Music Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2796
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Item The Wind Band Works of the MENC Contemporary Music Project Library(2018) Coffill, Brian Albert; Votta, Michael; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been a continuous effort within the wind band profession to improve the quality of the available repertoire. From 1959 through 1973, the Music Educators National Conference (MENC) and the Ford Foundation contributed to this enterprise through the Contemporary Music Project (CMP), placing seventy-three promising young composers in-residence with public school systems across the United States of America. These composers were assigned to collaborate with school music programs to create a new body of literature suitable for performance by school bands, orchestras, and choirs. Hundreds of works were written, and, in the late years of the program, the participating composers were invited to submit representative compositions to the CMP Library, which was to become a publication house and resource for music educators. The works in this vast collected repository have since languished in obscurity; existing scholarship on the CMP Library is similarly meager, with little modern scholarship, none investigating the body of collected wind works. This dissertation reopens the investigation into the CMP from a modern perspective, shining a scholarly light onto this neglected portion of the wind repertoire. This study is in two parts: the first part defines the evolution of the modern wind band, framing the investigation into CMP repertoire in the context of present-day ensemble performance practice, then describes the Contemporary Music Project and the Contemporary Music Project Library in-context. The second examines the Contemporary Music Project Library works written specifically for wind bands, exploring each work with modern performance considerations in mind, and updating the 1969 MENC/CMP publication The CMP Library: Works for Band, Winds, and Percussion with new information on each composer and individual work, creating a set of resources for modern conductors and music educators to utilize for contemporary performances.Item The Ford Foundation-MENC Contemporary Music Project (1959-1973): A View of Contemporary Music in America(2013) Covey, Paul Michael; Davis, Shelley G; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Challenging the widespread belief that serial or otherwise atonal composers dominated the United States' contemporary music scene of the 1950s and '60s (a situation named the “serial tyranny” by Joseph Straus), this study of the Ford Foundation-funded Contemporary Music Project (CMP) concludes that tonality was prevailingly considered an acceptably “contemporary” compositional orientation at the time (1959-1973). The evidence examined includes music by the 73 composers-in-residence the CMP placed in public school systems and communities nationwide, as well as syllabi and lesson plans for 90 Project-sponsored courses on purportedly “contemporary” music, also spread throughout the country, most at college level. Both the former and the content of the latter are placed in tonal or atonal categories, and the result tabulated. The study is in four main parts: Part 1 gives a working definition of tonality and discusses the Project's early stages (1959-63), when it was called the Young Composers Project and featured only composer residencies. Throughout discussion of these residencies, the Project's absence of bias with regard to style is highlighted. Part 2 details its expansion, as the CMP, to include educational programs such as Seminars and Workshops (1964-1966). Part 3 concerns the Institutes for Music in Contemporary Education (IMCE)--which included experimental musicianship courses at 33 universities--and the final years of school system residencies. Part 4 outlines the Project's final years, which continued workshops and moved composer residencies from schools to communities. The study's account of the content of the CMP's educational programs provides a statistical image of the contemporary canon as of the mid-to-late 1960s: the works and composers from within then-living memory that were considered most significant. Tonal music forms unambiguously the greater portion of this canon, and is also prevalent within the output of the resident composers, a group including many later well-known names. In addition to these findings, the study documents the remarkable collaboration of numerous significant composers and other musical figures, with various individual proclivities, on a massive undertaking that had both the goal and effect of cultivating and promoting contemporary music in a full and open-minded range of styles.