Includes bibliographical references / Philip Glass is best known for his role in the establishment of the 1960s minimalist movement, which was characterised by an extensive reduction of musical means. Since the mid-1970s, the composer has adopted a richer, more complex musical language, and distanced himself from the minimalist label. Academic scholarship on the composer's more recent compositions is severely limited, with the result that he is often still viewed as a minimalist. This dissertation's focus is on a more recent work by Glass, the Tirol Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2000), and thus seeks to contribute to our knowledge of the composer's more recent stylistic development and the extent to which it is minimalist. The research approach entails compositional analyses of the concerto's second movement from both literary and theoretical perspectives. The movement's conception, its background and factors that had an influence on its compositional content are explored through literature studies. This is followed by theoretical investigations of its musical characteristics through the application of functional harmonic analysis and neo-Riemannian theory. Findings from the research provide evidence that the composition's title stems from the 'Tyrolean character' that was requested by its commissioners. However, relations between the movement and the film The Truman show (1998) challenge the composer's affirmations of a Tyrolean folk-song basis. Musically, the movement consists of a simple, repetitive structural and harmonic framework that undergoes superficial variations through melodic, textural and rhythmic changes. Transformational coherence within a functional structure is an essential component of the movement's harmonic content. This dissertation concludes that the piece contains musical characteristics consistent with all of Glass's stylistic periods, including minimalism, as well as new compositional devices that have not been identified previously. It recommends further study of the composer's more recent output , especially through transformational perspectives, and a reconsideration of the ontology and appropriateness of stylistic labels such as minimalism.

‘...and one of time.' is a reinterpretation of a small musical moment from Philip Glass' opera, Einstein on the Beach, centered around the phrase "Berne, Switzerland 1905." This reinterpretation is realized through the use of several different compositional techniques including spectral composition, micropolyphony and dodecaphony, as well as the application of extra-musical models developed by Alan Lightman, John Gardner, Italo Calvino and Albert Einstein.

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Composer Michael Nyman wrote the one-act, minimalist opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, based off the neurological case study written by Oliver Sacks under the same title. The opera is about a professional singer and professor whom suffers from visual agnosia. In chapter 1, the plot and history of the opera are discussed. Chapter 2 places The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat alongside a selection of minimalist operas from Philip Glass and John Adams. Chapter 3 contains a history of the Fluxus art movement and shows where Fluxus-like examples appear in the opera. Chapter 4 includes Nyman's usage of minimalism, vocal congruencies, and Robert Schumann as musical elements that convey the drama.

This thesis is a response to a lacuna in musicology, namely the near absence of postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies. Employing both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, it provides a historical overview of the institutional positioning of musicology as an academic discipline founded on structures of expectation and exploitation indebted to Western imperialism. This longer historical view is accompanied throughout by an examination of ethics in its institutionalised forms, specifically in the domains of knowledge production and the university. The thesis maintains that while such ostensibly ethical underpinnings may promise redress on the basis of the violence inflicted by an imperialist past, the discourse employed in its application in fact serves to strengthen the ideological hold of Western hegemony and, in so doing, betrays the promise of reparation that ethics is ordinarily understood to encompass. The thesis examines different aesthetic and epistemological manifestations of the postcolonial, considering at length Steve Reich's string quartet, Different Trains (1988), Philip Glass's opera, Waiting for the Barbarians (2005), and Philip Miller's choral work, REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony (2006). Both content and style weave these works together as they engage, by means of a post-minimalist aesthetic, stream-of-violence narratives intimately bound up with the postcolonial condition. Of particular importance in the consideration of these musical texts is the urgent necessity for epistemological transformation, marked in musicology as the lack of post- and decolonial perspectives. Finally, the thesis grapples with the (im)possibility of complicit scholarship that must, through its very expression, wound its subject.

We live in a globalized world that is changing rapidly. We interconnect between cultures in different ways. But what if we want to go global with a performance to go around the world, without modifying the piece? Is that possible? How to be international but without losing the here and now by reading subtitles? The diversity of sounds when speaking on stage can embrace otherness, the audience's encounter with a language that may not be familiar to them. This is my journey through creating a play to broaden the audiences I can reach as much as possible.