only some are born with a gift to be musical. Participant convictions that they were not musical deterred some individuals from active engagement in music making. They felt as if they had been left out of the 'musical ballpark'. Details from conversations illustrated a constricting cultural imposition on individuals; this was perpetuated in many schools and also in private music teaching. Data revealed that current educational practice contributed to a denial of a natural birthright and alienated some individuals from being part of a musical community. As their stories revealed failed attempts to engage in music making, iterative contacts created a daunting quantity of data. But there was poetry in participant data. These self-perceived non-musicians simultaneously demonstrated their musicality in the rhythms of their narrative as they denied that they were musical; this emerged as a means to report the research whereby participants' words combined to tell a non-musician's tale. Compelling narrative revealed a society where educational practice does little to address individual musical development. While each story alone was specific and complex, once the stories became woven together as a complex and contradictory whole, the ballad of the never picked captured the essence of a distanced musicality in our Western society. Narrative drove towards meaning. Through interpretation and detailed qualitative analysis, understandings began to emerge from depths of experience and from friction existing within contradictions. Deep within narrative which evolved over a period of five years were perceptions that led to understandings of our cultural reality. Active involvement in this research became part of an emancipatory process for several participants where mutually reflective acts exposed unnecessary impositions from societal expectations. Participant voices uncover a bifurcated reality wherein the musical development of many individuals is undermined through an ignorance of holistic human potential; this musical-unmusical divide is perpetuated in educational practice.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1992. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [246]-256).