John Barlow Roeder

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

The 1960s and 70s saw the flowering of the singer-songwriter style, which featured acoustic performances by artists who were the composers and lyricists of their own music. Reflecting their culture, their songs carried messages of personal and political significance. But their music is of technical as well as of social interest. Like classical art song, it often highlights lyrical meaning with various sorts of metric irregularities. In this dissertation, I closely analyze twenty-seven songs by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joni Mitchell, and Cat Stevens, in order to characterize the metric style of their songwriting and demonstrate their use of meter as an expressive device. To describe meter in this music requires theories more flexible than those usually applied to groove-based music. The analyses in this dissertation draw not only from theories of meter as a hierarchy of beat streams, but also upon theories of metrical process and prosody, in order to create transcriptions, to describe precisely listeners' sensations of meter, and to propose expressive rationales for metric settings. As an introduction to the style and the theoretical issues, Chapter 1 considers the problems of conceiving of meter in the expressively timed context of Mitchell’s “The Fiddle and the Drum.” Chapter 2 examines the existing methods for analyzing meter in music and poetry, in order to find some productive ways to analyze this metrically fluctuant repertoire. Chapter 3 considers transcription as analysis, showing that one's conception of meter informs and constrains musical representation, and therefore interpretations of lyrical meaning. In Chapter 4, I position 1960s and 70s songwriting in its cultural and political environment, reviewing some stylistic precedents to understand their influence, and determine its original metrical techniques. In the remaining analytical chapters, I examine meter-text expression in songs by Simon, Sainte-Marie, and Stevens (Chapter 5), the expression of character and lyrical personae in the narratives of three solo-piano-accompanied songs by Mitchell (Chapter 6), and how Dylan adapted text-expressive metric techniques of earlier genres in a variety of original ways (Chapter 7).

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Nicholas George Julius Ballanta (1893-1962) was a Sierra Leonean composer, ethnomusicologist and scholar. Trained in Western art and church music both in his home country and in the United States, he also conducted many years’ research into tribal music in Africa, and indeed was a pioneer in the study of West African music. His most complete opera is “Afiwa,” which sets the story of a girl who stands up to her father, the king of the Anlo Ewe tribe in Ghana, for atrocities he had committed at her birth. This study identifies what is uniquely African yet also Western about Ballanta’s “Afiwa”. In chapter 1, an introduction to the work is presented, including Ballanta’s biography. In Chapter 2, I determine what Ballanta believed to be characteristic of the African music he studied by examining his writings about rhythm, melody, form, texture and harmony. In Chapter 3, I cite numerous passages from “Afiwa” where these characteristics are found. My conclusion is that Ballanta combined both African and Western musical aspects in this opera. Chapter 4 goes beyond the music to explain, referencing the 2010 Cottey College production, aspects of the libretto, plot and staging that will help any future producers to understand the opera better so as to provide as authentic a production as possible.

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Despite the wealth of Canadian clarinet repertoire, most of the existing studies focus only on pedagogy for student performers. Its significance and merit can better be understood, however, by considering its cultural context, especially through the perspective of Canadian identity. Canada’s social framework directly impacts its musical output and reflects Canada’s core values, especially multiculturalism, which became government policy in 1971. Using multiculturalism as a focal point for examining Canadian clarinet repertoire, this study explores the ways in which music performance is a multicultural action rather than simply stating the fact of social pluralism. From a list of Canadian clarinet works reflecting multiculturalism, selected works have been chosen for detailed study. Empty Sky by Elliot Weisgarber, Sitpatsimoyi by Robert Rosen, Anerca II by Milton Barnes, and Between the Shore and the Ships by Derek Charke are four Canadian works which use the clarinet as a solo instrument and reflect the ethnocultural groups the Canadian Multiculturalism Act accommodates: immigrants, First Nations, and French-speaking people. Selected works are examined from contextual and musical perspectives for representations of ethnocultural identity. Likewise, performance decisions are discussed revealing how performance is a multicultural gesture requiring musical, contextual, and social analysis. The evaluation of these factors are consolidated into performance which musically illustrates an understanding and sensitivity to ethnocultural accommodation and comments on social issues making each performance a multicultural action.

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Teaching students to play the piano with more expression is one of the fundamental goals of piano pedagogy. The purpose of this study is to show how to help students develop careful and thoughtful articulation and interpretation, to gain experience performing contemporary piano works, as well as to improve their expression in the Classical and Romantic repertoire by having them learn selected pieces from Kurtág’s Játékok. Chapter 1 summarizes how musical “expression” has been defined by a number of philosophers, theorists, musicologists, and performers; it finds general agreement that four aspects of piano playing are especially important: tempo and flexible rhythm, dynamics, articulation, and sonority. Through analysis and discussion of many short pieces from Játékok Volume I – III, V – VII (Volumes IV and VIII are for piano duet and two pianos), Chapter 2 discusses how students can practice these aspects, learn a new music language through Kurtág’s notation, open their minds to accept new sound, and gain a complete knowledge of the music’s elaborate dynamic and expressive markings. The final chapter provides and discusses a progressive lesson plan, focusing on the major components that are demonstrated in Chapter 2. Kurtág’s Játékok is an excellent model for teaching, and it should be recognized and used as an important contribution to contemporary piano pedagogy.

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While jazz has become more integrated into academia, the repertoire that is commonly examined is out of date. Today's leading jazz scholars tend to focus on a handful of musicians who made their mark in the '50s and '60s. But jazz writing has continued to evolve in the last fifty years, particularly in regards to harmony. Though many rooted chords—including MM7, mm7, and Mm7—can be heard in succession, the relationships between adjacent chords are obscure, and rarely manifest the standard II–V–I progression found in classic jazz. Often, successive chords belong to different diatonic sets. Some composers have eliminated chord symbols from their lead sheets altogether, leaving harmonic interpretation and relationships even more open-ended.Since the inception of modal jazz in the late '50s, priority has been given to groups of notes and the ways that they can interact, as opposed to specific chords, keys, and function. This presents a challenge not only for harmonic analysis but also for improvising on these changes in performance. Nevertheless, pitch-class organization can often be heard to promote a hierarchical ranking amongst the chords, resulting in strong points of reference.This dissertation develops and applies a theory of referential sets, for analyzing and improvising over representative examples of chromatic chord successions found in some contemporary jazz. By treating pitch-classes outside the collection as alterations, this theory provides a way to hear successions of seemingly unrelated chords as derived from such collections, which are in turn supported by global referential tonics. This is analogous to traditional, hierarchical ways of hearing secondary dominants and other chromaticism, but with different restrictions on the types of alterations allowed. It therefore describes more variegated progressions, and also allows referential sets to be different and larger than diatonic sets, while still providing the traditional benefits of harmonic analysis, such as the identification of continuities, recurring patterns of root successions, cadences, and other formal processes and relations that remain paramount in much of today's jazz writing.

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The various genres of North American popular music developed since the 1950s are distinctive for their use of short repeating accompanimental patterns called grooves. Such groove-based popular music often includes many distinctive metrical features that cannot be reflected in standard hierarchical representations of metric structure, such as polyphonic textures, anacrusis, and syncopation. As a result, one crucial aspect of an important modern musical practice has been analytically underappreciated.The processual theory of meter developed by Christopher Hasty offers an alternative analytical framework that, by characterizing meter in terms of particular and constantly changing durations unfolding in time, has the potential to illuminate the important metric features of grooves in a range of popular music genres. By using and further developing such a comprehensive metrical model, popular music scholars can move beyond an existing vernacular that is often inadequate for in-depth musical discussion, and connect analytical observations to an in-time, felt experience, whether in dancing, listening, or performance contexts.In order to fully explore the benefits of this approach to meter in groove-based popular music, this dissertation analyzes a diverse sample of the repertoire from several perspectives. After a general introduction and establishment of the methodological approach, Chapters 3 and 4 detail metric aspects of specific genres of popular music (disco and Motown), while Chapter 5 focuses on a specific technique of groove composition, the buildup, that occurs in a wide range of musical genres. Chapter 6 incorporates the information gained in the preceding chapters into an analysis of a modern groove composition by Janelle Monáe. Throughout, particular metric features of the groove mentioned above are described and theorized in detail, as is the definition of the groove itself. Metric theory is also augmented with deeper consideration of the interplay of repetition and forward drive; listener shifts in attention among durations of different sizes (level shift); and the role of timbre and production techniques in metric interpretations.

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No abstract available.