The arrangement of movements in the Grand Sonata in B flat follows traditional classical lines, as is true of almost all the Schubert sonatas. A complete structural analysis of the work reveals some modifications in the architecture of individual movements; this is especially evident in the first movement. The departures from usual treatment of first movement sonata form may be classified as follows: 1. Developmental procedures begin in the exposition. 2. The second subject begins in a distantly related key. 3. The development section stresses melodic treatment rather than contrapuntal technique. The second movement is in ternary form and exhibits little irregularity in structure. The movement is an excellent example of the employment of an accompaniment figure as a unifying element.

The purpose of this thesis is to give a descriptive look at modern Russian music, specifically the early piano sonatas of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, with focus on style and style influences.

The purpose of this study is to analyze four late solo piano works of Franz Liszt that all bear the name "Mephisto" in their titles, in order to examine, identify and trace the development in the use of harmonic and melodic idioms that produced non-tonal or "omnitonic" effects, on the one hand, and to emphasize the need to duly accord Liszt a recognition of historical position as the nineteenth century's most influential avant garde composer whose attitude and approach had helped to shape much of the ideal of the atonal composition of this century, on the other. Chapter One presents the issues and the purpose of this study; Chapter Two investigates the principal forces that shaped Liszt's mature compositional style; Chapter Three identifies and discusses the requisites for tonal and atonal compositions; Chapter Four analyzes the four "Mephisto" dances: Waltz no.1 (1860); Polka (1883); Waltz no.3 (1883); and Bagatelle (1885). Chapter Five summarizes the findings from this study and attempts to identify in these late works of Liszt a pattern of conscientious, continuous, purposeful and progressive use of devices toward creating musical effect that would defy the established tonal requisites and undermine the tonal orientation in the composition. This study submits that it was Liszt who had first shown a way to free music from the shackles of prescribed idiomatic constraints, and to force us the listeners to approach and appreciate music for its own sound's sake. Additionally, this study submits that this effort of Liszt should be understood and appreciated in terms of programmatic association; that is, Liszt found in the persona of Mephisto the Diablo the ideal imagery for depicting the nature of the "music of the future" where tonality would be freed from any prescribed procedural requisites.

The lecture recital was given January 31, 1971. A discussion of Bartok's Out of Doors, a suite consisting of five movements entitled "With Drums and Pipes," "Barcarolla," "Musettes," "The Night's Music," and "The Chase" included biographical material, general analysis of Bartok's musical style, and specific analysis of the suite itself. The suite was then performed by memory. In addition to the lecture recital three other public recitals were performed. Two of these consisted entirely of solo literature for the piano, and the other was a vocal chamber music recital. The first solo recital was on June 7, 1970, and included works of Alfredo Casella, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, and Bartok. Part of the preparation included the writing of program notes of a historical and analytical nature.The other solo program, on July 5, 1971, consisted entirely of twentieth-century works by George Rochberg, Sergei Prokofieff, and Maurice Ravel. The chamber music recital was performed with a visiting soprano, Jane Paul, on February 28, 1971. Emphasis was given to German Lieder by Schumann, Joseph Marx, and Alban Berg, but Spanish songs of the Renaissance, by Juan del Encina and Fuenllana, as well as a modern English song cycle by Peter Warlock were also programmed.

The diploma thesis is focused on the Armenian piano music in context with Armenian culture. The first chapter summarizes important events of the history of Armenia from the ancient times to the present. Following chapters describes Armenian musical culture and Armenian piano music. The last chapter intended to be the most important, it tries to characterize giants of Armenian music and their most important works.

Cette synthèse du pianisme ravélien vise à éclairer les œuvres de façon inédite. Sans apporter une nouvelle compréhension des œuvres par leur dimension corporelle, elle se révèlerait inutile. Mais au-delà de son intérêt purement musical, elle appelait une question fondamentale : qu’est-ce qui a rendu possibles tel geste et telle posture à l’époque de Ravel ? / This synthesis of Ravelian pianism aims at considering musical works in a new way. Without bringing a new comprehension of works in their body dimension, it would appear useless. But beyond its musical interest, it required a fundamental question: what made possible such gesture and posture during Ravel’s time ?

Nikolai Karlovich Medtner (1880-1951) was a Russian composer, pianist and pedagogue. While active during the period of Modernism, he was one of the last descendants of the nineteenth-century tradition. Without a doubt, Medtner was considered one of the most brilliant successors of the Russian piano school, though his compositions did not particularly bring him a great deal of popularity in his time. Nonetheless, his unique style of writing has always attracted a small circle of musicians and admirers, and more recently, there has been a remarkable resurgence of interest in Medtner’s music. In the 2000s, several recent prizewinners of the International Tchaikovsky Competition – Daniil Trifonov, Dmitry Masleev, and Lucas Debargue – have shown their special interest in Medtner’s music, and this has drawn public attention to Medtner’s major piano works. However, discussions regarding performance practice and interpretation in playing Medtner have only recently begun. Although dissertations focused on Medtner’s music began to appear in the 1960s, primary sources have been examined by only a limited number of scholars, due to geographic and linguistic barriers. This dissertation aims to formulate and answer performance practice issues to develop a practical approach to learning and performing Medtner’s piano compositions. Since the primary sources related to op. 38 are comparatively abundant, and the work contains several pieces of contrasting character, Forgotten Melodies can serve as a good model for developing an informed approach to interpreting Medtner’s piano music. Analyses of three major types of material are provided to trace the chronological development of ideas in op. 38: sound recordings of Medtner’s own playing; written records by the composer and his student; and the score Medtner had on which he noted down his ideas. In addition to Medtner’s publication The Muse and the Fashion, unpublished diaries and essays found at the Medtner Archive (‘Fond Metnera’) of the Glinka National Museum of Musical Culture (Moscow, Russia) have also been examined.

In Schubert’s music, the theme “wandering” is used frequently, closely related to human life and death. I presume that, being stricken by serious illness and facing challenging relationships, Schubert lived his short life with agony and dismay, confronting the life theme “death.” In that sense, Schubert himself was probably the wanderer who kept trudging throughout his life journey. In 1822, Schubert composed the allegorical tale “My Dream,” and in that tale, he writes as follows; “when I attempted to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love. Thus were love and pain divided in me” (Deutsch 1977, 227). Schubert lived his life, struggling between love and pain, and between life and death. Human life and death conflict with each other, but exist together in the same place. In other words, death is a root of life. If one can perceive that life and death both exist at the root of one’s life, the form of life should be represented by a circular path, not by a linear formation. This notion accords with Schubert’s musical style, where the same material comes back again and again in a circular formation. I assume that the notion—death as a root of life—is the essential conception of “wandering” that Schubert’s music expresses. In this dissertation, I would like to offer several Neo-Riemannian analyses and graphs of Schubert’s piano compositions; Impromptus D. 899, Moments Musical D. 780, Sonata in C-minor D. 958, and the “Wanderer” Fantasy D. 760. For each work and movement, I will map out the harmonic structure and key progressions on a Tonnetz graph, and suggest a new way to comprehend the nature of “wandering” that Schubert’s music portrays. Through the configurations and harmonic motions on the Tonnetz graphs, I will establish a way to comprehend Schubert’s concept of circular “wandering” visually and geometrically.

by Lee Chui Ling. / Thesis (M.Mus.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Preface --- p.1 / Chapter I. --- Twinkling --- p.3 / Chapter i) --- Analysis-----Introduction --- p.4 / Chapter ----- --- Formal structure / Chapter ----- --- Musical elements / Chapter ii) --- Score (with performance notes) --- p.8 / Chapter II. --- Emancipation --- p.14 / Chapter i) --- Analysis 226}0ؤ Introduction --- p.15 / Chapter ----- --- First movement ~ Formal structure / Chapter ~ --- Orchestration / Chapter ----- --- Second movement ~Formal structure / Chapter ~ --- Harmony / Chapter ----- --- Third movement ~ Formal structure / Chapter ~ --- Musical elemets / Chapter ii) --- Score (with 226}0بorchestra' & performance notes) --- p.25 / Chapter III. --- Once Upon a Time --- p.105 / Chapter i) --- Analysis 226}0´ؤؤIntroduction --- p.106 / Chapter ----- --- Formal structure / Chapter ----- --- Scale / Chapter ----- --- Quotation / Chapter ii) --- Score (with performance notes) --- p.111

This thesis is concerned with computational methods for alignment and score-informed transcription of piano music. Firstly, several methods are proposed to improve the alignment robustness and accuracywhen various versions of one piece of music showcomplex differences with respect to acoustic conditions or musical interpretation. Secondly, score to performance alignment is applied to enable score-informed transcription. Although music alignment methods have considerably improved in accuracy in recent years, the task remains challenging. The research in this thesis aims to improve the robustness for some cases where there are substantial differences between versions and state-of-the-art methods may fail in identifying a correct alignment. This thesis first exploits the availability of multiple versions of the piece to be aligned. By processing these jointly, the alignment process can be stabilised by exploiting additional examples of how a section might be interpreted or which acoustic conditions may arise. Two methods are proposed, progressive alignment and profile HMM, both adapted from the multiple biological sequence alignment task. Experiments demonstrate that these methods can indeed improve the alignment accuracy and robustness over comparable pairwise methods. Secondly, this thesis presents a score to performance alignment method that can improve the robustness in cases where some musical voices, such as the melody, are played asynchronously to others - a stylistic device used in musical expression. The asynchronies between the melody and the accompaniment are handled by treating the voices as separate timelines in a multi-dimensional variant of dynamic time warping (DTW). The method measurably improves the alignment accuracy for pieces with asynchronous voices and preserves the accuracy otherwise. Once an accurate alignment between a score and an audio recording is available, the score information can be exploited as prior knowledge in automatic music transcription (AMT), for scenarios where score is available, such as music tutoring. Score-informed dictionary learning is used to learn the spectral pattern of each pitch that describes the energy distribution of the associated notes in the recording. More precisely, the dictionary learning process in non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is constrained using the aligned score. This way, by adapting the dictionary to a given recording, the proposed method improves the accuracy over the state-of-the-art.