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Russian-born American composer, Lera Auerbach (b. 1973), is a pianist and composer with a growing reputation. She has written nearly a dozen works for solo piano in addition to ballets, operas, chamber works, and other solo instrumentations. Her solo piano work 24 Preludes for Piano, op. 41 (1998) is the first of three prelude sets she has written; op. 41 is scored for solo piano, op. 46 is composed for violin and piano, and op. 47 is written for cello and piano. Throughout her works, Auerbach's compositional language is intuitively polystylistic, tonally centered, and couched in traditional forms. In her 24 Preludes for Piano, op. 41, Auerbach creates a polystylistic and motivically cohesive large-scale work of the individual preludes. In this document, three aspects of the 24 Preludes for Piano, op. 41 are discussed in two parts: form, most significant polystylistic influences, and most prominent motivic connections. The first part of the document investigates two aspects: the form of each prelude and several polystylistic influences. Auerbach uses form to give each short prelude structure; ABA and Arch forms are most often used. Each of the preludes demonstrates different polystylistic elements; she refers to various genres such as the ricercar and chorale prelude as well as various techniques including stretto and additive rhythms. Additionally, Auerbach pays polystylistic homage to different composers including Bartók, Debussy, Mussorgsky, Purcell, Ravel and others. The second part of the document demonstrates several of the underlying motivic connections that unify the collection. The cohesion is created through self-referencing motivic connections that are best heard when the set of twenty-four is performed in its entirety. Auerbach's series of polystylistic miniatures is also an organically unified large-scale work.

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Since the late seventeenth century, Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707) has been acknowledged as one of the great organists and composers of the North German tradition. Nowadays, his free organ preludes are considered both as examples of the Stylus Phantasticus, and also as the repertoire in which he developed most of his innovations. My goal is to analyze these works, interpreting the preludes' pitch and textural organization in terms of seventeenth-century music theory, in order to incorporate an awareness of the organist's perspective, and to further the appreciation of Buxtehude's contributions to the organ tradition of his time. Most of the analyses of the preludes written during the past 34 years have focused on explicating their texture, and pitch organization in terms of eighteenth-century tonality as well as the seventeenth-century tradition of musical rhetoric. In contrast, William Porter (1986) and Geoffrey Webber (2007) have analyzed the preludes in terms of a theoretical system contemporary to Buxtehude: the psalm-tone tonalities. Their analyses also draw on Harold Powers's theory (1981) regarding the transition from psalm tones to keys, which proposes an alternative system of church tones based on the organ practice of the early seventeenth century. In my analysis of Buxtehude's free organ preludes I aim to build on these insights and study the musical content in contemporary terms, by integrating a church-tone analysis of the pitch organization with a rhetorical analysis of the texture. My findings suggest an awareness of the church tones as an organizing factor in the preludes' compositional process.

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