Matching Items (442)
Description
John Harbison is one of the most prominent composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He has made major contributions in all areas of classical music, including operas, symphonies, chamber music, choral works, and vocal pieces.Among his vast output is 'Four Songs of Solitude,' his only composition (to date) for solo violin. Though the piece is beautiful and reflective in nature, its inherent technical and musical difficulties present challenges to violinists preparing the piece. There is no published edition of 'Four Songs of Solitude' that includes bowings and fingerings, and violinists used to practicing and performing the études and repertoire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may have difficulty determining how to successfully navigate the music. This paper examines the piece in detail, providing an analytic description of the music and suggestions for practice. An interview with the composer yielded many insights into the structural and harmonic events of the songs, and the composer's interpretive suggestions are given alongside technical suggestions by the author. The solo violin has a centuries-long legacy, and some of the most performed repertoire exists in the medium. 'Four Songs of Solitude' is a demanding set of pieces that stands out in late twentieth-century violin music. Providing information about the piece directly from the composer and suggestions for practice and performance increases the accessibility of the work for violinists seeking to bring it to the concert stage.
ContributorsSchreffler, Sarah (Author) / McLin, Katherine (Thesis advisor) / Hill, Gary (Committee member) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / Spring, Robert (Committee member) / Swartz, Jonathan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Examples of new or extended clarinet techniques first appeared early in the twentieth century. By the 1960s, composers and performers began to drastically augment standard clarinet technique, by experimenting with multiphonics and microtones. Subsequently, clarinetists-teachers William O. Smith, Gerard Errante, Ronald Caravan, and others further pushed the limits of sound through their compositions for clarinet. This study explores the important contributions of clarinetist-teacher-composer Eric Mandat to the clarinet repertoire, and presents readers with a detailed biography of Mandat. Additionally, this research paper provides insights into Eric Mandat's instinctive approach to life and considers how this modus operandi translates into success as a composer, as a clarinetist, and as a teacher. Interviews with Eric Mandat comprise the basis for this document; these are supplemented by his writings, articles about Mandat, reviews of his music, and interviews with select colleagues and students. This is the first document to examine Eric Mandat's history and development as a composer, teacher and clarinetist.
Contributorsd'Alessio, Rebecca Tout (Author) / Spring, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Hill, Gary (Committee member) / Hackbarth, Glenn (Committee member) / Schuring, Martin (Committee member) / McLin, Katherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This DMA project (in piano performance) consists of a concerto composed for trumpet and piano duo with orchestra and an analytical document that accompanies it. The text portion of this paper discusses the different compositional aspects of Rapsodia Camaleónica, including instrumentation, form, influences and the performers' perspective. The work is scored for a medium-sized orchestra: 2 flutes (flute 2 double piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, horn, trombone, bass trombone, 4 percussionists (timpani, snare drum, crash cymbals, suspended cymbal, castanets, güiro or carrasca, shekere, whip, xylophone, triangle, pandeiro, tam-tam, wood blocks, 2 congas, glockenspiel, 3 tom-toms, bass drum) and strings. It is written in one multi-sectional movement with a duration of approximately twenty-three minutes. The full score is attached as an appendix. The influences in Rapsodia Camaleónica range from the western classical tradition to world music to urban dance music, all of which fuse together in a work that blends this eclectic mix into a unified whole. This composition is intended as an addition to the piano concerto repertoire from Latin America, which includes compositions by Carlos Chávez, Manuel María Ponce (both Mexican), Alberto Ginastera (Argentinian), Camargo Guarnieri and Heitor Villa-Lobos (both Brazilian). It is the composer's desire to add a Colombian piece of universal appeal to this list.
ContributorsArias-Esguerra, Mauricio (Author) / Meir, Baruch I (Thesis advisor) / DeMars, James (Committee member) / Hamilton, Robert (Committee member) / Pagano, Caio (Committee member) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
ContributorsZhu, Shuang (Performer) / Spring, Robert (Performer) / Zhang, Aihua (Performer) / Skinner, Wesley (Performer) / Jiang, Zhou (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-09-09
ContributorsSpring, Robert (Performer) / Gardner, Joshua (Performer) / Buck, Elizabeth (Performer) / Schuring, Martin (Performer) / Micklich, Albie (Performer) / Ericson, John Q. (John Quincy), 1962- (Performer) / Smith, J. B., 1957- (Performer) / Ryan, Russell (Contributor) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-09-16
Description
Of Leto: a staged concert reading is a new work development created by Alexander Tom and Daniel Oberhaus focusing on collegiate collaboration, production process, and creative intuition. An original story was adapted by Daniel Oberhaus into a working libretto. Alexander Tom created a two-act musical-drama and utilized the colleges on the Arizona State University \u2014 Tempe campus: Barrett, the Honors College, W.P. Carey School of Business, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts: School of Music and School of Theatre, Film and Dance. This cross-discipline staged concert reading was comprised of a libretto by Daniel Oberhaus, music, additional lyrics and orchestrations by Alexander Tom, and orchestrations by Drew Nichols. The performance included a thirteen-piece orchestra and fourteen vocalists in undergraduate and graduate programs. This paper includes research on Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper's Death in Venice and Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Its purpose is to impart a comparative analysis on the process of collaboration in opera, musical theatre, and the newly determined "musical-drama" \u2014 the genre in which Of Leto resides. Use of historical research will expound on the evolution of musical theatre along with each team's collaborative processes in relation to the music (lyrics and melody respectively), the libretto, and the production. The research permits conclusions regarding the possible practices to utilize in creating new student works like Of Leto.
ContributorsTom, Alexander Robert (Author) / DeMars, James (Thesis director) / Swoboda, Deanna (Committee member) / Yatso, Toby (Committee member) / School of Music (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
In recent years, networked systems have become prevalent in communications, computing, sensing, and many other areas. In a network composed of spatially distributed agents, network-wide synchronization of information about the physical environment and the network configuration must be maintained using measurements collected locally by the agents. Registration is a process for connecting the coordinate frames of multiple sets of data. This poses numerous challenges, particularly due to availability of direct communication only between neighboring agents in the network. These are exacerbated by uncertainty in the measurements and also by imperfect communication links. This research explored statistically based registration in a sensor network. The approach developed exploits measurements of offsets formed as differences of state values between pairs of agents that share a link in the network graph. It takes into account that the true offsets around any closed cycle in the network graph must sum to zero.
ContributorsPhuong, Shih-Ling (Author) / Cochran, Douglas (Thesis director) / Berman, Spring (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
This thesis focused on understanding how humans visually perceive swarm behavior through the use of swarm simulations and gaze tracking. The goal of this project was to determine visual patterns subjects display while observing and supervising a swarm as well as determine what swarm characteristics affect these patterns. As an ultimate goal, it was hoped that this research will contribute to optimizing human-swarm interaction for the design of human supervisory controllers for swarms. To achieve the stated goals, two investigations were conducted. First, subjects gaze was tracked while observing a simulated swarm as it moved across the screen. This swarm changed in size, disturbance level in the position of the agents, speed, and path curvature. Second, subjects were asked to play a supervisory role as they watched a swarm move across the screen toward targets. The subjects determined whether a collision would occur and with which target while their responses as well as their gaze was tracked. In the case of an observatory role, a model of human gaze was created. This was embodied in a second order model similar to that of a spring-mass-damper system. This model was similar across subjects and stable. In the case of a supervisory role, inherent weaknesses in human perception were found, such as the inability to predict future position of curved paths. These findings are discussed in depth within the thesis. Overall, the results presented suggest that understanding human perception of swarms offers a new approach to the problem of swarm control. The ability to adapt controls to the strengths and weaknesses could lead to great strides in the reduction of operators in the control of one UAV, resulting in a move towards one man operation of a swarm.
ContributorsWhitton, Elena Michelle (Author) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis (Thesis director) / Berman, Spring (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This thesis presents a process by which a controller used for collective transport tasks is qualitatively studied and probed for presence of undesirable equilibrium states that could entrap the system and prevent it from converging to a target state. Fields of study relevant to this project include dynamic system modeling, modern control theory, script-based system simulation, and autonomous systems design. Simulation and computational software MATLAB and Simulink® were used in this thesis.
To achieve this goal, a model of a swarm performing a collective transport task in a bounded domain featuring convex obstacles was simulated in MATLAB/ Simulink®. The closed-loop dynamic equations of this model were linearized about an equilibrium state with angular acceleration and linear acceleration set to zero. The simulation was run over 30 times to confirm system ability to successfully transport the payload to a goal point without colliding with obstacles and determine ideal operating conditions by testing various orientations of objects in the bounded domain. An additional purely MATLAB simulation was run to identify local minima of the Hessian of the navigation-like potential function. By calculating this Hessian periodically throughout the system’s progress and determining the signs of its eigenvalues, a system could check whether it is trapped in a local minimum, and potentially dislodge itself through implementation of a stochastic term in the robot controllers. The eigenvalues of the Hessian calculated in this research suggested the model local minima were degenerate, indicating an error in the mathematical model for this system, which likely incurred during linearization of this highly nonlinear system.
To achieve this goal, a model of a swarm performing a collective transport task in a bounded domain featuring convex obstacles was simulated in MATLAB/ Simulink®. The closed-loop dynamic equations of this model were linearized about an equilibrium state with angular acceleration and linear acceleration set to zero. The simulation was run over 30 times to confirm system ability to successfully transport the payload to a goal point without colliding with obstacles and determine ideal operating conditions by testing various orientations of objects in the bounded domain. An additional purely MATLAB simulation was run to identify local minima of the Hessian of the navigation-like potential function. By calculating this Hessian periodically throughout the system’s progress and determining the signs of its eigenvalues, a system could check whether it is trapped in a local minimum, and potentially dislodge itself through implementation of a stochastic term in the robot controllers. The eigenvalues of the Hessian calculated in this research suggested the model local minima were degenerate, indicating an error in the mathematical model for this system, which likely incurred during linearization of this highly nonlinear system.
ContributorsBaye-Wallace, Lily Catherine (Author) / Berman, Spring (Thesis director) / Marvi, Hamidreza (Committee member) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of Music, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / School for Engineering of Matter,Transport & Enrgy (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
The original scope of this project was to have several conducting experiences and written records about the conductor’s experiences. Due to COVID-19, the focus of the paper has shifted to documenting the preparation, rehearsal, and performance "Recombobulation" (2016) by Theresa Martin. Using the templates found in the "Teaching Music Through Performance in Band" book series as a model, combined with the author’s personal narrative of their experience, this paper aims to serve as a resource for both people considering programming this piece of music as well as early career conductors who strive to improve their craft.
ContributorsStirm, Taylor Lynne (Author) / Caslor, Jason (Thesis director) / Spring, Robert (Committee member) / Gardner, Joshua (Committee member) / School of Music, Dance and Theatre (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12