Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

<p> This project report analyzes Eric Whitacre&rsquo;s choral piece <i> When David Heard</i>, a work about grieving the loss of a son, alongside psychologist Elizabeth K&uuml;bler-Ross&rsquo;s five stages of grief. The paper serves to better understand the lamentation of King David in Whitacre&rsquo;s piece by seeing where each of the five stages fit into the process of grief throughout the piece. </p><p> The analysis observes Whitacre&rsquo;s variety of musical devices such as tonal clusters, intermittent silences, and polyrhythms, as a means to describe the stages of grief that David is experiencing. By understanding these different stages of grief within the piece, one can conduct or sing the performance of this piece with better understanding of this grief.</p><p>

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The search for alternative approaches to time outside of the Western concert music tradition has provided inspiration for many contemporary composers. This essay is a brief examination of temporal models taken from traditional Chinese guqin music. Focusing on the famous composition Flowing Waters, the study looks at aspects of temporality in the piece: the use of traditional notation (the jianzipu spectrum as well as brush-painting illustrations) with transcribed comparisons of individual interpretations, various finger-sliding techniques, the dual melodic and harmonic roles of single lines, and even the tuning system as a path toward revealing a new way of composed time, that which reflects the aesthetics of brush-stroke calligraphy, brush-painting, and ancient Chinese philosophical views on nature and the arts. Continual movement of textures, fluidity of materials, organic transitions, and gradual growth and decay of sound in space are the unique characteristics of this piece that become the main focus of the analysis.

This paper presents a conceptual and musical analysis of my composition Lineage, an eleven-minute work for large orchestra, written in 2013 for the New World Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony. Lineage takes as its premise the imagining of faux-folkloric music from a fictitious, distant culture. It engages with the idea of my artistic and personal ancestry, and revolves around the concept of return through the reworking of my own material, the re-contextualization of and linkage to past music traditions, and the repetition and transformation of musical material. I discuss the meaning behind the music, the choice of source material, and my compositional process, including descriptions of how I use technology. I place my work in relation to other composers who have revisited material, including Pierre Boulez, Yan Maresz, and György Ligeti. I also compare Lineage to Phonotopographie, my 2012 work for chamber ensemble that is closely related. The theoretical analysis involves an in-depth explanation of formal concerns, compositional techniques such as polyphonic and resonant usages of stratification, harmonic and pitch material from traditional, microtonal, and spectral sources, and finally rhythm. I conclude with a brief discussion on sideshadowing and temporal openess, a literary concept developed by Gary Saul Morson. I propose that the use of digital audio workstations (DAWs) as a compositional tool may provide composers with a form of musical sideshadowing - a way of understanding the plurality of possibilities present, while contemplating the global formal design.

It is my contention that the worlds of instrumental and electroacoustic music are essentially grounded in one basic reality – the physical properties of sound. If there is a divide, then it is based on compositional models and conventions. This is not to diminish the stylistic or technical differences between the two but rather to make the case for a focus on the core aspects of sound, in order to discover different ways of exploring various possible relationships between music for instrumental performer(s) and digital (electroacoustic) means. My thesis stems from the argument that every sound has its own spectromorphology– its own inner life governed by envelope, spectral content, energy and internal pulsation. This leads architecturally to considering the relationship of micro- to macro- phenomena and provides the essential foundations for all the compositions in this portfolio. Taking Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of the “sound object” as its starting point, my portfolio explores various forms of interaction between instrumental and electroacoustic techniques, methodologies and aesthetics, via a range of outcomes for fixed media, acoustic instruments, and combination of instruments with electroacoustic media.

This thesis, A Portfolio of Original Compositions, contains six musical compositions and accompanying commentary presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music Composition at the University of Aberdeen in 2017. The focus of these musical works is on the composition of music for the human voice, though there are significant examples of instrumental composition included in the portfolio as well. The focal point of the accompanying commentary is an extended work for choir, string quartet and percussion ensemble titled Endless, which uses verses from Rabindranath Tagore's Nobel-Prize-winning collection of devotional poetry Gitanjali as its textual basis. The other works contained within the portfolio, O Great Beyond, Songs of the Questioner, The Dream I Knew, Ave, maris stella and When daylight came…, are shown in the commentary to be important examples of supplemental research that led to the composition of Endless. The individual chapters of the accompanying commentary discuss various aspects of research-based composition found throughout the portfolio, again with specific emphasis on Endless. These include the approach to form and text setting, the use and development of musical motives, the approach to harmony and specific techniques of orchestration. The commentary also discusses how research into the music of other cultures, most importantly the pitch and ornamental systems employed in Indian music, has informed the composition of the works contained in the portfolio.

This dissertation, organized in two parts, is comprised of an essay on my song cycle Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine and its scores. Perle Noire consists of a flexible musical score that I composed for soprano Julia Bullock, select members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, and myself, with two performance editions. The primary edition, which stems from part of a production conceived of by theater director Peter Sellars, includes recited poetry about Josephine Baker by Claudia Rankine and choreography by Michael Schumacher. The second edition is a musical performance with neither poetic texts nor choreography. The world premiere of Perle Noire took place at the 2016 Ojai Music Festival in California, with subsequent performances at Lincoln Center in New York; Da Camera in Houston, Texas; and the Stony Island Arts Center in Chicago, Illinois. The entire performance of the 90-minute song cycle entails the following five recompositions and one “head arrangement” for a mixed ensemble of improviser-performers and soprano: Part I—1. Bye Bye Blackbird, 2. Sous le Ciel d’Afrique, 3. C’est ca le Vrai Bonheur and Madiana (medley); Part II—4. Si J’etais Blanche, 5. C’est Lui, 6. Terre Seche (Negro Spiritual). The essay centers on the compositions in Part II of Perle Noire: “Si J’etais Blanche,” “C’est Lui,” and “Terre Seche” (Negro Spiritual). To begin, I briefly discuss my aesthetic exigencies in relation to the Black creative musics initiated during the latter part of the twentieth century as well as the inspiration informing the creation of this song cycle. Next, I discuss the aforementioned songs to demonstrate how my aesthetics play out in this work. Finally, I detail the controversial critical reception of the song cycle’s world premiere performance and my response to it.

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