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Item flight 295 | a string quartet in two parts.(2024) Visser, Johannes Hendrik; Gibson, Robert; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This work is a critique of the social injustices committed by the oppressive South Africangovernment at the height of the Apartheid era. Its commentary is exemplified through the metaphor of Flight 295 – a South African Airways flight that crashed in the Indian Ocean in the late 1980s. The crimes against humanity committed throughout South Africa by the Apartheid regime find a chilling parallel in the events that caused the crash of Flight 295. En route from East Asia, it is widely acknowledged that the Boeing 747-200 Combi was carrying volatile arms in its cargo compartment. Severe turbulence is said to have caused the arms to destabilize, causing a fire that engulfed the aircraft mid-flight. The recklessness of the government in smuggling unstable black-market arms to South Africa (which would then be used to fight a “war” against people of colour) on board a passenger flight, showed their lack of concern for human life. It is an awareness of these atrocities that this composition strives to share with audiences through the expression of the emotions that I feel when I think of the events of that horrific era in the history of my country and culture. I believe that it is important to share this uncomfortable historical event with people so that we can fight against similar human rights violations happening daily around the world.Item Russian Jazz with Bolshevik Trimmings: Modernist Composer-Pianists in Revolutionary Russia(2021) Tumanov Pavlov, Mijail V; Dedova, Larissa; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this project is to highlight the piano compositions of the extraordinarily diverse period in Russian music between the emergence of pre-Revolutionary modernism in the early twentieth century and the publication of the “Muddle Instead of Music” article in 1936, the lack of State intervention in artistic matters up until the early 1930s proved to be a boon for Soviet composers. The title of this project is taken from Karleton Hackett’s review of the 1921 premiere of Prokofiev’s opera The Love for Three Oranges in the Chicago Evening Post. Hackett’s misguided characterization is very telling – The Love for Three Oranges contains neither jazz nor Bolshevik influences. The figure of the composer-pianist played an important role in the development of Russian piano music in the early twentieth century; every one of the composers featured in this project was an accomplished pianist. This project presents but a small fraction of the solo piano repertoire created by the remarkable innovativecomposers of early twentieth-century Russia. A number of these composers failed to remain relevant in the post-1936 political climate and have thus vanished from history books. Yet their works offer a wealth of exciting new repertoire for pianists. In addition to discussions of each work and composer featured, special attention is given to Samuil Feinberg, whose life and works remain in obscurity. An extensive analysis of Feinberg’s Second Piano Sonata, Op. 2, and Berceuse, Op. 19a, is included since available information on Feinberg’s musical language is very scarce. References to thorough analyses and discussion of works covered is provided in the bibliography.Item THE ART OF MUSIC IN GB-Lbl Add. MS 4911: A CASE FOR ROBERT CARVOR AS THE ANONYMOUS SCOT(2020) Nakos, Debra Marion Livant; Haggh-Huglo, Barbara H.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)GB-Lbl Add. MS 4911, the sole source of an anonymous music treatise, The Art of Music, is among the few manuscripts to have survived the Scottish Reformation. In answer to the puzzle of its authorship, masters of song schools in Edinburgh or Aberdeen have been proposed. A new reading of the text places the date of its creation between 1559 and 1567 and leads to a revised profile of the author, which, as is demonstrated here, the Scottish composer Robert Carvor (1487/8 – c. 1568) uniquely matches. Further supporting Carvor as the author of the treatise is its inclusion of a section of Carvor’s Missa L’homme armé and of a caricature strikingly similar to one found in the Carvor Choirbook (GB-En MS Adv. 5.1.15), where Carvor’s compositions bear his signature. An Appendix includes the first English translation of the rules of faburden, which are unique to The Art of Music (f.94r-f.112r).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.