Title from accompanying document. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

"Little Black slave child" : operatic expressions of Black cultural trauma from William Grant Still's A troubled island and A bayou legend: Introduction -- From Troubled island (1939). Little black slave child ; 'Tis sunset in the garden -- From A bayou legend. In ages past ; Now they will be coming to the tree -- Lecture. / text

Dichterliebe : op. 48 / Robert Schumann -- Paris / Cesar Franck -- Gianni Schicchi. Avete torto! ; Firenze e come un albero fiorito / Giacomo Puccini -- Suite Espanola / Agustin Lara -- On the town. New York, New York / Leonard Bernstein -- The holy city / Michael Maybrick. / text

Title from accompanying document. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Title from accompanying document. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Act one of The Metamorphosis is based on the novella by Franza Kafka of the same title. In the writing of the act, George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill and Oliver Knussen's Where the Wild Things Are provide a model of using musical material as a storytelling device. Benjamin emphasizes the parallel nature of Crimp's text through the manipulation of similar music between the acts. Knussen uses form and color to emphasize Max's childlike energy and his desire to return home. In act one of The Metamorphosis these approaches are combined to enhance Kafka's absurd narrative through a rapid collage of texture and form that is influenced by both events and characters in the opera.

There is no abstract available for this dissertation. / School of Music

This anthology of late 19th- and early 20th-century Czech opera arias for soprano focuses on works that lack existing scholarship, bridging the language gap through translations and pronunciation materials for English-speaking singers. Its 24 arias supplement the works of Smetana, Dvořák, and Janáček with those of contemporaneous composers Karel Bendl, Zdeněk Fibich, Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Karel Kovařovic, Vítězslav Novák, and Otakar Ostrčil. Its musicological scope provides vignettes of the musical-cultural landscape of Czech opera around the turn of the 20th century, the transformation of Czech declamation during that period, and the language knowledge needed to sing the works thereof. Chapter 2 elucidates the methodology used in the anthology's phonetic transcriptions and discusses the unique articulatory demands of singing in Czech. Chapter 3 grounds contemporaneous discussion of Czech declamation as late 19th- and early 20th-century composers and librettists sought to shape a musical voice suited to the features of their language. The following chapter is a look at Janáček's unique solution to this challenge. In Chapter 5, the relationship between criticism and composition is examined for these two faces of Czech modernism. Finally, Chapter 6 includes new performance editions of the arias curated for the anthology. Each aria is accompanied by an idiomatic translation, an inline phonetic transcription and word-for-word translation, a brief biographical introduction of the composer, and background information contextualizing the aria and the work from which it is derived. The objective of the anthology is to facilitate a broader range of well-informed performances of Czech repertoire as well as the acquisition of Czech lyric diction for singers at various experience levels.