Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item THE CORNO D'AMORE - A BAROQUE TRANSCRIPTION PROJECT(2019) Drew, Justin Thomas; Miller, Gregory E; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Throughout my musical career, I have always enjoyed Baroque music, especially in a church setting. I have had some opportunities to experience this first hand on the horn, but realized that the Baroque repertoire available to a horn player is incredibly limited. Furthermore, there became a realization that French horn music students do not interact enough with Baroque music. While undergraduate Music Education and Performance majors seek a complete education and experience in performing all genres of music, horn players are often left with a void of music and techniques from the Baroque Period. It is also not common for students to own period instruments, nor is it common for university studios to own these instruments. The baroque horn also follows Baroque tuning A=415, which is far lower than the modern traditional tuning, which is A=440. Therefore, I have created four Baroque transcriptions for Horn and Organ to add to the horn repertoire. Two transcriptions were taken from Oboe concertos and two from Oboe D’amore concertos. All of these works were originally accompanied with small string ensemble and continuo. I chose Oboe and Oboe D’amore because the melodies were accessible for the modern day horn player, where flute, violin, viola, and cello features brushed up against virtuosity. These melodies also embody four different types of baroque style and melodic mastery. The project includes a professional recording, the sheet music of the transcriptions, and a CD cover with liner notes. The CD was recorded at Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church on November 10, 12, 17, and 25, 2019. The horn used was a Lukas Horn #4 with an Osmun Chicago cup and Geyer rim. The organ is a Rieger Tracker Organ designed by Josef von Glatter-Gotz in 1973-4, performed on by Julie Vidrick Evans. My engineer and producer was Neil Brown, through the recording company Arts Laureate. The arrangements were created using the music writing software, Sibelius. The cover photo is credited to Kyung Jung at Yellowhale Photography.Item Isle of Gold - a story in music(2018) Samson, Matthew David Arling; Gibson, Robert; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Out of the great abundance of stories available to humans throughout history, opera composers and their librettists have favored a surprisingly small subset of these stories in the production of their works. Thus, a significant amount of very interesting subject matter has remained largely unexplored by the compositional community. One such seldom attempted story is Plato’s tale of Atlantis, both its existence and its fall. At present, only a small handful of composers have attempted large scale musico-dramatic works dealing with the legend, and arguably none of these works have taken hold in the greater operatic canon, if they are even known in the first place. Despite its neglect, this particular legend, which depicts the conflict of an idealized primal state with one ruined by arrogance and both of their eventual destructions by catastrophe, is ripe for interpretation. This work is an attempt to begin to begin to address the story’s neglect. My focus in exploring the topic and composing this stage piece has been foremost on the idea of repetition, and key to that exploration has been the use of carefully structured anachronism. Symbolically, Atlantis can be made to function as a stand-in for nearly any powerful nation or empire in nearly any time period. As such, textually, “the Isle” as it is called in the piece, is ostensibly placed in the distant past; however, there are textual elements that problematize this assumption, such that it could indeed be set in the distant future or even as a continuously repeating event, removed from the normal workings of time. Similarly, the orchestration consists of essentially only instruments present in an early baroque orchestra, and while they are generally asked to play in a conventionally baroque style, the harmonic, melodic, and formal material is decidedly contemporary. Furthermore, from time to time, both the instruments and voices are asked to perform techniques and in styles borrowed from many different times and places. All these elements and others taken together serve to underscore the universality and timelessness of the tale, especially highlighting its relevance to the modern world and our place in it.Item FROM PICTURE TO SOUND: A CONDUCTOR'S STUDY GUIDE TO THE ST. JOHN PASSION OF JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH(2018) Kim, Kieun Steve; Maclary, Edward; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bach’s music is filled with musical allegories. These musico-theological symbols are often concealed to modern eyes and ears. Scholars have worked diligently to help modern musicians gain a better understanding of this learned musician’s musical allegories, theological symbols, and, in the words of John Butt, his dialogue with modernity. It is the conductor’s job to help reveal the meaning of these symbols so that the performers can translate the visual representation of the score into a sonic realization for the listeners. This study guide to the St. John Passion is an attempt to help conductors understand Bach’s musical, textual, and theological intent. The St. John Passion was written for a liturgical purpose— to edify Bach’s Leipzig congregation and to help them comprehend the essential meaning of the Passion story. The work is both a musical proclamation of Scripture and a detailed dramatization of that narrative. Therefore, it is critical for conductors to examine not only the musical structures and motives, but also to study the text carefully. The Passion text of John’s gospel is unique and differs from the Synoptic Gospels. This dissertation provides musical analyses of this Passion by examining key passages of the Scripture in the original Greek and Hebrew, and using the lenses of theologians by whom Bach was influenced. This includes relevant scholarship as well as examinations of musical interpretations of recordings of the St. John Passion by acclaimed conductors through comparisons of score illustrations of each conductor’s interpretations. Deepening the surface level understanding of the text, and Bach’s depiction of it, will broaden the conductor’s choices to intensify both musical rhetoric and dramatic sound. This method of 1) analyzing musical motives and structures, 2) studying exemplary interpretations, and 3) dissecting key words of the biblical texts in the original languages will enhance the understanding of Bach’s theology and enable the conductor to encourage the musicians to perform Bach’s music more enlightened and inspired. This, in turn, will strengthen the conductor’s and the performers’ rendition of the St. John Passion and augment the power and drama of its music.Item Transcribing Viola da Gamba Literature for the Modern Double Bass(2015) Alger, Shawn; Murdock, Katherine; Manzo, Anthony; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The double bass, in its modern incarnation, dates from the late nineteenth century, which means that any performer wishing to play solo music from an earlier era must resort to transcriptions. For modern bassists wishing to play music from the Baroque era, the options of existing transcriptions are severely limited. Currently a handful of composers dominate the landscape of baroque music for double bass, and the music tends to borrow from either violin or cello repertoire. The fact of the matter is that Baroque music is tremendously underrepresented when compared against the entire oeuvre of available music for the double bass. This dissertation will present a collection of transcriptions from viola da gamba literature in a variety of styles and genres in order to illustrate the potential this music has for expanding the baroque repertoire for double bass. The scope of this paper will include solo music with accompaniment, unaccompanied transcriptions, and music for two and four basses. In transcribing these works I have kept as close to the original manuscripts and publications as possible with regards to bowing and notation. Deviations from the original have been clearly marked so that modern performers may decide for themselves how faithfully to reproduce what the composer wrote. It will also serve as a starting point toward reinventing this wonderful body of music that has heretofore been taken for granted.Item The Landscapes of Gaspard Dughet: Artistic Identity and Intellectual Formation in Seventeenth-Century Rome(2013) Cantor, Sarah; Colantuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The paintings of Gaspard Dughet (1615-1675), an artist whose work evokes the countryside around Rome, profoundly affected the representation of landscape until the early twentieth century. Despite his impact on the development of landscape painting, Dughet is recognized today as the brother-in-law of Nicolas Poussin rather than for his own contribution to the history of art. His paintings are generally classified as decorative works without subjects that embody no higher intellectual pursuits. This dissertation proposes that Dughet did, in fact, represent complex ideals and literary concepts within his paintings, engaging with the pastoral genre, ideas on spirituality expressed through landscape, and the examination of ancient Roman art. My study considers Dughet's work in the context of seventeenth-century literature and antiquarian culture through a new reading of his paintings. I locate his work within the expanding discourse on the rhetorical nature of seventeenth-century art, exploring questions on the meaning and interpretation of landscape imagery in Rome. For artists and patrons in Italy, landscape painting was tied to notions of cultural identity and history, particularly for elite Roman families. Through a comprehensive examination of Dughet's paintings and frescoes commissioned by noble families, this dissertation reveals the motivations and intentions of both the artist and his patrons. The dissertation addresses the correlation between Dughet's paintings and the concept of the pastoral, the literary genre that began in ancient Greece and Rome and which became widely popular in the early seventeenth century. The pastoral world, with its melancholic atmosphere and nostalgia for antiquity, was quickly assimilated into landscape painting, most effectively in the work of Poussin and Claude, and also in Dughet's paintings. For artists in the seventeenth century, the pastoral landscape was a place of meditation on the ancient past and the future inevitability of death, a theme present in Dughet's work as well. The dissertation reveals connections to ancient Roman paintings unearthed at the time and to antiquarian culture and contemporary interpretations of early frescoes. This study presents a renewed and comprehensive appreciation for Dughet's landscapes and a more nuanced view of his intellectual contribution as an artist.Item Writing at the Edge of the Empire: The Poetics of Piracy in the Early Modern Atlantic World(2012) Payton, Jason M.; Bauer, Ralph; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines four pirate-authored texts from the early modern period, each of which centers on the development of piracy in the Atlantic world. Contrary to popular opinion, not all pirates were illiterate thugs. Many wrote about their experiences, and their narratives were immensely popular among early modern readers. I focus on the generic choices pirate-authors made as they crafted their narratives for popular consumption, particularly their use of chivalric romance, which they drew on to present "enchanted" histories of the Atlantic world. By representing themselves as chivalric knights-errant, pirate-authors transformed themselves from thieves to gallant knights, they recast their raids as knightly quests, and they re-imagined their gruesome acts of violence as heroic feats of daring at arms. The romance form thus allowed pirate-authors to create modern spaces of agency within empire that resembled the mythical landscapes of the medieval chivalric tradition. It also allowed them to fashion critiques of empire, which increasingly limited the social mobility of the lower classes from which most pirates hailed. Pirates' reflections on the violence of empire offer a disenchanting picture of the development of imperialism during the colonial American period. My dissertation begins with Sir Walter Raleigh's 1596 Discovery of Guiana, which narrates the author's voyage to Guiana simultaneously as a knightly quest for the mythical city of El Dorado and as a mercantilist voyage for England. Raleigh was met with severe criticism for his decision to frame the history of his voyage as a romance quest because the notion of the adventure-quest celebrated the freedom of the individual apart from the power of the state. The conflict between the interests of the pirate-as- knight-errant and the aims of the state became even more pronounced during the seventeenth century. I trace the evolution this conflict in three narratives written by Caribbean pirates--also known as buccaneers--during the late seventeenth century: Alexander Oliver Exquemelin's 1678 Buccaneers of America, Raveneau de Lussan's 1689 Journal of a Voyage Made into the South Sea, and William Dampier's 1697 New Voyage Round the World. Whereas Raleigh could envision his adventure-quest as part of a larger narrative of English imperial expansion, buccaneer authors understood piracy as a utopian escape from the hegemony of empire. For Exqmemelin and de Lussan, piracy represents an alternative to their lives as servants. The chivalric ethos that Exquemelin and de Lussan projected onto pirate society allows them to level a devastating critique of the debasing nature of empire. For Dampier, representing his circumnavigation of the globe as the adventure-quest of a troupe of knights-errant allows him to imagine a global space in which pirates could create a society completely free from constraints of imperial governance. Ultimately, my dissertation demonstrates that the most unlikely band of literati in the Atlantic world made significant contributions to the development of American literary forms. By adopting the Old World form of the chivalric romance to New World contexts, pirate-authors created spaces of individual agency at the edge of the imperial domain, which allowed them to offer sharp critiques of the systems of exploitation and subjugation that structured imperial culture. The narratives I treat here reveal that the history of early America cannot simply be told as the history of states and empires. Rather, my research shows that early American scholars must broaden their disciplinary horizons to include the literary contributions of trans-national, trans-Atlantic subjects whose lives at the edge of empire allowed them to pursue lives of political transgression and fashion narratives that challenged progressivist narratives of imperial history.