"Transformations" is a three-movement work that is approximately 17'30" in duration and is scored for full orchestra. The piece is a tone poem and employs extended tonal pitch content. Each of the three movements is based upon a cell of planing intervals: the cell of I. Molto Moderato consists of two parallel fifths played by the double basses; the cell of II. Adagio is three intervals (a seventh, third, and fourth) sounded first by the violins; and the cell of III. Allegretto is four intervals (a sixth followed by three fourths) played by the bassoons, violas, and double basses. The planing motifs, which evoke both medieval and contemporary popular styles, recur throughout the piece with varied pitch content (including inversions) and in a variety of orchestrations (e.g. in "transformations," as implied by the title).

After 1885, Richard Strauss began to create program music due to Alexander Ritter¡¦s suggestion. Among these works, the most important were the 7 tone poems. Tone poem ¡mDon Quixote¡n was composted according to the play created by the Spanish writer Cervantes. Richard Strauss not only expressed the story by leading motive and tone painting, but also satirized the society. Furthermore, he unleashed his angry by the meaning of the story. My essay is divided into two major parts. The first is the biography of Richard Strauss as well as the characteristic of this tone poem. The second is the analysis of variation structure, motive development, tone painting skill, orchestration timbre and harmony disposition. I still discuss the rhythm, skill and terminology in advanced.

Composers of the 20th century express through intimate and personal language the conditions of the present, utilizing compositional techniques, forms, pitch and rhythmic language, and characteristics of Western composers, as well as looking towards non- Western music for the same. Each musical language, be it tonal, twelve-tone, modal, pitch-class, or derived from folk and non-Western material, is contained in a structural framework which is audibly recognizable, and controls the musical tapestry, processes, and results. Frequently composers use distinctive musical languages to portray different atmospheres, and thus allow each musical language to dominate the texture in order to create the desired contrast. But, jumping directly from one pitch language to another can create a sense of cacophony and loss of cohesion to the composition as a whole. In my composition I intend to show that by superimposing the structural parameters of one musical language onto another, it is possible to attain consistency and coherence, despite the underlying diversity. The composition is based on the story Heimferðin (The Journey Home) by Sigurður Rúnar Þrastarson (1961-1998). The composition is in five movements: I. Dawn; II. Dance and Devotion; III. Frolic; IV. Fury, V. Farwell. Each movement describes particular settings and events of the story. Internal events have been slightly reordered, but otherwise the composition follows the storyline from beginning to end. The final two minutes and twenty seconds of the composition are an original arrangement of a song, written in 1820, by the Danish composer P. C. Krossing (1793-1838).

This paper is intended to compliment and describe the body of work that has been produced within the time I have been enrolled as a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University's Photography and Film department. The paper will include information on both my MFA candidacy presentation as well as a description of the evolution of my artistic endeavors. The main focus of this document is to discuss my formal examination of performance based video works pertaining to the absurd as described by Camus, and later expressed by Samuel Beckett, also the role of the masculine body's physicality within ritualized actions.

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The portfolio contains two of Becky Llewellyn’s music compositions: an orchestral tone poem and a chamber opera score and libretto created to explore the process of producing a major work of music theatre from conception to performance. In both works, Llewellyn’s research has concentrated on her interest in structure and form between ideas, music and visual art and their relationship to each other. Rothko’s Red The first composition in her submission is her orchestral tone poem, Rothko’s Red, a tribute to US artist Mark Rothko, whose painting techniques questioned traditional forms of narrative and structure. The topographical matrix of Rothko’s Red contains vertical aural space introduced in a ‘keyed up’ range suggesting ‘redness’, gradually deepening until the bass predominates, retaining a widened spaciality at the peak moment. Horizontally, the piece is a long crescendo of extended phrases, at first lightweight, then filling out with each repetition, moving to a full expression of orchestral magnitude, then gradually subsiding. The tone poem passes limited melodies and harmonies around to and within the orchestral families, as if in one colour. Llewellyn’s use of individual dynamics for orchestral players is an experiment in aural equivalence of Rothko techniques, using ‘heard’, not ‘seen’ tone colours. The Portrait: a musical tribute to Stella Bowen Llewellyn’s chamber opera is based on books, letters, diaries and family history research into the life of Adelaide-born writer and painter, Stella Bowen and three other writers. The opera’s libretto is structured as a series of songs reflecting Bowen’s paintings and life story. The chamber opera opens and closes in 1944, with Bowen as a WWII Australian war artist. The opera spans from 1917, when as a London art student, Bowen is introduced to editor/writer, Ford Madox Ford with whom she falls in love. The opera moves through to Paris and Ford’s subsequent love affair with writer Jean Rhys and his death in 1939. The Portrait is an exploration of how we know who we are and how, as artists, we choose to represent those insights. As the four main characters each wrote about themselves and each other, Llewellyn used their distinct content, style and aesthetic concerns to invent their musical and dramatic personae. The Portrait plays with ideas these four artists explored of extended metaphors, a shifting ambiguity in ‘artifice as a real story’, in an imagined dramatic musical work about real artists and writers; life as art and art as life. Among other themes in The Portrait; thanatos and eros, culture and morality, war and peace, fate and choice and opera as portraiture, is an underlying structural theme of time itself. Mythic time is explored as fairytale. Historical time ranges from 1920s chordal and dance motifs back to associations of medieval castles, where western-style Romantic love began. Personal, subjective experience of time is explored by most characters, as is the lack of artistic time given domestic commitments. Objective ‘time as limited’ is explored with Ford’s death and the impending death of the Australian bomber crew. Llewellyn focuses on the timebased art-form of music, while incorporating words, Bowen’s paintings and archival photographs in a chamber opera that explores the potential each art-form carries for revelation. / Thesis (M.Mus.) -- University of Adelaide, Elder Conservatorium of Music, 2007

Se Enkhbayar (b. 1956) is one of the most important contemporary Mongolian composers in China. His choral tone poem, Önchin Botog, integrates the traditional Mongolian musical elements Urtiin Duu (long song) and Khöömii (throat singing) with modern choral music and is one of the most representative works in the genre of modern Mongolian choral music. The purpose of this study is to provide a performance guidance for non-Mongolian musicians on Se Enkhbayar's work, Önchin Botog, by presenting his biographical and cultural backgrounds, discussing the use of traditional Mongolian singing styles, special rhythmic patterns (horse-step rhythm) and Chinese pentatonic scales. For conductors, this guide can shorten preparation time by providing musical analysis for artistic interpretation and practical points for sound effect creation. For solo singers, this guide will enable a Bel Canto singer to sing Urtiin Duu in Mongolian singing style. For Khöömii singers, this guide provides supplementary practical suggestions.