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Expectation as Narrative Strategy in Richard Wagner's Parsifal

Description: The story of Parsifal is presented in two manners: through action and through narrative. Using the formalist theories of Vladimir Propp, the overall narrative is articulated in three narrative episodes. This thesis interprets the structure of narrative episodes in Parsifal on the basis of expectation. Propp's theory of functions provides labels for an interpretive analysis. Levi-Strauss' reconstruction of Propp's functions into paired structures identifies key points in the drama as moments of … more
Date: August 1997
Creator: Straughn, Greg, 1972-
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Fourteen Seréstas of Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)

Description: The Fourteen Seréstas of Heitor Villa-Lobos comprise a group of songs that expresses Villa-Lobos's compositional technique for the voice. These songs are challenging as a topic because not much historical or analytical research has been done on them. I approach the topic by providing historical background on the modinha and how it relates to the serésta. This is followed by a descriptive analysis in the order of the set, which includes musical examples, chart diagrams, and comparisons of the se… more
Date: August 1999
Creator: Sánchez, Noé
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Sounding sacred: Interpreting musical and poetic trances.

Description: This essay investigates the relationship between trance and various musical and poetic expressions that accompany trance when it is interpreted as sacred. In other words, the aim of this investigation is to interpret how experiences of the entrancing power of the sacred come to expression with the sounds of music and poetry. I articulate such an interpretation through the following four sections: I) a discussion of the basic phenomenological and hermeneutic problems of interpreting what other… more
Date: May 2006
Creator: Mickey, Samuel Robert
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Yoon-Seong Cho's Jazz Korea: A Cross-cultural Musical Excursion

Description: This thesis examines Yoon-Seong Cho's critically acclaimed recording Jazz Korea, in which Cho unites Korean folk music and American jazz into a single form of expression. By reinterpreting Korean folk music through jazz, Cho stimulated interest in the Korean jazz scene and a renewed interest in Korean traditional folk songs. The goal of the thesis, the first musicological essay about Yoon-Seong Cho, is to understand how Cho's diasporic experiences affected his music by leading to a process of s… more
Date: May 2008
Creator: Joo, Hwajoon
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Selected works for solo frame drums by B. Michael Williams.

Description: In 1993, American percussionist and composer B. Michael Williams published Four Solos for Frame Drums. This collection is considered the first work written exclusively for solo frame drum in Western notation. Williams primarily modeled his solos around traditional rhythms and techniques from Middle Eastern musical traditions as well as Glen Velez's virtuosic style of playing frame drums. He also drew influence from the music of South India and Sub-Saharan Africa. Williams intentionally combines… more
Date: August 2009
Creator: Nicholson, Jason Eugene
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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"Being" a Stickist: A Phenomenological Consideration of "Dwelling" in a Virtual Music Scene

Description: Musical instruments are not static, unchanging objects. They are, instead, things that materially evolve in symmetry with human practices. Alterations to an instrument's design often attend to its ergonomic or expressive capacity, but sometimes an innovator causes an entirely new instrument to arise. One such instrument is the Chapman Stick. This instrument's history is closely intertwined with global currents that have evolved into virtual, online scenes. Virtuality obfuscates embodiment, but … more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Hodges, Jeff
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Native American Elements in Piano Repertoire by the Indianist and Present-Day Native American Composers

Description: My paper defines and analyzes the use of Native American elements in classical piano repertoire that has been composed based on Native American tribal melodies, rhythms, and motifs. First, a historical background and survey of scholarly transcriptions of many tribal melodies, in chapter 1, explains the interest generated in American indigenous music by music scholars and composers. Chapter 2 defines and illustrates prominent Native American musical elements. Chapter 3 outlines the timing of sev… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Thomas, Lisa Cheryl
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Otha Turner Family Picnic: Occupying Musical and Social Space In-Between Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Description: This thesis concerns African-American fife and drum band music, a pre-blues genre that was a fixture at summer picnics in the Mississippi hill country from the late nineteenth century through most of the twentieth century. The picnics held a unique place in African-American life, a crossroads of juke joints and churches, blues and gospel, individuality and family. Using the African-American paradigm of a Saturday night / Sunday morning people, I describe the Otha Turner Family Picnic, the last … more
Date: May 2011
Creator: Vermilyea, Carl P.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Performing the “Classical”: the Gurukula System in Karnatic Music Society

Description: Recent scholarship has revealed that the representation of Karnatic music as a “classical” art form in South Indian society was a complicated process bound to the agendas of larger early twentieth-century nationalist projects in India. This thesis explores the notions of classicalness as they are enacted in Karnatic music society through the oral transmission process from guru to shishya, or disciple. Still considered one of the most important emblems of the “classical,” the gurukula (lit. “g… more
Date: August 2012
Creator: Harris, Myranda Leigh
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Creation of a Performance Edition of Gustav Mahler's Lieder Und Gesänge Aus Der Jungendzeit and Its Role in Bass Tuba Pedagogy

Description: When the tubist is first introduced to the bass tuba, Mahler's songs can be used as effective solo material. Through transcription, practice, and performance of art songs, novice bass tubists focus primarily on fundamental musical components such as tone quality, intonation, breathing, and musicianship. By identifying deficiencies in the current solo repertoire as related to the early stages of development on the bass tuba, I intend to address the need for more solo works through the transcri… more
Date: December 2012
Creator: Baker, Jeffrey T.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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It's Not Fusion: Hybridity in the Music of Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa

Description: This thesis concerns the performance of identity in the music of Indian American jazz musicians Rudresh Mahanthappa and Vijay Iyer. In combining the use of Indian classical music elements with jazz, Iyer and Mahanthappa create music that is inextricably tied to their multifaceted identities. Traditional musicological analysis is juxtaposed with a theoretical framework that draws on postcolonial theory and the history of Asian immigrant populations to the U.S. I chronicle the interactions betwee… more
Date: December 2012
Creator: Govind, Arathi
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Tubas on the Rise: the Tuba As a Signifier of 21st Century Mexican-American Music Culture in Southern California

Description: Banda is a rural Mexican brass band genre from the state of Sinaloa that became popular among immigrant populations of Los Angeles in the 1990s. In contemporary banda, the tuba has acquired a more prominent role than it held in traditional banda. The tuba has shifted from the traditional background harmonic and rhythmic function to a significant and new placement with the front line melodic instruments. The focus on tubas in modern incarnations of banda has helped it become a staple in acoustic… more
Date: August 2015
Creator: Orth, Jesse
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Composing Symbolism's Musicality of Language in Fin-de-siècle France

Description: 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… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Varvir Coe, Megan Elizabeth, 1982-
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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The Most Expressionist of All the Arts: Programs, Politics, and Performance in Critical Discourse about Music and Expressionism, c.1918-1923

Description: This dissertation investigates how German-language critics articulated and publicly negotiated ideas about music and expressionism in the first five years after World War I. A close reading of largely unexplored primary sources reveals that "musical expressionism" was originally conceived as an intrinsically musical matter rather than as a stylistic analog to expressionism in other art forms, and thus as especially relevant to purely instrumental rather than vocal and stage genres. By focusing … more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Carrasco, Clare
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Opera and Society in Early-Twentieth-Century Argentina: Felipe Boero's El Matrero

Description: Premiering at the twilight of the gauchesco era and the dawn of Argentine musical Modernism, El matrero (1929) by Felipe Boero (1884-1958) remains underexplored in terms of its social milieu and artistic heritage. Instantly hailed as a masterpiece, the work retains a place in the local repertory, though it has never been performed internationally. The opera draws on myths of the gaucho and takes further inspiration from the energized intellectual environment surrounding the one-hundred-year ann… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Sauceda, Jonathan
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Negotiating Decades of Change in America: The Houston Chinese Traditional Music Group

Description: For over two hundred years, Chinese immigrants have brought ancient customs and musical traditions to their new homes in America. As in many immigrant communities, a new heritage that embodies and exhibits both the quintessential features of American culture and genuine Chinese heritage have come together to form new expressive cultures that are uniquely "Chinese American." As the youngest of the major American Chinese immigrant centers, the city of Houston, Texas provides an exemplary example … more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Mei, Yuxin
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Listening in the Living Room: The Pursuit of Authentic Spaces and Sounds in Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Punk Rock

Description: In the Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) do-it-yourself (DIY) punk scene, participants attempt to adhere to notions of authenticity that dictate whether a band, record label, performance venue, or individual are in compliance with punk philosophy. These guiding principles champion individual expression, contributions to one's community (scene), independence from the mainstream music industry and consumerism, and the celebration of amateurism and the idea that everyone should "do it yourself." While each … more
Date: December 2017
Creator: Peters, Sean (Sean Louis)
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Expanding the Violin's Possibilities in Chinese Music: A Case Study of Transcription and Performance Issues Related to Pipa Music Played on the Violin

Description: In recent years, a large part of the erhu's repertoire has been arranged for performance on the violin and vice versa. Given the difficulties involved in transcribing the music of plucked or woodwind instruments for the violin, the erhu has been the most popular choice for transcribing Chinese music for the violin. However, the erhu and violin are radically dissimilar instruments based on different principles. Pipa music is an essential part of traditional Chinese music from as early as 202 BCE… more
Date: August 2018
Creator: Wang, Tracy (Chun-Chia)
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Investigation, Interpretation and Internalization in Concerto Piccolino for Vibraphone by Milton Babbitt

Description: Written in 1999, Concerto Piccolino is a part of the Composer's Guild of New Jersey Vibraphone Commission, which contains a collection of twelve soli written exclusively for vibraphone. Concerto Piccolino presents vibrant opportunities for both performer and listener to experience the compositional world of Milton Babbitt. With its limited register, ability to control duration and create extreme dynamics, the vibraphone serves as an appropriate vehicle for Babbitt's multi-dimensional style. The… more
Date: December 2018
Creator: Yakas, James
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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Shaping Hagiography through Liturgy: Music for the Patron Saints of Three Cathedrals in Medieval Aquitaine

Description: While the development of hagiography over time has long attracted the attention of medievalists, scholars have not fully explored the critical role of the liturgy in prompting and transmitting these changes. This dissertation examines the liturgies for the patron saints of three musical and ecclesiastical centers in medieval Aquitaine: the cathedrals of Saint-Trophime in Arles, Saint-Just-et-Saint-Pasteur in Narbonne, and Saint-Étienne in Toulouse. Through the music, texts, and ritual actions o… more
Date: December 2018
Creator: Recek, Andrea
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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