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- Creators: Gardner, Joshua
Description
Owen Middleton (b. 1941) enjoys an established and growing reputation as a composer of classical guitar music, but his works for piano are comparatively little known. The close investigation offered here of Middleton's works for piano reveals the same impressive craftsmanship, compelling character, and innovative spirit found in his works for guitar. Indeed, the only significant thing Middleton's piano music currently lacks is the well-deserved attention of professional players and a wider audience. Middleton's piano music needs to be heard, not just discussed, so one of this document's purposes is to provide a recorded sample of his piano works. While the overall repertoire for solo piano is vast, and new works become established in that repertoire with increasing difficulty, Middleton's piano works have a significant potential to find their way into the concert hall as well as the private teaching studio. His solo piano music is highly effective, well suited to the instrument, and, perhaps most importantly, fresh sounding and truly original. His pedagogical works are of equal value. Middleton's piano music offers something for everyone: there one finds daring virtuosity, effusions of passion, intellectual force, colorful imagery, poetry, humor, and even a degree of idiomatic innovation. This study aims to reveal key aspects of the composer's musical style, especially his style of piano writing, and to provide pianists with helpful analytical, technical, and interpretive insights. These descriptions of the music are supported with recorded examples, selected from the works for solo piano written between 1962 and 1993: Sonata for Piano, Childhood Scenes, Katie's Collection, and Toccata for Piano. The complete scores of the recorded works are included in the appendix. A chapter briefly describing the piano pieces since 1993 concludes the study and invites the reader to further investigations of this unique and important body of work.
ContributorsMoreau, Barton Andrew (Author) / Hamilton, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / Campbell, Andrew (Committee member) / Spring, Robert (Committee member) / Gardner, Joshua (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Repertoire for solo bassoon is becoming more common as music advances and evolves. There is a vast array of works for solo bassoon; however, only a small percentage of those are by composers from an underrepresented community, with an even smaller percentage written by composers with East Asian or Southeast Asian heritage. Furthermore, these works have little to no high-quality studio recordings. Additionally, these works often include contemporary techniques such as multiphonics, difficult tremolos, flutter tonguing, pitch bends, and glissandi, among others. This adds another layer of inaccessibility for those bassoonists who are unfamiliar with how to perform these techniques and therefore may be afraid to “take the plunge” into contemporary works that utilize them. I have created performance guides for Tilt by Tonia Ko, Legend of the Sea by Xinyan Li, and Jeu des Cinq Éléments II by Tôn-Thât Tiêt, in hopes of promoting and raising the accessibility of works by living composers with East Asian and Southeast Asian backgrounds.
ContributorsJohnson, Bradley Raymond (Author) / Micklich, Albie (Thesis advisor) / Gardner, Joshua (Committee member) / Temple, Alex (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024