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- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Ryan, Russell
Description
Jaime Mendoza-Nava (1925-2005) was an important Bolivian composer. In addition to writing music for the concert stage, he worked as a composer of film music in Los Angeles during the second half of the twentieth century. His life and work remain greatly unstudied, with the majority of his compositions existing only in manuscript form. The present study surveys the available biographical information on the composer and supplements it with new data collected through interviews with the composer’s family. The information presented here focuses on the composer’s American period as well as his personality traits. The study also examines the development of musical nationalism in Bolivia and other important aspects of Bolivian culture and society, thus creating a historical context through which key influences on the composer are identified. This historical and cultural information also contributes to an examination of Mendoza-Nava’s song cycle País de sombra (1988). A close study of this work reveals Mendoza-Nava’s sensitive setting of the poetry of Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (1868-1933) and his musical references to his Bolivian heritage. A recording of the song cycle by soprano Andrea Ramos and the current author and an edited copy of the musical score conclude the study.
ContributorsSakuma, Masaru (Author) / Ryan, Russell (Thesis advisor) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / Campbell, Andrew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
The purpose of this research project is to expand the unaccompanied cello solo repertoire. This composition, Traveler for Solo Cello, was commissioned to South Korean Composer, Eun-Chul Oh by the author in April of 2020. This research project includes a recording of the work to highlight Eun-Chul Oh’s musical creativity. Traveler for Solo Cello is structured in four movements: The Gyeongbokgung Palace, Night Gypsy, A Fiddler in Ireland, and Tango Bar. The four movements each present the musical elements of different cultures while exploring extended musical techniques and rhythms. Eun-Chul Oh uses the cello as a means of transport, for the audience, on a journey through different cultures’ traditional music styles and sounds.
This document includes a brief historical background, compositional analysis, and performance recommendations for each movement. The original score of the piece is included at the end of the paper. In addition, there is a recording of the work.
ContributorsHan, Sarah Kyungmin (Author) / Landschoot, Tom (Thesis advisor) / Feisst, Sabine (Committee member) / Ryan, Russell (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
Description
The purpose of this lecture-recital is to explore the Protestant Reformation’s effect on the lives of a selected number of composing organists who were active in the field of church music before, during, and after the Reformation. The organists were selected based on the prominence of their positions and the significance of their compositions in the history of the organ. The lecture thus focuses on their employment situations and the repertoire they created. Jan Pieterszoon Sweelick is one of the most extreme examples of changed employment due to the Reformation. Trained as a Catholic organist, and taking up his position at the Oude Kerk Amsterdam at the age of 19, Sweelinck was forced to adapt quickly when the city converted to Calvinism within that same year. He became the civic organist, playing daily recitals on the organ instead of liturgical music, which was prohibited by the Calvinists.
Because of his background in music and his compositional inclinations, Martin Luther created a liturgy that was much friendlier to musicians than was that of Calvin. Lutheranism fostered many fine organist-composers, culminating in the music of J.S. Bach. Early in the Reformation, Hans Kotter was fired from his position in Catholic Fribourg due to his Protestant leanings. Samuel Scheidt also suffered because of religious turmoil. He published three extraordinary volumes of organ music, entitled Tabulatura nova, in 1624, but the onset of the Thirty Years War cost him his employment. His final compositions are simple chorale harmonizations, reflecting the upheaval of the Reformation and the War. In Catholic Italy and Spain, where Reformers never gained a strong foothold, Marco Antonio Cavazzoni and Antonio de Cabezón were able to continue their work with little change.
Due to the nature of their work and instruments, organists stand at the nexus of religion, economics, politics, and art. This lecture-recital seeks to reveal these relationships following the Reformation. These significant organist-composers provide case studies for how the changing religious and political climates of the Reformation affected the work of organists and the music they composed.
ContributorsTucker, Julia (Author) / Marshall, Kimberly (Thesis advisor) / Saucier, Catherine (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
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
Heinrich Heine’s collection of poems, Lyrisches Intermezzo, is well-known in music circles, largely due to Robert Schumann’s settings of sixteen of these poems in his masterwork Dichterliebe. Because of Dichterliebe’s place of importance in art song literature, many other settings of Heine’s sixty-five poems are often overlooked. Breton-born composer Joseph Guy Marie Ropartz composed Quatre Poèmes d’après l’Intermezzo d’Henri Heine in 1899, after having collaborated on a new French translation of the entire Lyrisches Intermezzo in 1890. This cycle is rarely performed, largely due to Ropartz’s relative obscurity as a composer, as the focus of his career was administration of two regional conservatories in France. The Quatre Poèmes were written fairly early in Ropartz’s life, but feature many compositional techniques that remain staples of Ropartz’s work throughout his career. It is an accessible work to many singers and audience members already familiar with Heine. The texts of the four songs are not simply translations of Heine’s original, but altered to adhere to the rules of French poetry. Examining the changes made in the text, both in language and structure, reveals information that will aid performers’ understanding of the poetry and of Ropartz’s choices in musical setting. The music of the work is greatly dependent on a single motive, an idée fixe, and considering the role of this motive in its various appearances is illuminating to the narrative arc of the cycle. This study seeks to aid potential performers and listeners of the Quatre Poèmes by expanding their understanding of the artists responsible for creating it, and by exploring the textual and musical elements that are the building blocks of this work.
ContributorsHutchinson, Taylor Grace (Author) / Campbell, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / DeMaris, Brian (Committee member) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Between the years of 1818 and 1833 the Austrian composer, teacher, and pianist, Carl Czerny (1791–1857) wrote one of his greatest compositions, the f minor Grand Piano Sonata, Op.178 for piano four hands. Overshadowed by composers like Ludwig van Beethoven, Frederic Chopin, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and possibly because of Czerny’s prolific pedagogical output, this work has received little scholarly attention and is rarely performed.
The aim of my paper is first to provide a concise background of the composer for better insight of his ideas and influences and, second to provide a theoretical framework and analysis of the composition to show how this piece is uniquely set in the musical backdrop among early nineteenth century piano music. Further, I will demonstrate performance concepts and ideas of the composition highlighting his instructional mastery. There are two components for this project including a research paper and a lecture recital.
I hope this project could bring more musicians and audiences to Carl Czerny’s serious and concert music as he categorized his music. He had been a great model of true artist, he composes, teaches and perhaps not the greatest promoter of his own music like the contemporaries. However, he devoted most of his life to development of music and the new generation of pianists, which is the most honorable of an individual.
The aim of my paper is first to provide a concise background of the composer for better insight of his ideas and influences and, second to provide a theoretical framework and analysis of the composition to show how this piece is uniquely set in the musical backdrop among early nineteenth century piano music. Further, I will demonstrate performance concepts and ideas of the composition highlighting his instructional mastery. There are two components for this project including a research paper and a lecture recital.
I hope this project could bring more musicians and audiences to Carl Czerny’s serious and concert music as he categorized his music. He had been a great model of true artist, he composes, teaches and perhaps not the greatest promoter of his own music like the contemporaries. However, he devoted most of his life to development of music and the new generation of pianists, which is the most honorable of an individual.
ContributorsShui, Ho Michael (Author) / Pagano, Caio (Thesis advisor) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Norby, Christopher (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Hans Gál is arguably one of the most underrated, underperformed and forgotten composers of the twentieth century. Once a prolific composer in the 1920s and 1930s, Gál’s career was cut short by the Nazi regime in 1933 when he was fired, and his works banned due to his Jewish heritage. Following the Second World War, his music was relegated as obsolete, belonging to a bygone era. Hans Gál is a perfect example of the intransigence, superficiality, and discrimination of the evolving musical fashion, and his life-story speaks to the misfortunes and persecution of the Jewish people in the mid-twentieth century.
Consequently, Hans Gál is known today mainly as an educator, scholar, and editor of Brahms’s works, rather than as a composer, despite an impressive compositional output spanning over 70 years covering every major musical genre. Within his impressive oeuvre are several little-known gems of the violin repertoire, including the Sonata in D for Violin and Piano and Violin Concerto op. 39 among others. Scholarly writings on Gál and his music are unfortunately scarce, particularly such works exploring his violin music.
However, recent years have seen an increased interest in resurrecting the music of Gál. Recordings of his major works as well as research of his music have furthered the awareness and understating of this forgotten composer’s music. In my document, I will continue the path of recent rediscovery and celebration of this unsung hero of twentieth-century post-Romanticism with an in-depth look at his Sonata in D for Violin and Piano (1933). A light-hearted, accessible and unpretentious work, the Sonata in D distinguishes itself in the violin-piano sonata repertoire of the interwar period by its witty, clear use of form and motivic/thematic unity in the vein of the great Viennese masters. Gál’s take on traditional idioms such as tonality, coupled with masterful use of the implication/realization process, create a highly original and noteworthy style, that renders the Sonata in D an immediately appealing work for performers and listeners alike.
Consequently, Hans Gál is known today mainly as an educator, scholar, and editor of Brahms’s works, rather than as a composer, despite an impressive compositional output spanning over 70 years covering every major musical genre. Within his impressive oeuvre are several little-known gems of the violin repertoire, including the Sonata in D for Violin and Piano and Violin Concerto op. 39 among others. Scholarly writings on Gál and his music are unfortunately scarce, particularly such works exploring his violin music.
However, recent years have seen an increased interest in resurrecting the music of Gál. Recordings of his major works as well as research of his music have furthered the awareness and understating of this forgotten composer’s music. In my document, I will continue the path of recent rediscovery and celebration of this unsung hero of twentieth-century post-Romanticism with an in-depth look at his Sonata in D for Violin and Piano (1933). A light-hearted, accessible and unpretentious work, the Sonata in D distinguishes itself in the violin-piano sonata repertoire of the interwar period by its witty, clear use of form and motivic/thematic unity in the vein of the great Viennese masters. Gál’s take on traditional idioms such as tonality, coupled with masterful use of the implication/realization process, create a highly original and noteworthy style, that renders the Sonata in D an immediately appealing work for performers and listeners alike.
ContributorsGebe, Vladimir, 1987- (Author) / McLin, Katherine (Thesis advisor) / Carpenter, Ellon (Committee member) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This project details specific placement and usage of the Clara motive in Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe. The analysis categorizes the motive according to its different shapes and relationships to the poetry in Dichterliebe. Four main permutations of the motive are discussed in great detail: the original motive, inverted motive, retrograde motive, and retrograde inverted motive.
Schumann (1810–1856) composed more than 160 vocal works in 1840, commonly referred to as his Liederjahr. At the time, Schumann and Clara Wieck (1819–1896) were planning to marry, despite the objections of her father Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873). Robert was inspired to write Dichterliebe because of the happiness-and anxiety-surrounding his love for Clara, and the difficulties leading to their impending marriage. Schumann used the Clara motive (C-Bb-A-G#-A), which incorporates the letters of her name, throughout the song cycle in special moments as a tool of musical expression that alludes to his future wife.
Eric Sams (1926–2004), a specialist of German Lieder, has made significant contributions to the research of the Clara motive in Schumann’s music (through his book The Songs of Robert Schumann). However, research into specific locations and transformations of the Clara motive within the Dichterliebe are still insufficient. A further awareness of the Clara motive’s inner working is intended to help performers interpret this song cycle.
Schumann (1810–1856) composed more than 160 vocal works in 1840, commonly referred to as his Liederjahr. At the time, Schumann and Clara Wieck (1819–1896) were planning to marry, despite the objections of her father Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873). Robert was inspired to write Dichterliebe because of the happiness-and anxiety-surrounding his love for Clara, and the difficulties leading to their impending marriage. Schumann used the Clara motive (C-Bb-A-G#-A), which incorporates the letters of her name, throughout the song cycle in special moments as a tool of musical expression that alludes to his future wife.
Eric Sams (1926–2004), a specialist of German Lieder, has made significant contributions to the research of the Clara motive in Schumann’s music (through his book The Songs of Robert Schumann). However, research into specific locations and transformations of the Clara motive within the Dichterliebe are still insufficient. A further awareness of the Clara motive’s inner working is intended to help performers interpret this song cycle.
ContributorsYoo, Jihye (Author) / Campbell, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019