Love at Second sight is a twenty-five-minute chamber opera in two scenes for soprano, tenor, baritone, and piano. The libretto was written by theorist Dr. Robert Hatten and is loosely based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald called "Love in the Night." Composing an opera poses many significant challenges, including the crafting of the right music to support the drama, writing idiomatically for the voice, and composing in a number of styles. The first chapter of this treatise discusses my reasons for writing an opera, the creation of the libretto, challenges inherent in the medium, and some influential works that helped shape the work. The second chapter is a complete scene-by-scene analysis along with some information on the major motives and harmonic language used throughout the work. / text

A Different Drummer is a chamber opera adaptation of Donald Davis's story "A Different Drummer" from his collection Listening for the Crack of Dawn, published by August House. The opera lasts about seventy minutes, and calls for a cast of three and an orchestra of sixteen players. It contains a prologue, epilogue and four scenes in a single act. The score is prefaced by a paper describing the musical strategies employed in setting the story as an opera. Three chapters describe the adaptation from short story to opera, the essential musical elements, and details of the application of the musical elements in each scene of the opera. The libretto is presented in the fourth chapter.

This opera, for soprano, contralto, baritone, treble voice, and chamber orchestra, sets an original story, a meditation on gender and the effects of restrictive gender norms in a society. The narrative follows a young sailor who wishes nothing more than to work on the sea forever, but is derailed from that destiny by her forced betrothal to a captain. She escapes this fate through the discovery of a latent power, sailing away from her home into an uncertain future of her own making. The work is approximately one hour in duration.

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The Canticle of the Black Madonna is an original opera-oratorio in two acts, comprising 27 pieces for six operatic soloists, mixed chorus, and chamber orchestra. It is based on an original libretto by Tiziana DellaRovere and is approximately two hours in duration. The Canticle of the Black Madonna combines elements of numerous musical traditions—including medieval organum, baroque oratorio, and both classical and contemporary chamber opera—to tell the story of a fictional American soldier returning from Afghanistan to his wife in Louisiana, the challenges they face to their marriage and livelihood as they struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, the ecological and socioeconomic consequences of the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill, and the healing transformation they ultimately undergo at the hands of a mysterious divine figure called The Black Madonna.

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Writing for solo instruments today offers composers an option to create a framework that results from the psychoacoustic interaction of composer, listener and performer. The interaction between musicians, audience and the concert environment, and the extent to which they themselves embody the material of the music presented, can be called into question and a composer's expectation of the dynamics of the concert situation is part of this examination. This understanding in turn prepares the way for one of the ultimate challenges and achievements for a composer, writing an opera. Opera combines all the other arts with the composer in command, which is not the case when composing for dance or providing auxiliary music for theatre. Writing an opera means that all features of structure and timing are in the composer’s hands. Opera has had a crisis of identity; the market for traditional operas and classic repertoire but there is no overall identity for contemporary operatic writers. However modern opera is still evolving. This thesis will recount a range of musical ideas developed for a variety of classical solo instruments, all of which attempt to create this interactive concert situation, before going on to consider the three year evolution of my opera The Doll Behind the Curtain.

This thesis consists of a chamber-staged composition for soprano, baritone, modified Pierrot ensemble (flute, clarinet, piano, violin, viola and cello), Colombian tiple, and fixed media, together with an analytical paper in which I discuss my compositional techniques and their historical antecedents. The composition is an interpretation of an acute schizophrenic episode of a young female patient that is committed to a mental health facility. It was inspired by the need to bring awareness about mental illness and the struggles that these patients experience every day. In this work, I explore the inclusion of a folkloric instrument, the Colombian tiple, within a classical chamber ensemble to expand the color and timbre of the sound world of the composition. In addition, I use different compositional techniques including set theory, unordered pitch collections, and choral-like polyphonic texture. The work is composed in a twenty-first century expressionistic style.