Vítězslav Novák wrote his second opus of choral ballads, Two Ballads on Words of Moravian Folk Verses Op. 23 Vražedný milý and Neščasná vojna, in 1900. He set Moravian folk song texts from contemporary song collections to music, the first version was for mixed choir and piano four hands, followed by an orchestration for symphony orchestra. The ballads were a great contribution to choir repertoire and have made their mark in choral concert life, as evidenced by the press. Despite such a great interest, the orchestral score has never been printed and is only available in manuscript. Even critical literature did not deal with this topic more specifically, so there is still some ambiguity, for example, concerning premieres or the state of the sheet music.

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The poems of Mignon have inspired song writers for almost two centuries. They have served as the texts for more composers than almost any other single set of poetry. The Romantic composers were especially fond of the words. The poems are full of sadness and yearning and composers found they could be set in different moods. Some settings are in major tonalities while other settings of the same poem can be found in minor. Simple harmonies are used in some settings while others contain more complex harmonies. There are those composers who would have Mignon appear as a lost soul throughout all the poems with each song quietly sung, while others use a variety of dynamics adding drama to the setting and picturing Mignon as full of optimism at the end.

This diploma thesis deals with the topic of setting the poems of Josef Václav Sládek to music. The main source of the analyzed data is a bibliographic list of compositions, which was compiled after my own research in the databases and catalogues of the National Library of Czech Republic, the Municipal Library in Prague and Czech Museum of Music, as well as in specialised literature. The first chapter briefly summarizes the general principles of setting poetry to music and then it focuses on particular aspects of Sládek's poetics, which encourage composers to set his poems to music. The first chapter also outlines Sládek's poetics in different poetry collections. The second chapter gives a detailed analysis of the compiled bibliographic list of compositions in terms of the frequency in which particular poems have been set to music, the number of works composed by different authors, vocal and instrumental cast, and also time contexts. The third, and the most comprehensive chapter, is divided in accordance with the proposed semantically significant thematic areas of Sládek's poetic work - love poetry, poetry for children, peasantism and folk echo poetry and militantpatriotism. In the subchapters, Sládek's work is at first viewed through a literary prism, then the author attempts a musical analysis and...

This dissertation examines a recent work for flute and piano, Here Everything Shines, by a living composer, Charlotte Bray, including a study, analysis and performance guide. The composition was largely inspired by the late Cape Verdean singer Cesária Évora and her song Petit Pays. My research explores the influence of Évora's song on Here Everything Shines, including the melodic development, tonal center, style and freedom of her singing and the impact the song has on a performer's interpretation of Here Everything Shines. The study examines the text of the song, the emotions evoked and reflects on the compositional elements in Here Everything Shines. Originally written for flute and guitar and commissioned by Tom Kerstens for International Guitar Foundation, Here Everything Shines was published in 2015. Bray transcribed it for violin and piano at request of Darragh Morgan and Mary Dullea and subsequently for flute and piano at my request. This dissertation compares the three versions for flute and guitar, violin and piano, and flute and piano and examines the variations between flute and violin as well as guitar and piano parts. The performance guide includes the composer's input on both interpretation and implementation of her ideas throughout the work.

By examining Renaissance criticism both literary and musical, framed in the context of the contemporaneous obsession with the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Horace, among others, this thesis identifies the parallels in poetic and musical practices of the time that coalesce to form a unified idea about the poet-as-singer, and his role in society. Edmund Spenser and John Milton, who both, in various ways, lived in periods of upheaval, identified themselves as the poet-singer, and comprehending their poetry in the context of this idea is essential to a fuller appreciation thereof. The first chapter addresses the role that the study of rhetoric and the power of oratory played in shaping attitudes about poetry, and how the importance of sound, of an innate musicality to poetry, was pivotal in the turn from quantitative to accentual-syllabic verse. In addition, the philosophical idea of music, inherited from antiquity, is explained in order elucidate the significance of “artifice” and “proportion”. With this as a backdrop, the chapters following examine first the work of Spenser, and then of Milton, demonstrating the central role that music played in the composition of their verse. Also significant, in the case of Milton, is the revolution undertaken by the Florentine Camerata around the turn of the seventeenth century, which culminated in the birth of opera. The sources employed by this group of scholars and artists are identical to those which shaped the idea of the poet-as-singer, and analysing their works in tandem yields new insights into those poems which are considered among the finest achievements in English literature.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2010. / Title from screen (viewed on July 19, 2010). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Karen Kovacik, Peggy Zeglin Brand, Ronda C. Henry. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-83).