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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
- Creators: Rogers, Rodney
- Creators: Liu, Huan
Description
Several contemporary clarinet works use Chinese folk music elements from different regions in new compositions to entice listener's and performer's appreciation of Chinese culture. However, to date, limited academic research on this topic exists. This research paper introduces six contemporary clarinet works by six Chinese composers: Qigang Chen's Morning Song, Yan Wang's Mu ma zhi ge (The Song of Grazing Horses), An-lun Huang's Capriccio for Clarinet and Strings Op. 41, Bijing Hu's The Sound of Pamir Clarinet Concerto, Mei-Mi Lan's Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra with Harp and Percussion, and Yu-Hui Chang's Three Fantasias for Solo Clarinet in B-flat. They are examined from different perspectives, including general structure, style, and rejuvenated folk music use. The focus of this research paper is to investigate the use of Chinese folk music in several works in collaboration with the composers. The author found that although contemporary composers use Chinese folk music differently in their works (i.e., some use melodies, others use harmony, while others use modes), each work celebrates the music and culture of the folk music on which the pieces are based. It is the author's hope to stimulate people's interest in music using Chinese folk music elements, and bring these lesser known works into the common clarinet repertoire.
ContributorsFeng, Chiao-Ting (Author) / Spring, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Gardner, Joshua (Committee member) / Micklich, Albie (Committee member) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Schuring, Martin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Bright Summer, a one-movement piece for orchestra, was composed in Arizona, and completed in February 2013. The piece is approximately twelve minutes long. The motivation for writing this piece was the death of my mother the year before, in 2012. The prevailing mood of this work is bright and pleasant, expressing my mother's cheerful personality when she was alive. It also portrays bright summer days which resemble my mother's spirit. Thus, soundscape plays an important role in this work. It depicts summer breeze, rustling sounds of leaves, and, to translate a Korean saying, "high blue skies." This soundscape opens the piece as well as closes it. In the middle section, the fast upbeat themes represent my mother's witty and optimistic personality. The piece also contains the presence of a hymn tune, The Love of God is Greater Far, which informs the motivic content and also functions as the climax of the piece. It was my mother's favorite hymn and we used to sing it together following her conversion to Christianity. The piece contains three main sections, which are held together by transitional material based on the soundscape and metric modulations. Unlike my earlier works, Bright Summer is tonal, with upper tertian harmonies prevailing throughout the piece. However, the opening and closing soundscapes do not have functional harmonies. For example, tertian chords appear and vanish silently, leaving behind some resonant sounds without any harmonic progression. Overall, the whole piece is reminiscent of my mother who lived a beautiful life.
ContributorsKim, JeeYeon (Composer) / DeMars, James (Thesis advisor) / Hackbarth, Glenn (Committee member) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Levy, Benjamin (Committee member) / Rockmaker, Jody (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Automating aspects of biocuration through biomedical information extraction could significantly impact biomedical research by enabling greater biocuration throughput and improving the feasibility of a wider scope. An important step in biomedical information extraction systems is named entity recognition (NER), where mentions of entities such as proteins and diseases are located within natural-language text and their semantic type is determined. This step is critical for later tasks in an information extraction pipeline, including normalization and relationship extraction. BANNER is a benchmark biomedical NER system using linear-chain conditional random fields and the rich feature set approach. A case study with BANNER locating genes and proteins in biomedical literature is described. The first corpus for disease NER adequate for use as training data is introduced, and employed in a case study of disease NER. The first corpus locating adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in user posts to a health-related social website is also described, and a system to locate and identify ADRs in social media text is created and evaluated. The rich feature set approach to creating NER feature sets is argued to be subject to diminishing returns, implying that additional improvements may require more sophisticated methods for creating the feature set. This motivates the first application of multivariate feature selection with filters and false discovery rate analysis to biomedical NER, resulting in a feature set at least 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the set created by the rich feature set approach. Finally, two novel approaches to NER by modeling the semantics of token sequences are introduced. The first method focuses on the sequence content by using language models to determine whether a sequence resembles entries in a lexicon of entity names or text from an unlabeled corpus more closely. The second method models the distributional semantics of token sequences, determining the similarity between a potential mention and the token sequences from the training data by analyzing the contexts where each sequence appears in a large unlabeled corpus. The second method is shown to improve the performance of BANNER on multiple data sets.
ContributorsLeaman, James Robert (Author) / Gonzalez, Graciela (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Cohen, Kevin B (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
ABSTRACT Musicians endure injuries at an alarming rate, largely due to the misuse of their bodies. Musicians move their bodies for a living and therefore should understand how to move them in a healthy way. This paper presents Body Mapping as an injury prevention technique specifically directed toward collaborative pianists. A body map is the self-representation in one's brain that includes information on the structure, function, and size of one's body; Body Mapping is the process of refining one's body map to produce coordinated movement. In addition to preventing injury, Body Mapping provides a means to achieve greater musical artistry through the training of movement, attention, and the senses. With the main function of collaborating with one or more musical partners, a collaborative pianist will have the opportunity to share the knowledge of Body Mapping with many fellow musicians. This study demonstrates the author's credentials as a Body Mapping instructor, the current status of the field of collaborative piano, and the recommendation for increased body awareness. Information on the nature and abundance of injuries and Body Mapping concepts are also analyzed. The study culminates in a course syllabus entitled An Introduction to Collaborative Piano and Body Mapping with the objective of imparting fundamental collaborative piano skills integrated with proper body use. The author hopes to inform educators of the benefits of prioritizing health among their students and to provide a Body Mapping foundation upon which their students can build technique.
ContributorsBindel, Jennifer (Author) / Campbell, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Doan, Jerry (Committee member) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Schuring, Martin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
There are a significant number of musical compositions for violin by composers who used folk songs and dances of various cultures in their music, including works by George Enescu, Béla Bartók and György Ligeti. Less known are pieces that draw on the plethora of melodies and rhythms from Turkey. The purpose of this paper is to help performers become more familiar with two such compositions: Fazil Say's Sonata for Violin and Piano and Cleopatra for Solo Violin. Fazil Say (b. 1970) is considered to be a significant, contemporary Turkish composer. Both of the works discussed in this document simulate traditional "Eastern" instruments, such as the kemenҫe, the baðlama, the kanun and the ud. Additionally, both pieces use themes from folk melodies of Turkey, Turkish dance rhythms and Arabian scales, all framed within traditional structural techniques, such as ostinato bass and the fughetta. Both the Sonata for Violin and Piano and Cleopatra are enormously expressive and musically interesting works, demanding virtuosity and a wide technical range. Although this document does not purport to be a full theoretical analysis, by providing biographical information, analytical descriptions, notes regarding interpretation, and suggestions to assist performers in overcoming technical obstacles, the writer hopes to inspire other violinists to consider learning and performing these works.
ContributorsKalantzi, Panagiota (Author) / Jiang, Danwen (Thesis advisor) / Hill, Gary (Committee member) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Rotaru, Catalin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The purpose of this project is twofold: to contribute to the literature of chamber ensembles comprising mixed wind, string, and percussion instruments by producing arrangements of three piano rags by William Bolcom; and to highlight Bolcom's pivotal role in the ragtime revival of the 1960's and 1970's. Through his influence as a scholar, composer, and performer, Bolcom (b. 1938), one of the most prominent American composers of his generation, helped garner respect for ragtime as art music and as one of America's great popular music genres. Bolcom's 3 Ghost Rags were written in the tradition of classic piano rags, but with a compositional sensibility that is influenced by the fifty years that separate them from the close of the original ragtime era. The basis for the present orchestrations of 3 Ghost Rags is the collection of instrumental arrangements of piano rags published by Stark Publishing Co., entitled Standard High-Class Rags. More familiarly known as the "Red Back Book," this publication was representative of the exchange of repertoire between piano and ensembles and served as a repertory for the various ragtime revivals that occurred later in the twentieth century. In creating these orchestrations of Bolcom's piano rags, the author strove to provide another medium in which Bolcom's music could be performed, while orchestrating the music for an historically appropriate ensemble.
ContributorsMelley, Eric Charles (Author) / Hill, Gary W. (Thesis advisor) / Bailey, Wayne (Committee member) / Norton, Kay (Committee member) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Russell, Timothy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In most social networking websites, users are allowed to perform interactive activities. One of the fundamental features that these sites provide is to connecting with users of their kind. On one hand, this activity makes online connections visible and tangible; on the other hand, it enables the exploration of our connections and the expansion of our social networks easier. The aggregation of people who share common interests forms social groups, which are fundamental parts of our social lives. Social behavioral analysis at a group level is an active research area and attracts many interests from the industry. Challenges of my work mainly arise from the scale and complexity of user generated behavioral data. The multiple types of interactions, highly dynamic nature of social networking and the volatile user behavior suggest that these data are complex and big in general. Effective and efficient approaches are required to analyze and interpret such data. My work provide effective channels to help connect the like-minded and, furthermore, understand user behavior at a group level. The contributions of this dissertation are in threefold: (1) proposing novel representation of collective tagging knowledge via tag networks; (2) proposing the new information spreader identification problem in egocentric soical networks; (3) defining group profiling as a systematic approach to understanding social groups. In sum, the research proposes novel concepts and approaches for connecting the like-minded, enables the understanding of user groups, and exposes interesting research opportunities.
ContributorsWang, Xufei (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Committee member) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In this dissertation I develop a deep theory of temporal planning well-suited to analyzing, understanding, and improving the state of the art implementations (as of 2012). At face-value the work is strictly theoretical; nonetheless its impact is entirely real and practical. The easiest portion of that impact to highlight concerns the notable improvements to the format of the temporal fragment of the International Planning Competitions (IPCs). Particularly: the theory I expound upon here is the primary cause of--and justification for--the altered (i) selection of benchmark problems, and (ii) notion of "winning temporal planner". For higher level motivation: robotics, web service composition, industrial manufacturing, business process management, cybersecurity, space exploration, deep ocean exploration, and logistics all benefit from applying domain-independent automated planning technique. Naturally, actually carrying out such case studies has much to offer. For example, we may extract the lesson that reasoning carefully about deadlines is rather crucial to planning in practice. More generally, effectively automating specifically temporal planning is well-motivated from applications. Entirely abstractly, the aim is to improve the theory of automated temporal planning by distilling from its practice. My thesis is that the key feature of computational interest is concurrency. To support, I demonstrate by way of compilation methods, worst-case counting arguments, and analysis of algorithmic properties such as completeness that the more immediately pressing computational obstacles (facing would-be temporal generalizations of classical planning systems) can be dealt with in theoretically efficient manner. So more accurately the technical contribution here is to demonstrate: The computationally significant obstacle to automated temporal planning that remains is just concurrency.
ContributorsCushing, William Albemarle (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Weld, Daniel S. (Committee member) / Smith, David E. (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Davalcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born July 18, 1918 into the Madiba clan in Mvezo, Transkei, South Africa. Mandela was a lawyer by trade and a freedom fighter who envisioned freedom and equality for all South Africans regardless of race. In 1965, Mandela was imprisoned at Robben Island for twenty-seven years for treason and terrorist activities against the South African apartheid regime: he was assigned prison numbers 46664. In 1992, Mandela was released from prison and two years later not only became the first democratically elected president of South Africa, but also its first black president. "Madiba 46664" is an eight-minute chamber work scored for flute, oboe, clarinet in B-flat, and bassoon; vibraphone, and two percussionists; piano; violins, violas, and celli. The work blends traditional South African rhythms of the drumming culture with elements of Western harmony and form in contrasting textures of homophony, polyphony and antiphony. "Madiba 46664" utilizes Mandela's prison number, birthdate and age (at the time the composition process began in 2013) for the initial generation of meter, rhythm, harmony, melody, and form. The work also shares intercultural concepts that can be seen in the works of three contemporary African composers, South Africans Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph and Andile Khumalo, and Nigerian Ayo Oluranti. Each section represents a period of Mandela's life as a freedom fighter, a prisoner, and a president. The inspiration stems from the composer's discussions with Mandela soon after his release from prison and prior to his presidency. These lively discussions pertained to the state of traditional music in then apartheid South Africa and led to this creation. The conversations also played a role in the creative process.
ContributorsMabingnai, Collette Sipho (Composer) / DeMars, James (Thesis advisor) / Hackbarth, Glenn (Committee member) / Humphreys, Jere (Committee member) / Rockmaker, Jody (Committee member) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra was conceived in February of 2013, and conceptually it is my attempt to fuse personal expressions of jazz and classical music into one fully realized statement. It is a three movement work (fast, slow, fast) for 2 fl., 2 ob., 2 cl., bsn., 2 hrn., 2 tpt., tbn., pno., perc., str. (6,4,2,2,1). The work is approximately 27 minutes in duration. The first movement of the Concerto is written in a fluid sonata form. A fugato begins where the second theme would normally appear, and the second theme does not fully appear until near the end of the solo piano section. The result is that the second theme when finally revealed is so reminiscent of the history of jazz and classical synthesis that it does not sound completely new, and in fact is a return of something that was heard before, but only hinted at in this piece. The second movement is a kind of deconstructive set of variations, with a specific theme and harmonic pattern implied throughout the movement. However, the full theme is not disclosed until the final variation. The variations are interrupted by moments of pure rhythmic music, containing harmony made up of major chords with an added fourth, defying resolution, and dissolving each time back into a new variation. The third movement is in rondo form, using rhythmic and harmonic influences from jazz. The percussion plays a substantial role in this movement, acting as a counterpoint to the piano part throughout. This movement and the piece concludes with an extended coda, inspired indirectly by the simple complexities of an improvisational piano solo, building in complexity as the concerto draws to a close.
ContributorsSneider, Elliot (Author) / Rogers, Rodney (Thesis advisor) / DeMars, James (Committee member) / Hackbarth, Glenn (Committee member) / Solis, Theodore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013