The initial goal of this effort is to develop a discussion on urban design process and thinking that acknowledges the needs of places with meaning in the design of the urban waterfront. The thesis addresses the fact that the problematic of the coastal formulation is intricate, comprising not only aspects related to the spatial organization and design of its domain but also shared properties originated by the presence and movement of the perceiving subject in the area. In this framework, the research attempts to provide an understanding of the main relationships that the subject cultivates inside the coastal space and to offer a broader spatial reading of its narrative function. On the hypothesis that this function is susceptible of interpretation, the thesis develops an interest in examining the effects of the psychospatial nature of meaning on the design and experience of the urban edge, for to interpret a narrative spatial construct is to specify its meaning. To explore the issue of waterfront places that speak of the subject, the research conceives the coastal space as a field of mediated parameters that pertain to three crucial operational premises: the symbolic function of the urban space near the water, the meaning behind the coastal form, and the engagement of the perceiving subject in the conscious or reflexive appropriation of the waterfront setting. These premises, traced as psychophysiological spaces, determine the intermediary, the integrative, and the expressive discourses for the development of places with meaning near the water. Through them, the thesis attempts a reading of the coastal domain based upon the material interpretation of the meanings and messages associated with the immediate experience of the onset of water‐born notions, concepts, and images. Writing about the dialectics between the psychospatial inquiry and the spatial experience of the edge, this thesis suggests that, contrary to the established preconception, the psychology of human‐edge relations submits the perceiving subject to the conception of the coastal form and shape. / QC 20110907

This master thesis is an autoethnographic study, wherein the author presents and analyzes her approach to composition practice through intertextuality. Drawing on previous research in literary and musical studies, she aims to identify and/or define the types of intertextuality that she uses in her compositional practice, and their interaction within compositions. She also investigates, in which ways different musical and literary texts can mutually influence and enhance each other, as well as how these forms of intertextuality function in specific performance settings. Finally, the author contemplates on the question how intertextual elements might mediate in translating the author’s intentions to the audience, at least from the perspective of the composer. After a quick overview of ten of Astar’s musical works, making use of intertextuality as a composition strategy, the study focuses on a detailed analysis of two pieces, Escape and The Checkered Flag Villanelle, that rely upon contrasting ways of building cross-textual relationships. The analysis utilizes, among others, the topologies found in the works by Genette, Burkholder and Kawamoto. The author also makes an attempt at extending the existing terminology by suggesting such new terms as concept borrowing, interpermeating intertextuality, imposed intertextuality, transverbal prosodization and some other. This terminology is applied in the work to describe the types of cross-textual strategies used in Astar’s classical compositions that do not appear to be covered by any of the aforementioned topologies. The work also offers a first-person perspective at a close collaboration of a composer and a poet, where the result is a variety of artistic works, all of which employ multi-layered intertextuality and an intermedial approach.