Master of Music / Department of Music / Reginald Pittman / This Master’s Report contains extended program notes on the works performed on a graduate rectial of music for a Baritone. The text includes biographical information on each composer and an analysis of each piece performed. Text translations are included in the body of the discussions. The pieces discussed are Handel’s “See The Raging Flames Arise,” from Joshua, Poulenc’s Le Bestiaire, Strauss’s Zueignung, Nichts and Cäcilie, Puccini’s “Questo amor, vergogna mia,” from Edgar, Jason Robert Brown’s Moving Too Fast, The Next Ten Minutes, The River Won’t Flow and She Cries and lastly Jonathon Reid Gealt’s September of ’92. The graduate recital was given in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Music degree in vocal performance on April 7, 2014. It was performed in All Faiths Chapel at Kansas State University. It featured the piano talents of Amanda Arrington, Paul Meissbach and Norma Roozeboom, the vocal talents of Reginald Pittman, Elise Poehling and Patricia Thompson, and the insrumental talents of Nolan Groff and Craig Archer.

There exists between lyric poetry and music a bond that is at once tangible and grounded in practice, and yet that is indeterminate, a matter of perception as much as theory. From Graeco-Roman antiquity to the modern day, lyrical forms have brought together music and text in equal partnership: in archaic Greece, music and lyric poetry were inextricably (now irrecoverably) coupled; when lyric poetry flowered in the eighteenth century, composers harnessed text to music in order to create the new and fully integrated genre of Lieder; and in our contemporary age, the connection between word and music is perhaps most keenly felt in pop music and song 'lyrics'. In 2016, the conferral of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Bob Dylan brought to wider public attention the nature of lyric's poetical-musical bond: can Dylan be considered a poet if the meaning, syntax and expression of his words are dependent upon music? Is music supplementary to the words or are the two so harnessed that the music is in fact a facet of the poetic expression? The connection between music and poetry is perfectly clear in such integrated lyric forms as these, but a more indeterminate connection can also be felt in 'purely' musical or poetic works - or at least in the way that we perceive them - as our postRomantic, adjectival use of the word 'lyrical' shows. Describing music as lyrical often suggests that it carries an extra-musical significance, a deeply felt emotion, something akin to verbal expression, while a lyrical poem brings with it an emotive aurality and a certain musicality. Text and music of lyrical quality may, therefore, invoke the other for the purpose of expression and emotion so long as our understanding of lyric forms remains conditioned by the appreciation of an implied music-poetry relationship This thesis works within the overlap of music and poetry in order to explore the particular lyric voice of Catullus in the context of his twentieth-century musical reception. Whilst some of Catullus's poems may have been performed musically, what we know of poetry circulation, publication and recitation in first-century BCE Rome suggests that the corpus was essentially textual. Nevertheless, Catullus's poetry was set to music centuries later, not in reconstruction of an ancient model, but in new expression, suggesting not only that composers of the twentieth century found themes in Catullus's poetry that resonated in their own contemporary world but that they found a particular musicality, something in the poetry that lent itself to musical form. I argue that it is in these works of reception that we can most clearly identify the essence of Catullan lyricism. Moreover, by considering the process of reception, this thesis is able to take a broader view of lyric, identifying traits and characteristics that are common to both music and poetry, thus transcending the boundaries of individual art forms in order to consider the genre in larger, interdisciplinary terms.

Richard Strauss's Duett-Concertino for Clarinet and Bassoon with Strings and Harp, AV 147 was one of the last works written by this celebrated composer. This double concerto has been largely unrecognized by performers and scholars until a recent surge in recorded performances. Some factors that hinder performances of the Duett-Concertino include unusual scoring and difficult rhythmic passages, as well as a lack of acknowledgement or understanding of the programmatic elements represented in the music. Sketches and letters show that the Duett-Concertino was inspired by a fairytale, which may have been the popular Beauty and the Beast. The programmatic analysis in this study examines the musical gestures of the piece, which, when combined with the cues provided in the sketches and letters, construct a musical interpretation of the fairytale. Recognition of the extra-musical features of the Duett-Concertino is essential for an effective performance and, in turn, creates additional performance possibilities such as narration and choreography.

After the conclusion of World War II, Richard Strauss’s activities and compositions came under intense scrutiny as scholars tried to understand his position with respect to the National Socialist regime. Their conclusions varied, some describing Strauss as a Nazi sympathizer, some as a victim of Nazism, with others concluding that Strauss was neither a sympathizer nor a victim, merely politically naïve. Among the latter was Strauss’s friend and biographer, Willi Schuh, who ardently defended the composer’s activities during the Nazi period. While Schuh asserted that Strauss’s music had no direct political ties to the “Third Reich”, Strauss’s 1938 opera, Friedenstag, demonstrates that he was, in fact, politically aware and capable of composing a work replete with conscious political overtones. The correspondence between Strauss and his Jewish librettist, Stefan Zweig, shows that Strauss deliberately chose to compose Friedenstag in the face of his disillusionment with the Nazi government. Although initially hailed as the first Nazi opera, elements of Friedenstag’s political message resist appropriation by Hitler’s regime. While addressing the pro-Nazi implications through a close study of the libretto and score, this thesis will argue that Friedenstag was composed as a tribute to peace and a response to the increasingly hostile political climate.

Die zentrale Fragestellung dieser Arbeit ist, welche Impulse der Konzertagent Hermann Wolff (1845-1902) dem Berliner Musikleben im Zeitraum zwischen der Gründung seiner Konzertdirektion 1880 und seinem Tod 1902 gab. Um diese Frage zu beantworten, werden seine Tätigkeit und sein Wirkungskreis untersucht und Umfang, Grad sowie die Natur seines Einflusses ausgewertet. Diese Arbeit weist nach, dass sich der Einfluss seiner Tätigkeit auf das Berliner Musikleben nicht nur in der Quantität der stattgefundenen Konzerte, sondern auch in ihrer künstlerischen Qualität und in ihrem Inhalt (Programmgestaltung, Aufführende, Konzertstätten, Programmhefterstellung usw.) zeigt. Sie legt auch dar, dass er zwischen den damaligen europäischen Musikmetropolen einen Personen- und Informationsaustausch vermittelte und dadurch bei der Entstehung eines Standards im Konzertleben eine wichtige Rolle spielte.

A performance tradition stemming from the 19th century permitted lied accompanists to deviate considerably from the notated score when a flexible reaction to concrete performance situations was necessary. In this article some of these ‘accompanist’s licences’, as well as their decreasing acceptance in 20th century’s performance style, are described according to written sources. A comparative analysis of recordings of the lied “Zueignung” op. 10 No. 8 by Richard Strauss illustrates exemplarily the decline of ‘accompanist’s licences’ during the decades after 1900. Finally, the results are interpreted against the background of general developments in musical performance style.

In this dissertation, I explore the musical prosody of the literary symbolists and the influence of this prosody on fin-de-siècle French music. Contrary to previous categorizations of music as symbolist based on a characteristic "sound," I argue that symbolist aesthetics demonstrably influenced musical construction and reception. My scholarship reveals that symbolist musical works across genres share an approach to composition rooted in the symbolist concept of musicality of language, a concept that shapes this music on sonic, structural, and conceptual levels. I investigate the musical responses of four different composers to a single symbolist text, Oscar Wilde's one-act play Salomé, written in French in 1891, as case studies in order to elucidate how a symbolist musicality of language informed their creation, performance, and critical reception. The musical works evaluated as case studies are Antoine Mariotte's Salomé, Richard Strauss's Salomé, Aleksandr Glazunov's Introduction et La Danse de Salomée, and Florent Schmitt's La Tragédie de Salomé. Recognition of symbolist influence on composition, and, in the case of works for the stage, on production and performance expands the repertory of music we can view critically through the lens of symbolism, developing not only our understanding of music's role in this difficult and often contradictory aesthetic philosophy but also our perception of fin-de-siècle musical culture in general.

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A digital music edition that follows the principles implemented in the fully-digital, MEI-coded Digital Interactive Mozart Edition, pursued by the Mozarteum Foundation and the Packard Humanities Institute, has many advantages over conventional analog editions. One advantage is greater transparency, which is achieved not only at the level of the material, e. g. the inclusion of digital images of the sources, but above all by making editorial processes and decisions visible in the edition itself. In the digital edition, the Critical Report, a defining component of any critical edition and often physically separate from the edited musical text, becomes part of the overall digital code. The philological findings and editorial processes reported encompass the entire range of forms of expression, from verbal comments and annotations to pure code and non-verbal, largely visual communication strategies. Therefore, the format of the traditional printed Critical Report, which is mainly made up of text and tables, dissolves and is replaced by an immaterial, non-delimitable field of data, information, references and media for which the term Critical Documentation is more appropriate.