Matching Items (139)
Description
This presentation explores the processes of writing and producing the original musical "Subplots," debuted in August 2022. Through composition and music direction lenses, this presentation outlines the creative journey from conception to performance, highlighting the process of collaborating with a librettist, performers, and production team members. This thesis was completed under the direction of Dr. Jody Rockmaker and Dr. Alex Temple; all materials are copyrighted by Anthony Procopio and Sara Matin.
ContributorsProcopio, Anthony (Author) / Rockmaker, Jody (Thesis director) / Temple, Alex (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music, Dance and Theatre (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
While Aleksandr Borodin enjoyed a varied career as a composer, he was a chemist by profession and made his living as such. Although his focus was primarily on academic life as a chemistry professor, his musical style still managed to evolve in remarkable ways: from a more Western-European style to the style of Russian nationalism of the late 19th century. While Borodin did compose early chamber works featuring the piano, during this stylistic shift, his chamber music output notably excluded the piano, as he switched his focus to string quartets. Additionally, he dedicated many of these later years to producing large-scale symphonic works and the opera Prince Igor. The purpose of this project is to address a lost opportunity: There is sadly no chamber music in Borodin’s mature style that features the piano. His masterpiece, Prince Igor, is the work of a mature composer, and Konchakovna’s Cavatina from the opera’s second act was chosen to serve as the basis for an arrangement for traditional piano trio: violin, cello, and piano. This aria for contralto is rare in that the themes and orchestration all are attributed to Borodin, while much of the rest of the opera was completed by other composers of the time.
I have created two arrangements of this scene: a literal transcription that maintains the integrity of the original composition, in which the vocal line of the aria is given primarily to the violin, while the orchestral parts are divided between the cello and the piano, and a second arrangement that alters much of the piece for compositional variety, in the spirit of other arrangers such as Franz Liszt or Jascha Heifetz. In the second version, there are creative interpolations, countermelodies, harmonies, and new figuration to fully utilize the qualities of a piano trio. This paper explains the methods used in the creation of these arrangements, accompanied by examples from the score, and can serve as a model for other musicians who wish to create their own arrangements of pre-existing musical materials.
ContributorsArch, Nathan (Author) / Campbell, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Rockmaker, Jody (Committee member) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Czech composer, Václav Tomášek (1774-1850) belongs to a generation of late classical composers overshadowed by their contemporaries like Mozart and Beethoven. However, Tomášek’s work both as a composer and a pedagogue was influential to the subsequent generation of Romantic composers, and his pieces are an important bridge between the late Classical period and early Romantic. More substantial attention has been paid to Tomášek’s vocal compositions in the English language literature. Tomášek’s Eclogues for piano are excellent representative works of this transition between classical and romantic. They employ classical formal models which are meant to recall Greco-Roman poetic origins and do not contain complex harmonic language. These pieces are not strictly ‘classical’ works and should be considered early character pieces for the piano. Indeed, later Romantic composers, like Franz Liszt, also used the Eclogue as a form, evoking a bucolic pastoralism. Tomášek’s Eclogues are therefore important early templates of this form and should be considered by pianists for inclusion on concert programs. This project provides performance suggestions along with the recording which have not been recorded before, help performers program these overlooked pieces.
ContributorsGou, Xiaoqian (Author) / Meir, Baruch (Thesis advisor) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Rockmaker, Jody (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
The composition Fold is a multi-movement work for flute, clarinet, violin, violoncello, piano, and percussion. The music develops from one simple gesture that generates many variations. The gesture symbolizes a folding technique in origami, the pleat fold. The pleat gesture goes through many transformations and evolves into different musical ideas that carry various metaphorical meanings such as the concept of time, the devotion to craftsmanship, and the physical and mental deterioration of a person. The musical materials form a piece about the changing relationship between a craftsperson and their craft over the span of their creative life. Chinese ci poetry informs the structure of this piece on macro and micro levels. This document examines the compositional processes of Fold and explains how musical metaphors and cultural references are used in her creative output.
ContributorsWang, Ziyu (Author) / Rockmaker, Jody (Thesis advisor) / Navarro, Fernanda (Committee member) / Schmelz, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
ABSTRACTViolin sonatas composed by male composers of the romantic era are widely studied and performed, yet there is far less focus on pieces of that era composed by women. Much of the research on women’s music of the era is scattered and difficult to find. The creation of the Violin Sonatas by Women website (www.violinsonatasbywomen.com) is to educate, promote, and make accessible these deserving but overlooked composers and their works.
Presently, the Violin Sonatas by Women website serves as a resource with detailed information on twenty-five sonatas for violin and piano composed by fifteen European female composers of the romantic era. Provided on this site is biographical information on each composer and access to editions, manuscripts, and recordings. This resource also contains historical information, supplemental exercises and études, and other pedagogical notes. Composers are listed in order of birth date.
This site offers a robust, accurate, and accessible resource for students and professionals. It also provides knowledge, enhances understanding, and identifies technical challenges in the pieces that could be incorporated into teaching curricula and performance repertoires. Finally, it serves to provide long-overdue credit to these female composers by giving their work more recognition.
This study is an ongoing project with more editions and recordings added as they are produced. Presently, the main portion of this website includes advanced published works written from 1863 to 1917. This website will soon be expanded to offer information on violin sonatas composed by women of other eras and origins.
ContributorsAbbott, Sarah (Author) / Swartz, Jonathan (Thesis advisor) / McLin, Katherine (Committee member) / Rockmaker, Jody (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The unmeasured Fantasias by Johann Gottfried Müthel appear as part of a collection of pedagogical exercises to foster improvisation. The information he gives in the notation of his fantasias can be elucidated with a historiographical interpretation of musical rhetoric. Müthel developed musical figures and contrasting textures in accordance with contemporary rhetorical principles of inventio, dispositio and elaboratio. An analysis of Müthel’s G-minor Fantasia provides a link between musical rhetoric and performance, as seen through its improvisatory gestures. Issues of performance practice that arise in the G-minor Fantasia are the execution of ornaments, rhythmic alterations, registration, and articulation. This paper explores primary sources contemporary to Müthel to make sense of these issues. The unmeasured Fantasias are written for a keyboard with pedal. At the time that they were written, the pedal fortepiano and pedal clavichord were seen by musicians such as Carl Phillip Emanual Bach to be the superior instruments for performing improvisations. While the notation and texture of the Fantasias suggests that Müthel intended them for organ, a consideration of the possibilities provided by the fortepiano suggests that it may be more suited to conveying aspects of the galant aesthetic.
ContributorsMealey, Natalie (Author) / Marshall, Kimberly (Thesis advisor) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Rockmaker, Jody (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The word “nocturne” was first used to describe a piano work by the Irish composer John Field, who also established its basic framework. The genre was expanded and brought to its maturity by Chopin, who wrote twenty-one nocturnes for solo piano over his entire creative life. Among Chopin’s works, it is the nocturnes with their lyrical melodies and improvisational nature that especially provide flexibility and freedom for performers to express inner feelings and individual interpretations. The marked contrast between Chopin’s early and late nocturnes naturally leads to different interpretive results. Accordingly, this project investigates how the stylistic changes in Chopin’s early and late nocturnes are related to their performances. Taking Op. 9, No. 1 and Op. 62, No. 1 as examples of Chopin’s early and late nocturnes respectively, the project compares the recordings of Artur Rubinstein (1965) and Vladimir Ashkenazy (1981) through the lens of descriptive analyses. The introductory chapter covers the influences on Chopin’s nocturnes, Rubinstein’s and Ashkenazy’s playing styles of Chopin’s works, various editions of Chopin’s nocturnes, and the relation of analysis to performance. The main body of the paper alternates descriptive analysis of each section of Nocturnes Op. 9, No. 1 and Op. 62, No. 1 with comparisons between the two pianists’ recordings. The final chapter outlines how the two nocturnes from Chopin’s early and late creative periods differ from one another and how the changes in style affect the two pianists’ interpretations. The goal of this project is to aid in a better understanding of the interpretive choices made by Rubinstein and Ashkenazy in these two nocturnes.
ContributorsTang, Yun Ms. (Author) / Hamilton, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Rockmaker, Jody (Committee member) / Creviston, Hannah (Committee member) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
ContributorsRockmaker, Jody (Composer)
ContributorsRockmaker, Jody (Composer)
Description
Fingerboard study is an essential component of the college guitar curriculum. A Course on Guitar Fingerboard Melody and Harmony is a method to acquire and integrate fundamental music vocabulary for the guitar performer, interpreter, improvisor, and composer, the end goal being mastery of musical vocabulary to enable artistic freedom and creative depth. This class design facilitates a solid foundation of fundamental components and provides a framework for further study and integration. It offers a concise yet intense course that consolidates, codifies, explores, and applies scale, interval, and chord vocabulary through interpretive, compositional, and improvisational engagement. This project aspires to contribute to the discipline of guitar, its canon, and its pedagogy. This programmed curriculum offers a comprehensive one-year, two-semester, college-level course on fundamental music vocabulary on the guitar fretboard. Its design facilitates a solid foundation for fundamental musical components, equips the student with a working scale and chord vocabulary, reveals how vocabulary is generated on any fretted instrument, and provides a framework for further study and integration. Semester one facilitates in-depth scale and interval study, while semester two investigates triads and seventh chords, reflecting one, two, three, and four voices textures. Each unit contains lessons, assignments, and integration activities. This document provides both teacher edition, units one through four, and student workbook, units five through eight.
Students of A Course on Guitar Fingerboard Melody and Harmony can expect dramatic strides in their understanding of musical vocabulary, its applications, and their abilities to associate and engage in real-time interpretative, compositional, and improvisational contexts. Fingerboard knowledge greatly enhances sight reading skills and enables the interpreter to find fingerings that express the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic character of any particular musical gesture, and consequently, an entire composition. Guitar composers will be most effective when they know the possibilities and parameters of musical vocabulary on the instrument. Often, the study of vocabulary can inform and expand a composer's sonic palette and conception. For improvisers, fingerboard comprehension allows access to any interval, scale, arpeggio, or voicing the ear desires, regardless of where they happen to find themselves on the instrument in that unique moment.
ContributorsZweig, Phillip (Author) / Kim, Ji Leon (Thesis advisor) / Swartz, Jonathan (Committee member) / Rockmaker, Jody (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022