Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3
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- All Subjects: American Music
- All Subjects: Italian Opera
- Creators: Norton, Kay
Description
The focus of this in-depth study is to look at the gestation, performance history, and reception of Giacomo Puccini's evening of three one-act operas called Il Trittico and differentiate the particular components, Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi to analyze them for their individual stylistic elements of Italian Opera. These were the styles of verismo, pathos and sentimentality, and opera buffa. As substantiated by written criticism, the audience and the critics did not fully comprehend the hidden meaning behind the individual works of Il Trittico. Puccini, enigmatically, had chosen to present one last glimpse of outmoded Italian operatic traditions. In order to evaluate Il Trittico's importance in the history of Italian opera, this study will first review the musically changing landscape in Italy during the early to mid-nineteenth century, then the second part of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth-century when German, French, and eventually Russian music were starting to influence audience taste. Puccini who, over the course of his compositional life, absorbed and incorporated these different styles realized that long held Italian operatic tradition had reached a fork in the road. One path would ensure Italian composers a place in this new order and the other a stagnant dead end.
Even though Puccini's triptych garnered primarily negative reviews, the basis for this negativity was the perception that Il Trittico had broken with the historically traditional Italian musical styles. Though the present study acknowledges that break to a degree, it will also present a historically based rationale for the deviation, one left largely unnoticed by Puccini's critics. In the end, this author plans to realize their symbolic importance as a farewell to three uniquely Italian styles and a departure point for a new operatic tradition. Looking forward to the centenary of the work, this author seeks to illuminate how Puccini reached the pinnacle of firmly rooted genres of Italian opera. Ultimately this might help to unravel the enigma of Il Trittico while it continues to secure its rightful place as one of the masterpieces of the Puccini canon.
Even though Puccini's triptych garnered primarily negative reviews, the basis for this negativity was the perception that Il Trittico had broken with the historically traditional Italian musical styles. Though the present study acknowledges that break to a degree, it will also present a historically based rationale for the deviation, one left largely unnoticed by Puccini's critics. In the end, this author plans to realize their symbolic importance as a farewell to three uniquely Italian styles and a departure point for a new operatic tradition. Looking forward to the centenary of the work, this author seeks to illuminate how Puccini reached the pinnacle of firmly rooted genres of Italian opera. Ultimately this might help to unravel the enigma of Il Trittico while it continues to secure its rightful place as one of the masterpieces of the Puccini canon.
ContributorsScovasso, Stephen (Author) / Oldani, Robert W. (Thesis advisor) / Feisst, Sabine (Committee member) / Norton, Kay (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
As an organist, church musician, and educator, Clifford Demarest (1874-1946) was a prominent figure in New York during the first half of the twentieth century. However, prior to this thesis, Demarest's place within the history of American music, like that of many of his contemporaries, was all but neglected. This research reveals Clifford Demarest as an influential figure in American musical history from around 1900 to his retirement in 1937. Led by contemporary accounts, I trace Demarest's musical influence through his three musical careers: professional organist, church musician, and educator. As a prominent figure in the fledgling American Guild of Organists, Demarest was dedicated to the unification of its members and the artistic legitimacy of the organist profession. As the organist and choir director of the Church of the Messiah, later the Community Church of New York (1911-1946, inclusive), Demarest played an integral part in the liberal atmosphere fostered by the congregation's minister, John Haynes Holmes (1879-1964). Together Holmes and Demarest directly influenced the nascent National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and supported luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. Influential figures such as Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Augustus Granville Dill (1881-1956), Egbert Ethelred Brown (1875-1956), and Countee Cullen (1903-1946) were inspired by the liberal environment in the Church of the Messiah; however, prior to this research, their connections to the church were unexplored. As the music supervisor of Tenafly High School and later, for the state of New Jersey, Demarest influenced countless students through his passion for music. His compositions for student orchestras are among the earliest to elevate the artistic standards of school music ensembles during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Archival sources such as church records, letters, and newspaper editorials, are synthesized with current research to characterize Demarest's place in these three professional orbits of the early twentieth century. His story also represents those of countless other working musicians from his era that have been forgotten. Therefore, this research opens an important new research field – a window into the dynamic world of the American organist.
ContributorsHicks, Glen W (Author) / Saucier, Catherine (Thesis advisor) / Norton, Kay (Thesis advisor) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The American sublime aesthetic, discussed frequently in literature and art of the United States, is equally manifest in the nation’s symphonic music as a concurrent and complementary aesthetic. The musical application of the American sublime supports and enriches current scholarship on American musical identity, nationality, and the American symphonic enterprise. I suggest that the American sublime forms an integral part of nineteenth-century American music and is key to understanding the symphony as a genre in the United States. I discuss American symphonic works by Anthony Philip Heinrich, George Frederick Bristow, William Henry Fry, Dennison Wheelock, and Florence Beatrice Price, aided by an analytical tool which I developed, to illuminate my appraisal of the nineteenth-century American symphonic enterprise. Their compositions contribute meaningfully to the complex history of identity formation for both American composers and the nation. In focusing on these incorporations of the sublime by white composers and composers of color from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, my research demonstrates how the American sublime expanded and transformed to better accommodate the country’s diverse citizenry, despite the marginalization of some.
The nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic dialogue between Americans and their European contemporaries sustained a “distinctly cosmopolitan cultural ethos,” a phenomenon also described by Douglas Shadle as “one of the most vibrant intercultural exchanges in all of Western music history.” This dialogue shaped the cultural formation of identity for many American composers throughout the century and provided the foundation for a symphonic repertoire, which became internationally recognized for the first time as “American.” In this cosmopolitan environment, the Americanization of the sublime aided in the rebranding of long-established European artistic expressions like the symphony, while perpetuating the idealization of the nation’s geography, its people, and its beliefs. Perhaps most importantly, the American sublime supported the widely held belief in American exceptionalism and manifest destiny. The applicability of the American sublime to various genres made it a useful tool to assert autonomy and individuality in forms such as the symphony. For this reason, a revaluation of American symphonic music and its relation to the American sublime amplifies the significance of this repertoire.
The nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic dialogue between Americans and their European contemporaries sustained a “distinctly cosmopolitan cultural ethos,” a phenomenon also described by Douglas Shadle as “one of the most vibrant intercultural exchanges in all of Western music history.” This dialogue shaped the cultural formation of identity for many American composers throughout the century and provided the foundation for a symphonic repertoire, which became internationally recognized for the first time as “American.” In this cosmopolitan environment, the Americanization of the sublime aided in the rebranding of long-established European artistic expressions like the symphony, while perpetuating the idealization of the nation’s geography, its people, and its beliefs. Perhaps most importantly, the American sublime supported the widely held belief in American exceptionalism and manifest destiny. The applicability of the American sublime to various genres made it a useful tool to assert autonomy and individuality in forms such as the symphony. For this reason, a revaluation of American symphonic music and its relation to the American sublime amplifies the significance of this repertoire.
ContributorsHicks, Glen Wayne (Author) / Norton, Kay (Thesis advisor) / Feisst, Sabine (Committee member) / Solís, Ted (Committee member) / Shadle, Douglas W. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020