abstract: Arrangements of music from other instruments have always played a key role in expanding the guitar repertoire. This project investigates the life and work of eighteenth-century composer Antonio Soler (1729-1783), specifically his sonatas for solo keyboard. This study carries out a formal inquiry on Soler's influences, including a background of Soler's life and training, his connection with Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), and an overview of the eighteenth-century sonata in Spain. Timbres, articulations, tessitura, and other aspects of Spanish folk music are discussed as related to Soler's composition style. Five sonatas are analyzed in connection to Spanish folk music, and part of this study's focus was arranging the sonatas for two guitars: R. 48, 50, 60, 106 and 114. An overview of the current arrangements of Soler's sonatas for guitar is included in Appendix A. / Dissertation/Thesis / D.M.A. Music 2014

The Grand Tour is known to scholars as a significant period of travel in which members of English society could immerse themselves in the foreign, while also adhering to established social customs. Scholarship previously regarded the Grand Tour as an intellectual journey for aristocratic Englishmen; however, an incorporation of women into this narrative has introduced many new and important themes that merit further study. Women’s increasing participation in the Grand Tour, which gained in popularity in the eighteenth century, reveals many unique aspects of British society in the period. The integration of women into the Tour is also an indication of increased mobility for an emerging class of Britons who sought amusement and distinction abroad. Cultural identity played an active role in not only shaping the traveler’s experience but also in dictating how travelers represented themselves on their journey. Traveler’s served as cultural intermediaries that represented their country while abroad and transported aspects of the foreign societies they encountered home with them. While cultural identity certainly shaped perceptions of travelers, this work endeavors to bring into focus additional points of analysis and emphasize emerging areas of study. The appropriation of foreign objects and the significance of their integration into domestic life and social practices, the pursuit of amusement and that pursuit’s influence on the Tour experience, and the essential role played by the body as another category of experience in travel are all areas of interest and focus in this additional interpretation of the Grand Tour.

Friendship between the sexes, in eighteenth-century England, was a site of great controversy: it could be mocked as a chimera, feared as a mask for seduction or a leveller of gender distinctions, or welcomed as a sign of newly enlightened sociability. Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Charlotte Lennox all explored the tantalizing possibilities of such friendship in their daily lives as well as in their fiction. Their relationships have tended to be stereotyped as a symbiosis of benevolent male genius and grateful female talent. But as friends, siblings and colleagues who worked together closely, these writers broke new ground. In the middle of the century, a unique spirit of cooperation veiled, without erasing, the old tensions between the sexes, which continued to be played out discreetly in these writers' dedications, prefaces, reviews and, above all, letters. Mid--eighteenth-century experiments with the theme of friendship between the sexes in fiction have been generally ignored or misread as euphemistic versions of courtship or parenthood. But novels by the four authors in this study benefit greatly from being read against the grain, with the spotlight turned from their main plots of courtship to their more ambiguous sub-plots. Male-female friendship is not proposed here as a watertight category but rather as a fascinating area of overlap and contest between ideologies of relationship. Chapter 1 sketches the broad spectrum of male-female friendship possibilities in eighteenth-century literature. The next three chapters focus on three significant sample patterns: Sarah and Henry Fielding's sibling bond, Samuel Richardson's cultivation of a wide circle of literary 'daughters', and the mentor-protegee relationship in the life and works of Charlotte Lennox. The aim of this thesis is to reconsider these writers' lives and reputations while demonstrating the peculiar interest of male-female friendship as a lens through which to view eighteenth-century literature and literary history.

This thesis seeks to define how Francis Barrett’s The Magus, Or Celestial Intelligencer is indicative of a transitional period (1800–1830) of English Magic. The intention and transmission of Barrett’s The Magus is linked to the revival of occultism and its use as a textbook for occult philosophy. This thesis provides a historical background preceding this revival. The aim of the thesis is to establish Barrett’s text as a hybrid interpretation of Renaissance magic for a modern audience. It is primarily by this hybridization that a series of feedback loops would begin to create the foundation for modern occultism. This study utilizes a careful study of primary sources, including a systematic examination of The Magus within its intellectual and social contexts.

This dissertation examines the aesthetics of Adam Smith. It argues that, despite appearances to the contrary, Smith not only articulated ideas on the subject and was engaged in the aesthetic debates of his time, but that he in many ways innovates on and challenges received opinion—he thus differs significantly from some of his better known contemporaries, including Edmund Burke and David Hume. For this reason, he is not merely a major thinker who happened to dabble in aesthetics; on the contrary, he considered the subject, which appears in nearly all his works, important, and often interrogates its issues in a more studied way. My project thus makes a case for Smith as a significant thinker in the history of aesthetics, one who merits renewed attention. This study does so by investigating the major aesthetic issues of the day, which Smith in fact discusses. It begins by examining Smith’s remarks on taste—the aesthetic issue of the century—which occur largely in Theory of Moral Sentiments. Though seemingly tangential, his discussion of taste is significant as it argues against the predominant eighteenth-century current that maintained the existence of a standard. He also challenges theorists such as Hume who made aesthetic experience classless and, especially via sympathy, disinterested. The study next investigates Smith’s aesthetic normativity and what are for him valid aesthetic judgments, which can be reconciled with his remarks problematizing taste. Here too, Smith appears to argue against the predominant impulse that sought to ground valid aesthetic experience in the immediate; in doing so, Smith demystifies and democratizes aesthetic experience. Finally, the dissertation investigates tragedy, by far the literary genre that most interested Smith, and which also drew attention from better known theorists. The paradox of tragedy—why readers and spectators are attracted to painful representations—was an aesthetic issue that vexed many thinkers of the century, and although Smith appears to ignore the issue, we have in his moral theory a solution to the paradox, one that is unique and more satisfying than those of his contemporaries. The project concludes by examining Smith’s relation to neoclassical dramatic theory. Though superficially appearing complacent in uncritically adopting neoclassical doctrine, Smith, even here, is being original.

An important part of the recent growth in scholarship on meter focuses on reconstructing 18th-century listening practices. Danuta Mirka (2009) studies contemporary accounts of meter in theory treatises to build a model of 18th-century metric listening, while Stefan Love (2016) takes a corpus studies approach, arguing that surveying repertoire provides a more accurate view of meter than 18th-century theorists. But despite the known debt that much 18th-century art music owes to dance and dance music, Mirka and Love only briefly mention dance. In touching so lightly on dance, these and other authors overlook the more fundamental connection between meter and movement. In this paper I examine late 18th-century French contredanses and their music to propose a model of contemporary metric hearing that unites literal and musical motion. There are three features of the contredanse and dancing in general that support their relevance to 18th-century metric experience. First is the contredanse’s role in society—recent writers on 18th-century music often present the minuet as the premier dance of the century, but though it remained the most aristocratic dance, by the middle of the century it had been surpassed in popularity by the contredanse. Second, contredanses involved multiple dancers moving simultaneously, and music helped them coordinate their movements. As a result, hypermetrical schemas matching hypermeasures with dance moves could develop. Finally, the experience of moving in time with musical meter likely had a positive effect on dancers’ ability to find meter in music in general.

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Virgil's Georgics portray peace and war as disparate states derived from the same fundamental materials. Adopting a didactic tone, the poet uses the language of farming to confront questions about the making of lasting peace in the wake of the Roman civil wars. Rife with subjunctive constructions, the Georgics place no hope in the easily realized peace of a golden age; instead, they teach us that peace must be sowed, tended, reaped, and replanted, year after year. Despite this profound engagement with the consequences of civil war, however, the Georgics have not often been studied in relation to English writers working after the civil wars of the 1640s. I propose that we can better understand poems by Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Anne Finch, and John Philips--all of whom grappled with the ramifications of war--by reading their work in relation to the georgic peace of Virgil's poem. In distinct ways, these poets question the dominant myth of a renewed golden age; instead, they model peace as a stable yet contingent condition constructed from chaotic materials, and therefore in need of perpetual maintenance. This project contributes to existing debates on genre, classical translation, the relationships between early modern poetry and politics, and most importantly, poetic representations of political and social peace. Recent work has argued for the georgic as a flexible mode rather than a formal genre, yet scholars remain primarily interested in its relation to questions of British national identity, agricultural reform movements, and the production of knowledge in the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century. I argue, however, for the relevance of the georgic to earlier poems written in response to the consequences of the English civil wars. The dissertation includes chapters devoted separately to Marvell, Finch, and Dryden, and concludes with a chapter on how their dynamic conceptions of georgic peace both inform and conflict with aspects of the popular eighteenth-century genre of imitative georgic poetry initiated by Philips and brought to its height by James Thomson. / 2017-05-01T00:00:00Z

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