Master of Music, Theater, and Dance / Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance. / David Littrell / This report provides detailed analyses of several orchestral works. Current orchestras have striven to rejuvenate their programs by balancing canonical literature with newer or less familiar works; such a practice has become especially important in an age when audiences are dwindling and orchestras are disbanding. The works included in this report follow that balanced blueprint, including staples such as Haydn’s Symphony No. 103 in E-flat Major (the “Drumroll”) and Berlioz’s “Hungarian March” from The Damnation of Faust to new orchestrations of 20th century works, such as Bryce Craig’s arrangement of the toccata from Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, as well as works composed within the last six years, such as Casey Cangelosi’s Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra No. 2. Each work’s formal design is straightforward, and the technical skills required are not virtuosic. The chapters below explore each work from a historical, theoretical, and performance perspective.

American composer Christopher Theofanidis’s choral-orchestral work The Here and Now (2005) is a setting of Jalal ad-Din Rumi’s thirteenth-century poetry as translated by Coleman Barks. Theofanidis employs a cappella sonic contrasts, silence, rhythmic text setting, and a libretto based on fragments of Rumi’s poems to tell a story about the search for love, longing, joy, and gratitude. While rooted in traditional Western composition methods, this twenty-first-century work uses musical elements like color chords (bichords), cluster chords, changing meters, and modality, as well as imitative polyphony and unifying motifs within a new, tonal American aesthetic espoused by the Atlanta School of Composers, of which Theofanidis is a founding member. This DMA project presents warmups, rehearsal strategies, and teaching methods to guide the choir and conductor through the challenges of rhythmic text setting and dense harmonic language so that learning and performing The Here and Now is a rewarding endeavor.