Music Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2796
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Item Leonard Bernstein's "MASS": An Introductory Guide for the Developing Conductor(2022) Goinz, Matthew; Maclary, Edward; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In June 1966, a year after “Chichester Psalms” premiered, Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis approached Leonard Bernstein with an invitation to write the piece that would open the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. Bernstein was still int he midst of his music directorship of the New York Philharmonic and fielding guest conducting invitations from the top orchestras of the world. Tasked with honoring an immensely popular fallen President whose Catholic faith was central to his identity while simultaneously celebrating the immeasurable complexity of the United States of America, Bernstein surely felt the weight of this monumental commission. “MASS” would become the largest, most personal, and most controversial composition of Bernstein’s career. Both loved and loathed, “MASS” is an important work in Bernstein’s compositional oeuvre and, indeed, the modern choral-orchestral and theatrical canons. It is also a highly complex piece of music and theater that presents extraordinary organizational and financial challenges to those who would produce it. These obstacles, in turn, create a stumbling block to student conductors who might consider studying it. My hope is that this paper offers these student conductors a tangible, pragmatic place to start their journey with one of the great artistic achievements of the late 20th century.Item “As We Circle The World”: A Performative Ethnography of Irish Step Dance and Music in the United States and Japan(2018) Topper, Julia; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I examine current practices of modern competitive Irish step dance and feis music accompaniment through case studies conducted in the United States and Japan. More than twenty years after Riverdance significantly heightened the visibility of Irish dance both in Ireland and abroad, what do contemporary transnational practices of Irish step dance and music look and sound like and how do we compare these practices cross-culturally? Through a performance-based methodology, I contextualize the ways local and transnational Irish step dance and feis music (a specialized traditional Irish dance music used to accompany modern competitive Irish step dance) aesthetics and community values interact and construct one another in the “focus locations” of studios, feiseanna and oireachtasaí (local and regional competitions), performance stages, and the body— sites of performance where the modern competitive Irish step dance tradition is presented, embodied, and circulated. By discussing these local and transnational flows in grounded and particular key locations and experiences of performance, I demonstrate how Irish dance practices and ideas related to those practices are in constant negotiation and renegotiation between the major transnational regulatory body of An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha (The Commission of Irish Dance, CLRG) and the local cultures of the individual schools and dancers under its purview. As it goes through these processes of negotiation, Irish dance both homogenizes and diversifies, circulating through the transnational cultural cohort that practices it. This study informs several areas of research, including ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology, Irish dance and music studies, studies on processes of cultural globalization, and Japanese performing arts and cultural studies. In this work, I argue for a body- and performance-oriented approach to fieldwork and research for scholars of music as well as dance, noting the crucial role of embodiment for not only achieving a deeper understanding of the performing arts traditions they study, but also unveiling values and aesthetics fundamental to the communities they work with.Item KOREAN DANCE AND PANSORI IN D.C.: INTERACTIONS WITH OTHERS, THE BODY, AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY AT A KOREAN PERFORMING ARTS STUDIO(2009) Ash-Morgan, Lauren Rebecca; Provine, Robert C.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is the result of seventeen months' field work as a dance and pansori student at the Washington Korean Dance Company studio. It examines the studio experience, focusing on three levels of interaction. First, I describe participants' interactions with each other, which create a strong studio community and a women's "Korean space" at the intersection of culturally hybrid lives. Second, I examine interactions with the physical challenges presented by these arts and explain the satisfaction that these challenges can generate using Csikszentmihalyi's theory of "optimal experience" or "flow." Third, I examine interactions with discourse on the meanings and histories of these arts. I suggest that participants can find deeper significance in performing these arts as a result of this discourse, forming intellectual and emotional bonds to imagined people of the past and present. Finally, I explain how all these levels of interaction can foster in the participant an increasingly rich and complex identity.