College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Voices of the Cello: Speak, Sing, Play; An Aesthetic Examination of Style Periods in the Cello Repertoire and How They Relate to the Viability of Transcription(2019) Singer, Daniel Pecos; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This dissertation was produced in conjunction with three cello recitals as part of a Performance Dissertation Project. Each recital focuses on music from style periods ranging from the Baroque to the twenty-first century and seeks to demonstrate how the aesthetic language of a composer or style period affects the viability of transcription. The recitals also highlight the unique qualities of the cello, both when playing music originally for another instrument and when performing music specifically written for it. The first recital includes music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Franz Schubert. Bach’s Suite No. 6 in D major, BWV 1012—performed on a five-string Baroque cello—shows how the spoken quality of the Baroque idiom in Bach’s music allows for transcription between instruments. The Sonata in A minor for Arpeggione and Piano, D. 821 by Schubert offers an opportunity to expose the vocal quality of the ello while exploring the limitations of transcription in this aesthetic language so inspired by song. The second recital focuses on transcriptions within the violin family of instruments by including a transcription of the Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major, Op. 78 by Johannes Brahms, as well as César Franck’s Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano. While the Franck only needs minor adjustments for the cello version (the piano part is untouched), the Brahms is transposed from G major to D major in order to be suitable for the cello. The final recital completes the arc by culminating in music written specifically for the cello—music that would be impossible to imagine on any other instrument. First the Sonata for Solo Cello, Op.8 by Zoltán Kodály develops the unique sound of scordatura by lowering the pitch of two lower strings by one half step (from C and G to B and F-sharp). Similarly, the Sonata for Solo Cello by György Ligeti is so cellistic in its conception that it is essentially unviable on any other instrument. Finally, Crest, Clutter, Clamor by Bradley S. Green was designed specifically for the physical characteristics of the cello, thus making it a quintessential example of cello specific writing. The first recital was performed on November 26, 2018, with Ruth Bright on the piano in Ulrich Recital Hall. The second recital took place on March 6, 2019 in the Gildenhorn Recital Hall with Andrew Welch and Alexei Ulitin on the piano. The final recital was completed on May 5, 2019 in Ulrich Recital Hall.Item The Clarinet Repertoire and Musical Aesthetic of William Thomas McKinley(2019) Morales, Melissa; DiLutis, Robert; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)The clarinet repertoire of William Thomas McKinley is varied and interesting, but seldom performed today. The few recordings that exist were created by an elite contingency of soloists and chamber musicians who were close friends and colleagues with McKinley. Outside their premieres and these few recordings, his music has seldom been performed. While many of his works are challenging and engaging, most were never published and thus remain inaccessible. Through several engraving projects and performances, this dissertation brings light to a corner of the clarinet repertoire seldom explored and heard today. For this project, I have completed performance editions of several McKinley works and presented them on recital. I plan to make the editions themselves available through later publication. This will make his music more accessible for performers and audiences alike. A recital on McKinley’s influences, including Aaron Copland, Mel Powell, Gunther Schuller, and Lukas Foss, took place on December 7, 2018 in Gildenhorn Recital Hall. The recital on April 19, 2019 in Leah Smith Recital Hall concentrated on McKinley’s development and career trajectory, featuring For One, Mostly Blues, Two Romances for clarinet, violin, and piano, and Intermezzos No. 1 & 2. The final recital took place on May 4, 2019 in Ulrich Recital Hall and featured what could be considered his greatest works and clarinet duos, Clarinet Duets Book 1, Clarinet Concerto No. 2, and Clarinet Sonata. The recitals were recorded on compact discs and are archived within the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM).Item Cell maps on the human genome(Springer Nature, 2019-03-20) Cherniak, Christopher; Rodriguez-Esteban, RaulWe have previously described evidence for a statistically significant, global, supra-chromosomal representation of the human body that appears to stretch over the entire genome. Here, we extend the genome mapping model, zooming down to the typical individual animal cell. Its cellular organization appears to be significantly mapped onto the human genome: Evidence is reported for a “cellunculus” — on the model of a homunculus, on the H. sapiens genome.Item DESPERATE MEASURES: RECORDING OF THE COMPLETE PIANO WORKS OF ROBERT MUCZYNSKI(2019) Samogray, Dmitry; Dedova, Larissa; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The aim of this dissertation is to help assimilate the solo piano works of Robert Muczynski into the active 20th century piano repertoire, by providing pianists, musicologists, and listeners with the composer’s complete solo piano output on CD, for the first time. Of the fifteen compositions contained therein, only eight can be found on commercial CDs, with another two available on out-of-print LPs, and the last five never recorded on any recording medium. This circumstance diminishes Muczynski's piano music - the largest part of his catalogue - to a footnote in the American chapter of this instrument’s history. The ultimate goal is to have these recordings commercially released as a two-disk set. This release will follow an earlier disk of Muczynski's chamber music with piano, recorded for Brilliant Classics and released in the spring of 2017.Item “THE FIGHT IS YOURS”: ALLY ADVOCACY, IDENTITY RECONFIGURATION, AND POLITICAL CHANGE(2019) Howell, William; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since at least 1990, scholars and activists have used the term “ally” to describe and theorize a distinct sociopolitical role: someone from a majority identity group working to end that group’s oppression of another identity group. While the term is recent, “allies” are present throughout America’s constant struggle to actualize equality and justice. The identity-rooted ideologies that empowered allies disempowered the groups for and with whom they sought justice and equality. But those empowering identities were pieces, more or less salient, of complex intersectional people. Given the shared nature of identity, this process also necessarily pitted allies against those with whom they shared an identity. In this project, I ask two questions about past ally advocacy—questions that are often asked about contemporary ally advocacy. First, in moments of major civil rights reform, how did allies engage their own intersecting identities—especially those ideologically-charged identities with accrued power from generations of marginalizing and oppressing? Second, how did allies engage other identities that were not theirs—especially identities on whose oppression their privilege was built? In asking these two questions—about self-identity and others’ identity—I assemble numerous rhetorical fragments into “ally advocacy.” This bricolage is in recognition of rhetoric’s fragmentary nature, and in response to Michael Calvin McGee’s call to assemble texts for criticism. I intend to demonstrate that ally advocacy is such a text, manifesting (among other contexts) around the women’s suffrage amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the marriage equality movement. I argue that allies rarely engaged the ideologies underlying identity-based inequality in any open, direct, or thorough manner, especially at these moments when those ideologies were optimally vulnerable. I conclude that allies must accept that they marginalize others through identity and its adjacent ideology, and allies must help identity-group peers reconstitute their shared identity in recognition of this. Such reconstituting is necessary for a healthy American democracy but especially so in the late-2010s, as Americans persistently grapple with a political system fractured along identity lines.Item BLACK COMPOSERS OF THE CLASSICAL MUSIC GENRE FROM THE EIGTHTEENTH CENTURY TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY(2019) Joyner, Amyr; Salness, David; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation research paper will be an examination of a number of prominent Black composers in the Classical music genre and their influences and contributions to the Classical music violin literature. The overall intent of the paper is to act as an additional resource for violinists and musicians that are interested in exploring the composers and their works, while also increasing exposure to and awareness of Black classical composers. While the purpose of this dissertation lies specifically with exploring influential Black composers, their chosen works in the programs, and how they fit within the broad spectrum of classical music, I am hopeful that it will nevertheless promote a further discussion regarding incorporating a more extended study of minority and women composers in the general curriculum of music institutes, as well as encourage more widespread practice and performances of their works along the likes of Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, and Bartók.Item Troublesome Properties: Race, Disability, and Slavery's Haunting of the Still Image(2019) Mobley, Izetta Autumn; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Troublesome Properties: Race, Disability, and Slavery’s Haunting of the Still Image interrogates race, disability, slavery, and the visual, arguing for a reorientation of disability studies toward a comprehensive analysis of how Atlantic slavery structured the West’s conceptualization of the abled body. Slavery haunts the aesthetic impulses, discursive engagements, and visual formations that construct both disability and race. Slavery and disability have been historically mutually constitutive, establishing a network of power relations that define how the United States understands citizenship, sovereignty of the body, capital, labor, and bodily integrity. Troublesome Properties’ intervention places photography – specifically nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, cartes de visites, and portraiture –in conversation with race, disability and slavery, inviting a critical look at the social resonance of photographic production. This interdisciplinary project is deeply invested in the nineteenth century and critically considers how visual imagery establishes concepts of disabled and abled bodies. The visual and material analysis of visual culture and photography links my discussion of disability to racially marked bodies, explicitly illustrating how slavery haunts how we see and tie Blackness to disability. The illustrations, photographs, medical records, biographies, and ephemera of conjoined African American twins Millie and Christine McKoy serve as evidence of the troubled definitions of consent, care, property, and exploitation inherent in enslavement, disability, and display. Octavia Butler’s 1979 speculative novel, Kindred, anchors my discussion of the impact of disability on Black disabled women. Black scholars, artists, and historians have consistently employed photography as a visual tool to assert the humanity of Black people. The photographic suite Dorian Gray by Yinka Shonibare, a series that makes overt the parallels between disability and colonialism, are placed in conversation with W.E. B. Du Bois’ American Negro exhibit, demonstrating how race, disability, and the visual construct notions of which bodies matter, when, where, and why. In Troublesome Properties, I argue that we must approach visual production, material culture, and disability studies with the intention to reclaim the marked, raced, gendered, and disabled Black body, using slavery and an optimistic pessimism to construct a complex genealogy for disability studies.Item America's Commercial Cold War: Global Trade, National Security, and the Control of Markets(2019) Haddad, Ryan Issa; Sicilia, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Previous works considering the history of American trade policy during the Cold War have tended to focus on either the United States’ export control policy in the unilateral and multilateral context or the Cold War’s influence on the formation and evolution on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. While useful, these studies are limited by their narrowness. To date, no single work has emerged accounting for trade’s place in American Cold War strategy or the reciprocal impact that economic globalization and the Cold War had on each other. I argue that American Cold War trade policy was an “economic containment” exercise. The United States’ “Commercial Cold War” was conceptualized by strategists as a struggle between two rival, yet interdependent networks—one liberal and capitalist, and led by the United States; the other communist and led at the outset by the Soviet Union. The United States used trade both positively and negatively to achieve a variety of ends. Its overarching goal was to use trade to develop its network at the expense of the Soviet Union’s. This strategy assumed centralized, flexible control over trade policy in order to capitalize on diplomatic openings. Successive American presidents aspired to such trade policy control. But the diffusion of power throughout the U.S. government and across the Western alliance rendered that impossible. It proved far easier to deny East-West trade than to expand it, and more assertive American initiatives were often stymied. But despite the limits on unilateral action, the multilateral trade architectures that were established during the Cold War proved adequate to their purposes and remain in renovated form in the 21st Century.Item TEXTBOOK COMPOSERS: A PERFORMANCE STUDY OF AMERICAN MODERNISM(2019) Stocker, Josiah; Sloan, Rita; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The technical difficulties we face and the interpretive decisions we make when playing 20th century music are essentially the same as with music from earlier periods. When playing more recent works, we benefit from first-hand accounts which are more readily available, and have greater interpretive freedom in playing music that does not have an established tradition. Studying a composer’s writings on theory will aid in analyzing a piece which may not follow traditional rules of form and harmony, and descriptions by their contemporaries can help us in understanding the printed markings in pieces which contain improvisation, extended techniques, or other unusual instructions. For my dissertation, I have addressed some difficulties unique to American music from the early- to mid-twentieth century. I selected music for three programs, using scores, the writings of composers, critics, and performers, as well as recordings, in my background research. My program notes document this process, and present conclusions which I hope will be useful to other musicians. The repertoire includes art song, chamber music, and solo piano music by Henry Cowell, Elliott Carter, and Vincent Persichetti. These three composers wrote books and essays about the theoretical and artistic ideas behind their own music and that of their contemporaries. Cowell’s groundbreaking New Musical Resources gave a remarkably concise and prescient overview of possible innovations in rhythm, texture, and harmony, many of which are worked out in his later compositions. Carter published collections of essays which contain detailed introspection on his influences and development. And Twentieth Century Harmony by Persichetti remains the most comprehensive and nuanced summary of the various developments and sub-currents from the first half of the century; it is also an invaluable key to understanding Persichetti’s indefinable yet immediately recognizable style.Item The Agreement Theta Generalization(Ubiquity Press, 2019-08-29) Polinsky, Maria; Preminger, OmerIn this paper, we propose a new generalization concerning the structural relationship between a head that agrees with a DP in φ-features and the predicate that assigns the (first) thematic role to that DP: the Agreement Theta Generalization (ATG). According to the ATG, configurations where the thematic-role assigner is located in a higher clause than the agreeing head are categorically excluded. We present empirical evidence for the ATG, discuss its analytical import, and show that this generalization bears directly on the proper modeling of syntactic agreement, as well as the prospects for reducing other syntactic (and syntacto-semantic) dependencies to the same underlying mechanism.