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How to compose a PhD thesis in music composition

I start from the principle that composition is a historical lineage of techniques that have traditionally been applied to music but need not be. To illustrate this, I apply composition principles to the writing of this PhD thesis. In describing this process, I draw parallels between the music work I have composed during 2013-2017 and the process of thesis writing. Along the way, I show how quantization is not only central to my composition practice but fundamental to the act of composing; I rethink the basic epistemological principles of PhD research, using John Cage's ideology of chance and Arthur Koestler's idea of bisociation; I develop a new set of categories for classifying artworks that use combinatorics, under the umbrella neologism 'completism'; expand upon James Tenney's ideas to create a new typology of musical form based on completist principles; and finish by composing the bibliography, font, page-layout, semantics, word choice, and syntax of the Conclusion of this thesis.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:732921
Date January 2017
CreatorsPocknee, David Antony
ContributorsLim, Liza ; Cassidy, Aaron
PublisherUniversity of Huddersfield
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/34371/

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