Matching Items (202)
Description
A new arrangement of the Concerto for Two Horns in E-flat Major, Hob. VIId/6, attributed by some to Franz Joseph Haydn, is presented here. The arrangement reduces the orchestral portion to ten wind instruments, specifically a double wind quintet, to facilitate performance of the work. A full score and a complete set of parts are included. In support of this new arrangement, a discussion of the early treatment of horns in pairs and the subsequent development of the double horn concerto in the eighteenth century provides historical context for the Concerto for Two Horns in E-flat major. A summary of the controversy concerning the identity of the composer of this concerto is followed by a description of the content and structure of each of its three movements. Some comments on the procedures of the arrangement complete the background information.
ContributorsYeh, Guan-Lin (Author) / Ericson, John (Thesis advisor) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / Micklich, Albie (Committee member) / Pilafian, J. Samuel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The purpose of this project was to commission, perform, and discuss a new work for an instrument pairing not often utilized, oboe and percussion. The composer, Alyssa Morris, was selected in June 2009. Her work, titled Forecast, was completed in October of 2009 and premiered in February of 2010, as part of a program showcasing music for oboe and percussion. Included in this document is a detailed biography of the composer, a description of the four movements of Forecast, performance notes for each movement, a diagram for stage set-up, the full score, the program from the premiere performance with biographies of all the performers involved, and both a live recording and MIDI sound file. The performance notes discuss issues that arose during preparation for the premiere and should help avoid potential pitfalls. TrevCo Music, publisher of the work, graciously allowed inclusion of the full score. This score is solely for use in this document; please visit the publisher's website for purchasing information. The commission and documentation of this composition are intended to add to the repertoire for oboe in an unusual instrument pairing and to encourage further exploration of such combinations.
ContributorsCreamer, Caryn (Author) / Schuring, Martin (Thesis advisor) / Hill, Gary (Committee member) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / Micklich, Albie (Committee member) / Spring, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Although one finds much scholarship on nineteenth-century music in America, one finds relatively little about music in the post-Civil-War frontier west. Generalities concerning small frontier towns of regional importance remain to be discovered. This paper aims to contribute to scholarship by chronicling musical life in the early years of two such towns in northern Arizona territory: Prescott and Flagstaff. Prescott, adjacent to Fort Whipple, was founded in 1864 to serve as capital of the new territory. Primarily home to soldiers and miners, the town was subject to many challenges of frontier life. Flagstaff, ninety miles to the north-northwest, was founded about two decades later in 1883 during the building of the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad, which connected the town to Albuquerque, New Mexico in the east and southern California in the west. Although the particular resources of each town provided many different musical opportunities, extant newspaper articles from Prescott's Arizona Miner and Flagstaff's Arizona Champion describe communities in which musical concerts, dances and theatrical performances provided entertainment and socializing for its citizens. Furthermore, music was an important part of developing institutions such as the church, schools, and fraternal lodges, and the newspapers of both towns advertised musical instruments and sheet music. Both towns were home to amateur musicians, and both offered the occasional opportunity to learn to dance or play an instrument. Although territorial Arizona was sometimes harsh and resources were limited, music was valued in these communities and was a consistent presence in frontier life.
ContributorsJohnson, Amber V (Author) / Oldani, Robert W. (Thesis advisor) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / Saucier, Catherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The theme for this work is the development of fast numerical algorithms for sparse optimization as well as their applications in medical imaging and source localization using sensor array processing. Due to the recently proposed theory of Compressive Sensing (CS), the $\ell_1$ minimization problem attracts more attention for its ability to exploit sparsity. Traditional interior point methods encounter difficulties in computation for solving the CS applications. In the first part of this work, a fast algorithm based on the augmented Lagrangian method for solving the large-scale TV-$\ell_1$ regularized inverse problem is proposed. Specifically, by taking advantage of the separable structure, the original problem can be approximated via the sum of a series of simple functions with closed form solutions. A preconditioner for solving the block Toeplitz with Toeplitz block (BTTB) linear system is proposed to accelerate the computation. An in-depth discussion on the rate of convergence and the optimal parameter selection criteria is given. Numerical experiments are used to test the performance and the robustness of the proposed algorithm to a wide range of parameter values. Applications of the algorithm in magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and a comparison with other existing methods are included. The second part of this work is the application of the TV-$\ell_1$ model in source localization using sensor arrays. The array output is reformulated into a sparse waveform via an over-complete basis and study the $\ell_p$-norm properties in detecting the sparsity. An algorithm is proposed for minimizing a non-convex problem. According to the results of numerical experiments, the proposed algorithm with the aid of the $\ell_p$-norm can resolve closely distributed sources with higher accuracy than other existing methods.
ContributorsShen, Wei (Author) / Mittlemann, Hans D (Thesis advisor) / Renaut, Rosemary A. (Committee member) / Jackiewicz, Zdzislaw (Committee member) / Gelb, Anne (Committee member) / Ringhofer, Christian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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
Overcrowding of Emergency Departments (EDs) put the safety of patients at risk. Decision makers implement Ambulance Diversion (AD) as a way to relieve congestion and ensure timely treatment delivery. However, ineffective design of AD policies reduces the accessibility to emergency care and adverse events may arise. The objective of this dissertation is to propose methods to design and analyze effective AD policies that consider performance measures that are related to patient safety. First, a simulation-based methodology is proposed to evaluate the mean performance and variability of single-factor AD policies in a single hospital environment considering the trade-off between average waiting time and percentage of time spent on diversion. Regression equations are proposed to obtain parameters of AD policies that yield desired performance level. The results suggest that policies based on the total number of patients waiting are more consistent and provide a high precision in predicting policy performance. Then, a Markov Decision Process model is proposed to obtain the optimal AD policy assuming that information to start treatment in a neighboring hospital is available. The model is designed to minimize the average tardiness per patient in the long run. Tardiness is defined as the time that patients have to wait beyond a safety time threshold to start receiving treatment. Theoretical and computational analyses show that there exists an optimal policy that is of threshold type, and diversion can be a good alternative to decrease tardiness when ambulance patients cause excessive congestion in the ED. Furthermore, implementation of AD policies in a simulation model that accounts for several relaxations of the assumptions suggests that the model provides consistent policies under multiple scenarios. Finally, a genetic algorithm is combined with simulation to design effective policies for multiple hospitals simultaneously. The model has the objective of minimizing the time that patients spend in non-value added activities, including transportation, waiting and boarding in the ED. Moreover, the AD policies are combined with simple ambulance destination policies to create ambulance flow control mechanisms. Results show that effective ambulance management can significantly reduce the time that patients have to wait to receive appropriate level of care.
ContributorsRamirez Nafarrate, Adrian (Author) / Fowler, John W. (Thesis advisor) / Wu, Teresa (Thesis advisor) / Gel, Esma S. (Committee member) / Limon, Jorge (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Peter N. Schubert in "Hidden Forms in Palestrina's `First Book of Four-Voice Motets'" (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2007) defines significant blocks of vertical relationships in imitative and non-imitative duos in the thirty-six motets of Palestrina's Motectus festorum totius anni cum communi sanctorum, published in 1564. Schubert describes these blocks of vertical relationships that proceed from duos as modules and organizes them according to categories of construction and function. Palestrina's parody Mass, O Rex glóriæ, reveals the same duos and modules that Schubert discovers in Palestrina's motet of the same name. Palestrina transfers these duos and modules from the motet into the parody Mass, using them as building blocks for points of imitation. The duos, modules, and their motives appear in all but a few places, and are in some cases prominent throughout movements of the Mass, such as the Kyrie. Palestrina manipulates and elaborates these duos and modules according to the character and text of each movement. He borrows them consistently in their original order, which he changes only for reasons of textual meaning or verbal similarity. The module approach to recurring vertical combinations, although a recent application, is valuable for recognizing and treating systematically the duo relationships and their elaboration that are described by late-Renaissance theorists, especially Fray Tomas de Sancte Maria. The identification and analytical interpretation of duos and modules in Palestrina's motet O Rex glóriæ and the parody Mass based on it yields insights not only into his compositional decisions as he adapts material from the motet for its new setting, but also into the potential value of modules as the basis for an analytical approach to the sacred vocal polyphony of the sixteenth century.
ContributorsMenefee, Catherine Ann (Author) / Holbrook, Amy (Thesis advisor) / Saucier, Catherine (Committee member) / Carpenter, Ellon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a malignant tumor and seventh most common cancer in human. Every year there is a significant rise in the number of patients suffering from HCC. Most clinical research has focused on HCC early detection so that there are high chances of patient's survival. Emerging advancements in functional and structural imaging techniques have provided the ability to detect microscopic changes in tumor micro environment and micro structure. The prime focus of this thesis is to validate the applicability of advanced imaging modality, Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE), for HCC diagnosis. The research was carried out on three HCC patient's data and three sets of experiments were conducted. The main focus was on quantitative aspect of MRE in conjunction with Texture Analysis, an advanced imaging processing pipeline and multi-variate analysis machine learning method for accurate HCC diagnosis. We analyzed the techniques to handle unbalanced data and evaluate the efficacy of sampling techniques. Along with this we studied different machine learning algorithms and developed models using them. Performance metrics such as Prediction Accuracy, Sensitivity and Specificity have been used for evaluation for the final developed model. We were able to identify the significant features in the dataset and also the selected classifier was robust in predicting the response class variable with high accuracy.
ContributorsBansal, Gaurav (Author) / Wu, Teresa (Thesis advisor) / Mitchell, Ross (Thesis advisor) / Li, Jing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Discovering Puerto Rican art song: a research project on four art song works by Héctor Campos Parsi
Description
Puerto Rico has produced many important composers who have contributed to the musical culture of the nation during the last 200 years. However, a considerable amount of their music has proven to be difficult to access and may contain numerous errors. This research project intends to contribute to the accessibility of such music and to encourage similar studies of Puerto Rican music. This study focuses on the music of Héctor Campos Parsi (1922-1998), one of the most prominent composers of the 20th century in Puerto Rico. After an overview of the historical background of music on the island and the biography of the composer, four works from his art song repertoire are given for detailed examination. A product of this study is the first corrected edition of his cycles Canciones de Cielo y Agua, Tres Poemas de Corretjer, Los Paréntesis, and the song Majestad Negra. These compositions date from 1947 to 1959, and reflect both the European and nationalistic writing styles of the composer during this time. Data for these corrections have been obtained from the composer's manuscripts, published and unpublished editions, and published recordings. The corrected scores are ready for publication and a compact disc of this repertoire, performed by soprano Melliangee Pérez and the author, has been recorded to bring to life these revisions. Despite the best intentions of the author, the various copyright issues have yet to be resolved. It is hoped that this document will provide the foundation for a resolution and that these important works will be available for public performance and study in the near future.
ContributorsRodríguez Morales, Luis F., 1980- (Author) / Campbell, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Buck, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / Kopta, Anne (Committee member) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In addition to his many other works, Russian-American composer Leo Ornstein (1893-2002) contributed a substantial body of literature for cello and piano, including Sonata No. 1 (1915-1916), Sonata No. 2 (circa 1920), Composition No. 1 (date unknown), Two Pieces (date unknown), and Six Preludes (1930-1931). His cello music is an eclectic mix of twentieth-century Neoromantic and atonal styles. This study includes a recording of the complete works for cello and piano by Leo Ornstein and a description of the music that details the formal procedures and how the cello and piano relate to one another. The discussion offers extensive musical examples in support of the descriptions. The recording was completed at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada (October 2009), with R. Nicolas Alvarez, cello, in collaboration with pianist Keith Kirchoff. Andre Shrimski produced and edited the recording.
ContributorsAlvarez, Rodolfo Nicolas (Author) / Landschoot, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Rotaru, Catalin (Committee member) / Jiang, Danwen (Committee member) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013