The abstract includes a detailed analysis of the quartet as well as idiomatic aspects of the music. In addition, a background of composer/performer relationships is outlined.

Present Absence is a work that integrates electronic processing and live performance. It is approximately 20 minutes long and is divided into three movements. The movements are distinct from each other, but are related through various elements. Incorporating electronic processing and live performance can be cumbersome. The primary objective of this piece is to use electronic processing in a manner that liberates the performers from any restrictions imposed by the use of electronic processing. The electronic processing in the work is accomplished through the program MAX/Msp, a real-time digital signal processing environment. The patch that was created for this piece is called MOO-V. This paper discusses the both the technical details in the construction of this patch, and the aesthetic it serves.

The Pulitzer Prize in Music has been associated with excellence in American composition since 1943, when it first honored William Schuman for his Secular Cantata No. 2: A Free Song. In the years that followed, this award has recognized America's most eminent composers, placing many of their works in the standard orchestral, chamber and solo repertoire. Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Walter Piston and Elliott Carter are but a few of the composers who have been honored by this most prestigious award. Several of these Pulitzer Prize-winning composers have made significant contributions to the solo and chamber music repertories of the bassoon, an instrument that had a limited repertoire until the beginning of the twentieth century. The purpose of this project is to draw attention to the fact that America's most honored composers have enlarged and enriched the repertoire of the solo bassoon and bassoon quartet. The works that will be discussed in this document include: Quartettino for Four Bassoons (1939) - William Schuman, Three Inventions for Solo Bassoon (1962) - George Perle, Canzonetta (1962) - John Harbison, Metamorphoses for Bassoon Solo (1991) - Leslie Bassett and “How like pellucid statues, Daddy. Or like a . . . an engine” (1994) - John Corigliano. Each chapter will include a brief biography of the composer, a historical perspective of where that composition lies in relation to their other works, background information about the work, a formal analysis and suggestions for performance.

In this thesis, I have studied the composer Johannes Brahms. I have talked about the background and history of his Quintet in B minor for clarinet and string quartet and I have then analyzed the piece. The purpose of this thesis is to find lesser known but significant information about Brahms to help other clarinetists when they have to perform this important piece of clarinet repertoire. Moreover, my artistic questions are if one piece can change your perception or your way to play it after doing a deep analysis and if the interpretation is in a way stronger than before. I decided to analyze this piece due to my interest in Brahms and to learn more about the expressive qualities in his music. I wanted to know more about the composer and so I chose this Quintet, because it is a challenging piece to play and is often performed.  From the quintet, I concentrated specifically on the possibilities of performing it and I tried to search for a way to have a deeper understanding of Brahms to produce the most convincing artistic performance of the piece.  After I learnt more about the background of this piece it resulted in a stronger interpretation of his quintet.

Many commentators experience difficulties describing and analyzing Morton Feldman's String Quartet no. 2 (1983), implying that the quartet eludes stable ascriptions of meaning. Feldman's own philosophy frames these difficulties as symptoms of an antagonism between direct experience and post-hoc understanding of music, a dichotomy tacitly supported in much related discourse. I critique this proposed rift between understanding and experience by analyzing how String Quartet no. 2 prompts listeners to repeatedly reconsider their own experiences. Obfuscated instrumentation, transformations of repeated phrases, and disorienting formal returns challenge one's perception, pattern recognition, and musical memory, leading audiences to return to linguistic interpretation in an effort to comprehend what they hear. Drawing on writing by Lawrence Kramer, I show that the compulsion to voice these uncertainties is not a result of a separation of understanding and experience, but of the blurring of these categories. Vacillation between close listening and interpretation also typifies experiences of the music of Helge Sten, produced under the pseudonym Deathprod. For the album Imaginary Songs from Tristan da Cunha (1996), Sten transfers recorded violin improvisations to wax phonograph cylinders, clouding attributions of the music's manner of production. Incorporating Brian Kane's theory of acousmatic sound, I demonstrate that the resultant spacing of sound and source provokes listeners to oscillate between attending to the music's material properties and struggling to identify its meaning and cause. Work by Jonathan Sterne indicates that historical techniques of hearing associated with the antiquated medium of the phonograph cylinder prolong and complicate this mode of listening. As with Feldman's quartet, auditors of Imaginary Songs endlessly fluctuate between attempting to understand and striving to listen closely to the music. / Graduate

One of the principal techniques used by Lawrence Durrell in creating the rich and varied Alexandria Quartet is echo structure. Echo structures of similar construction (ether directly stated or implied) suffuse the text with additional meanings and achieve thematic significance and completeness. The symbolism of death and a new birth, or rebirth is a dominant means of conveying this in the Quartet, and particularly in Clea, its fourth and final book. Echo structure is created by the writer’s establishing actions, images, archetypes, allusions and characters in an early portion of the Quartet and generally suspending that entity until changed or unchanged, it recurs ata climactic moment to make its final appearance, in every case transformed because of the pressure of thematic resolution or to conform with overriding themes. The meaning is service precisely from the changes that occur in the entity between the first and final appearance. Rebirth may be nothing more than a metamorphosis in outward appearance or a change of an entity which generally produces something better for the person involved. It may be as profound as the spiritualization of the human being or a release of long pent-up creative energy. The change itself contributes to the meaning of the rebirth structure. IN any work of art there is usually a dominant theme, but many variations of the theme work throughout whenever some minor or superficial change occurs; this profoundly changes human destiny. Precisely this device of the echo structure furnishes a means for Durrell to convey his major theme of rebirth.

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I detta arbete analyseras Claude Debussys stråkkvartett op.10 i g-moll från 1893. Stråkkvartetten skrevs tidigt i Debussys karriär då han ännu inte förknippades som impressionistisk kompositör. Med frågeställningen Impressionism eller romantik analyseras verket utifrån motiv, form, tematik, satsstruktur, harmonik och instrumentering. Det romantiska formatet i kombination med ett nytt impressionistiskt tonspråk gör verket unikt i sitt slag. Debussy använder sonatform i första satsen men lyssnarens intryck är inte ett verk av romantisk karaktär. Musikens oavbrutna flöde kan förklaras med användning av heltonsskala, kyrkotonarter, staplade dimackord, septim-och nonackord utan förberedelser eller upplösning. Arbetets resultat visar att verket är både romantiskt och impressionistiskt. / In this study, Claude Debussy's string quartet op.10 in G minor from 1893 was analyzed. The string quartet was written early in Debussy's career when he was not yet considered as an impressionist composer. With the question Impressionism or romanticism, the work is analyzed based on motif, form, theme, movement structure, harmony, and instrumentation. The romantic format combined with a new impressionistic sound makes the work unique. Debussy uses sonata form in the first movement, but the listener's impression is not a work of romantic nature. The music's uninterrupted flow can be explained using whole-tone scales, church modes, stacked diminished chords, seventh and ninth chords without preparation or resolution. The results of the study show that the work is both romantic and impressionistic.

What is generally referred to by the public-at-large as “modernism” is thought (by it) to be based upon the denial and contradiction of the fundamental principles of musical art. But it would be a grave error to assume from this that the present age differs in the attitude toward modernism very considerably from any other, except perhaps in degree. The general intellectual or artistic niveau of any period whatsoever is almost inevitably a low one, apart from a few outstanding figures -- rarely exceeding two or three in any single generation -- who impart most of the significance to it. One is too prone to forget that art is somewhat different from other human activities in that the achievement of one man of genius far outweighs that of any number of mediocrities put together, even though he may be outnumbered by them in the ratio of a thousand to one. Even though it is rare, if not impossible, to find a man of solitary genius who is not indebted to at least one or several lesser men for his achievements it still holds true that a thousand noughts added together only amount to nothing in the end. It is the inability to recognize this simple truth that is primarily responsible for the all-too-familiar charge of decadence which is increasingly brought by each successive generation against its contemporary artists, even in the most incomparably fertile periods of artistic activity. In Bartok’s music one can feel a rich humaneness. The mechanization of music as found in Stravinsky, and the constructivism of Schoenberg in later years, are equally alien to Bartok. No matter how new his music, no matter how far he ventures into unexplored tonal spheres, his music never loses its inherent warmth. His keen mind, thinking clearly and surely, does not chill the emotion and does not allow the soul to freeze, as do the intellect of Schoenberg and the calculated objectivity of Stravinsky. Regardless of how much Bela Bartok condenses music and reduces it to the very essential of tone and rhythm, and even when he seeks heights where the atmosphere becomes thin and cold, music remains an art of the soul, of its grief and sorrow. The songs of the people, from whom Bela Bartok is descended, still resound into the lonely spheres in which the spirit of a great composer sought a new truth