Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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 Words on Music, Perhaps: The Writings of Arthur Berger(2020) Kobuskie, Jennifer Miriam; Haldey, Olga; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When Arthur Berger (1912–2003) is mentioned in the history books, it is often as a mid-20th century American composer, or a practitioner and teacher of music theory who, during his tenure at Brandeis University, had trained a generation of theorists and composers. This dissertation aims to demonstrate that Berger made one of his most significant contributions to the history of 20th-century music as a writer of prose. As a full-time critic, his work was featured in major newspapers of New York and Boston, and nationally distributed periodicals. He helped found two music journals, contributed regularly to others, and authored two books. For decades, his voice was widely heard and broadly influential. His aesthetic views, stated boldly and unapologetically, helped shape the post-WWII discourse on modern, particularly American music, and continue to impact both public and scholarly debate on this topic. This study surveys Berger’s personal history as a writer, including his career as a music critic, his involvement with the creation of the scholarly journal Perspectives of New Music, his pioneering biography of Aaron Copland, and his seminal article on Stravinsky’s octatonicism. The dissertation also offers a detailed, comprehensive analysis of Berger’s voluminous corpus of writings, both published and unpublished, as well as his personal archive of notes, drafts, and correspondence, in order to elucidate his aesthetic principles, and his views on a broad variety of subjects related to modern music, such as neoclassicism, nationalism, innovation and tradition, the music of Stravinsky, Copland, and their American successors, as well as the role of classical music in American culture, and the place of American music in the world. Finally, the study is concerned with the reception of Berger’s ideas, his personal aesthetic evolution, and his lively involvement in his own reception.Item THE ROLE OF NEOCLASSICISM IN GENERALIZING TRADITION: INTEGRATING TEXTURAL, TONAL AND TOPICAL ELEMENTS AT THE KEYBOARD(2019) Chow, Ryan; Gowen, Bradford; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While neoclassicism is viewed as a reaction against tonal saturation of late Romanticism, this dissertation discusses an array of works (both within and outside the scope of interwar neoclassicism) that absorbed elements of the aesthetic. Beyond Martha Hyde’s description of the neoclassical impulse as a “metamorphic anachronism,” I propose that it can extend to the following: (1) an opposition (or apposition, as proposed by Marianne Kielian-Gilbert) between specific musical elements, (2) a capitalization on ahistorical aspects of tradition, and (3) a generalization of tradition by placing the predecessor as a special case of a larger phenomenon. The first category is exemplified through chromatic displacement technique in Francis Poulenc and modified dominants in John Ireland, illustrating the coexistence of conventional periodicity with disruptive tonal practices. The second category manifests through non-contemporaneous musical codes, such as the use of musical topics (originally put forth by Leonard Ratner) within a neoclassical framework as points of departure from tradition, or the hypermeasure (proposed by Edward Cone) that capitalizes on Baroque and Romantic-era sequencing. The third category relates to Harold Bloom’s fourth revisionary ratio of a successor de-individuating the predecessor. For example, the generalization of thematic transformation while disregarding thematic character, and the generalization of the asymmetrical Fortspinnung while disregarding metric regularity, are exhibited in the works of Ernst Krenek and Peter Mennin respectively. In summary, this dissertation identifies how neoclassical-leaning composers confront tradition without placing themselves subordinate to their predecessors, forcing the listener to engage at a more fundamental level of musical syntax. The repertoire presented in this dissertation were premiered between 2018 and 2019 in the Joseph & Alma Gildenhorn Recital Hall at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland, College Park. Recital recordings are accessible through the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library at the University.