My master’s thesis project is about creating music for piano and improvising ensemble based on compositions that set the ground for an open improvisation. I wanted to find out methods of how to write and communicate a piece that gives the performing musician a maximum freedom to interpret their parts and still share the same vision of the piece. In order to get there I tried out different strategies of composing and different instrumentations. I also compare this project to previous ones and examine how the playing with the ensemble in this project affected my own style of playing. The exam concert together with this thesis document the process and outcome of this project. / <p>Composer: Johann Fritsche.</p><p>Musicians: Johanne Skaansar, Viola, Samuel Lazar Eriksson, Violoncello, August Eriksson, Double Bass, Fiach O’Briain, Drums, Johann Fritsche, Piano.</p><p>Uploaded media file: Johann Fritsche's exam concert. </p>

Willing to overstep literary conventions in order to ensure that meaning and purpose reign over structure, cross-genre writing works to push boundaries of genre and tear down the walls of limitation. This cross-genre thesis aims to test literary restrictions of structure and style and, as literary endeavors often do, to rattle our existence. In this thesis, nonfiction and fiction work together to drive meaning to the surface of the page, meaning that is universal in the individual stories as well as in the human experience. Although some characters are fictional and some real, they often intersect, their journeys and discoveries merging into one. The many voices of this thesis, while diverse, speak to similar themes and meaning. The main character of "Silhouettes," a homosexual male who yearns to find his identity away from the place he once called home, experiences feelings of abandonment and loss. The narrator of "A Crimson Trail" longs to uncovers truths about her uncle's suicide and endures similar feelings of loss. "Abandoned Laurels" explores a complex mother-daughter relationship and wades through themes of mourning, regret, and shame. The remaining stories explore similar themes, including those of longing, death, and familial relationships. Shorter pieces are scattered amongst longer works and supplement themes developed in the thesis. Each section contributes to the characters' longing for identity, recovery, and understanding of the past. These related characters and their stories--both real and fictional--merge in a collective endeavor to sift through loss, explore the past, and, most importantly, find identity and hope in the future amidst the rubble of the present.

Oftentimes, the children of immigrants find themselves straddling two worlds. As Americanized minorities, we navigate torn psychological landscapes in which uneasy dichotomies are formed: living up to our parents' expectations, or fulfilling our own; embracing tradition, or birthing a new culture; admiring the lives of our family, but wanting different for ourselves. These tough decisions are further compounded by identifiers such as age, race, and gender. My creative thesis, a collection of fiction and nonfiction, examines these issues through three central characters. In fiction, they are the Latina sisters Mel and Nena; in nonfiction, it is myself. Through these stories, these young women struggle to feel a sense of belonging where they are, be it at home, work, or school; among friends or on their own; in places they choose, or in places where they are put. Each of these characters is forced to consider whether they will ever find a place to call home. They wonder whether that is a place to be found at all.

The dissertation for my PhD is a composite novel called We Are Everyone You Know. The novel is set in a small town that is neither rural nor suburban, which, like the characters, defies classification. The cast rotates. Main characters become supporting characters in subsequent chapters and vice versa. I employ this strategy so the reader is able to see each character as an individual, that even those who seem to be in the background are living complex lives. The novel explores such themes as poverty, gentrification, the loss of innocence caused by a corrupt world, and the inability of people to realize their identities when the promises of youth turn out to be lies. Each chapter or story is told from either a different point of view or in a different style or genre. While the novel as a whole is grounded around a family and group of friends in a small town, the pieces of the story range in form from simple realism, to modernism, to post-modernism, to surrealism, to meta-fiction. I experiment with genres ranging from crime drama, to disaster survival, to sports comedy, to kung-fu epic, and more. Interspersed between the genre pieces are realist stories of a new lost generation—thirty-somethings who are stuck in permanent adolescence, who work at soul-crushing jobs, and who find neither the shining future that was promised to them in their youth nor the comfortable mediocrity of their parents’ lives. For this project I have been particularly inspired by the works of Louise Erdrich, James Joyce, and Jennifer Egan.

In 1904, Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor published six songs from the oeuvre of white British poet Christina Georgina Rossetti, only a few months after reading W.E.B. Du Bois’ groundbreaking work The Souls of Black Folk (1903). This seminal book included a chapter called “Sorrow Songs” devoted to discussing slave songs. It also introduced the concept of double-consciousness to describe how Black people, see themselves through the lens of the white society. This point of view creates a sense of doubleness in their identity and recognition of self. The songs that Coleridge-Taylor composed, which he titled Six Sorrow Songs, Op. 57, address themes of love, death, and spirituality. Coleridge-Taylor grouped these art songs under the title “Sorrow Songs”—showing a connection to Du Bois’ work and its influence. This fusion of art song and slave song opens up room for examinations of cross-genre relations, which highlights complexity of meaning and textual changes when interpreted and performed—revealing a “doubledness” to the composition in this time in the composer’s life. Serge Lacasse’s (2018) model for intertextuality offers a framework for considering the cross-genre relations that emerge in this song cycle. The concepts of architextuality, transfictionality, and polytextuality from his model are particularly relevant in this cycle, as they account for inter-genre relationships, fictional elements of the story (including speakers and the setting), as well as the overall compilation of the songs, respectively. Drawing this model together with scholarship on Sorrow Songs, this thesis focuses on the emergence of “Sorrow Songs” at this pivotal moment in the composer’s life, which will enable the consideration of the intertext of Western classical and African slave songs in this composition as well as the creation of a story in this musico-literary hybrid. Context is critical to this discussion so his trips to the USA, personal experiences, the socio-political events of the time, and the encounter with the influential Black figures will be discussed to understand how this song cycle reshaped Coleridge-Taylor’s musical path. Intertextual analysis of this song cycle reveals a sense of double meaning in Six Sorrow Songs, Op. 57, where one clearly sees Du Bois’ concept at work in the life of the composer living as a Black man in a white society, in his music combining Western classical and Sorrow Song genres, in the medium he chose to write for, a singer and a pianist, and in setting spiritual/religious poetry written by a white poet to these romantic songs.