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Thesis (M.M.)--Boston University. PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

This dissertation analyzes the group of postwar (1948-1964) independent films known as the New York city symphonies and argues that the films, rather than merely depicting space, produce it. City symphonies combine documentary, experimental, and sometimes fictional techniques to chronicle a paradigmatic day in the life of a given urban environment and its citizenry by concatenating spatially diverse, thematically related phenomena. Produced, distributed, and exhibited outside the commercial system, the New York city symphonies are nevertheless paradigmatic of the nonsynchronous spaces and layered temporalities that characterize late modernity. More important, as late modernist works, they critique this social order and the spaces that constitute it. City symphony films have often been studied as a crucial instance of the intersection of cinema and the urban environment. Previous work in film studies has used the films to argue for the mutual constitution of city and cinema on the grounds that urban modernity is primarily a mode of vision. This dissertation rejects that tradition on the grounds that it reduces space to a concept and cinema to the depiction of a pre-extant built reality. By contrast, this dissertation demonstrates that a city symphony is not a way of seeing but is rather a method for negotiating space - a spatial practice. Through extensive close readings of the films in close conversation with both Henri Lefebvre's theory of the production of space and models of narrative's spatial characteristics, this dissertation concludes that the New York city symphonies comprise a particular practice in which space can be inhabited and abstracted simultaneously, in which experience and language, place and story, are one in the same. That is, the films challenge modernity's dominant relation of production, in which space as a mental thing displaces space as it is lived and perceived. This relation largely depends on space being reduced to a series of metaphors and metonymies - to narrative. Modernity, Lefebvre argues, is constituted by such abstract space. Abstract space is reproduced through the construction of various narrations of space that naturalize or cover over the displacement of space as it is experienced. This dissertation identifies two such narratives, both of which employ microcosmic logic to produce the city as a unified, perfectly ordered, legible text to be read. Against the microcosmic narration of space, the New York city symphonies produce spaces that narrate. The films challenge the fantasy of "New York City" as a proper name that can refer to a single, knowable entity. Instead, they narrate an asynchronous multitude of sometimes overlapping, sometimes mutually exclusive New Yorks that are inhabited and invented by diverse populations as they perform their daily routines. They do this by narrating marginal areas as a series of secret passages that relate to the center through the time of the festival, and the center itself as a collective work. That is, the films not only produce space as an experience, but in doing so suggest an alternative concept of space. This dissertation proposes the New York films as a cinematic discourse capable of enunciating the multiple, contradictory meanings of given locations and from them positing an otherwise unfigurable, radically different social order characterized by both the perfect harmony of space as it is lived, perceived, and conceived as well as unlimited freedom. This dissertation claims the New York city symphonies as immanent utopias.

Dissertation--Halle-Wittenberg, 2007. / Bibliogr. p. 270-282.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4030. Adviser: John Walter Hill. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 965-1003) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

"Variation is one of the oldest and most elemental types of music, beloved and practised by all musicians since the early lute and keyboard composers." The principle of the variation is that of "variety within unity, secured by the reproduction of limited musical material in changing aspects and is fundamental to composition." Typical instances are the use of fugal themes in changing combinations and with changing counter-material; continuous sequential expansion of a single motif in the baroque sonata or suite; the symphonic development in classical sonata form; ornamentation, compression, extension or elaboration of recapitulated sections. Intro., p. 1.

Symphony No. 1 "Concertante" is a work of approximately twenty-two minutes duration for chamber orchestra. The work is scored for flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling English horn), B-flat clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, F horn, trombone, tuba, percussion, harp, piano (doubling celesta), solo violin, solo viola, solo cello, solo double bass, and strings.The percussion battery, which is to be played by one performer, includes three timpani, vibraphone, orchestra bells, xylophone, chimes, suspended cymbal, bass drum, snare drum, and two triangles. One group of instruments, including the eight winds, percussion, and the four solo strings, is treated primarily in a soloistic manner although it also functions as a part of the ensemble. The remaining group, piano, harp, and strings, functions primarily as an accompanying group although it does get some soloistic treatment. The work is in four movements, each of which uses the traditional symphonic form. Movement I is in sonata-allegro form, movement II a simple ternary "song" form, movement III a scherzo and trio, and the final movement is a theme and variations. These traditional forms apply only to thematic use and development, however, for the tonal scheme is developed in a broader design which unfolds throughout the course of the four movements. All important melodic ideas are based on the same pitch set that serves as the basis for the tonal scheme.