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No description available.

Thesis (M.Mus. Composition)--University of Waikato, 2006. / Also available via the World Wide Web.

STF is a large ensemble work in three movements: "Fatwa," "Hitchens," and "Albino Sex." It is scored for piano, double bass, cello, viola, violin, French horn, clarinet in Bb, bass clarinet in Bb, flute, baritone, tenor, alto, soprano, narrator, and electronics. Its underlying concept is how religious worldviews can collide with freedom of speech, atheism, and fundamental human rights. In extreme cases, zealots will interpret disease as evidence of divine intervention or even demand the death of blasphemers. The text in the first movement, “Fatwa,” expresses freedom of speech and incorporates passages from Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.” The second movement, “Hitchens,” centers on atheism and incorporates two audio excerpts from Christopher Hitchens’s lecture at the 2009 Festival of Dangerous Ideas. In the final movement, “Albino Sex,” I construct a narrative using media headlines, paraphrased biblical verses, and my own text to depict the human rights crisis during the 1980s A.I.D.S. epidemic. Various organizational approaches to text and pitch distinguish one movement from the other; the three movements cohere through unifying devices that I draw from set theory.

No description available.

This study traces the transfer of writing-related knowledge and concepts from the composition classroom into the writing assignments composed by students within the same course. Working in a first-year-composition classroom taught through a writing-about-writing curriculum, the researcher observed students as they navigated from the initial learning of concepts such as rhetorical situations, writing processes, and discourse communities, into an application of these concepts in various writing assignments, including rhetorical analyses and discourse community profiles. By analyzing a composition instructor's objectives for her assignments and observing the interaction between students and their instructor in a single composition course for the duration of one semester, the researcher traced how students operationalized knowledge from the classroom and applied it in their own writing. After tracing this operalization through interviews with the instructor, observation of class activities and analysis of assignment sheets and student papers, the researcher proposes that instructors may encourage transfer within their composition classrooms by adequately presenting assignment objectives to students, and by allowing sufficient scaffolding of writing tasks. In this way, the researcher explains that students may be able to understand the objectives of their writing assignments in a way that may encourage them to apply the knowledge they learned in the classroom to the writing tasks assigned by their instructor.

No description available.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

The composition The Drawing Board is an extended three-movement work for jazz orchestra, approximately twenty-six minutes in length. The Drawing Board is a musical portrayal of an imaginary artist as he undertakes his work, exploring the emotions inherent to the artistic process, including the uneasiness of staring at a blank canvas, the magical feeling of abstract ideas coalescing into something concrete, the frustration of an unfinished or imperfect work, and the unique sensation of artwork gradually revealing itself to the artist. The introductory section of the accompanying dissertation outlines my overall musical approach and philosophy, and describes the compositional goals behind this work. The core of the dissertation is a musical analysis that provides insight into various compositional techniques and strategies, showing relationships between the three movements. Topics include form, harmony, melody, orchestration, counterpoint, and contexts for improvisation. / text