“OUT.” is a song cycle for bass and piano that follows the coming out process of a young homosexual who has been raised in a politically and religiously conservative corner of American culture. This character was taught from a very young age that anything or anyone of a queer nature was inherently wrong and should be avoided and scorned. The story arc captured in this seven-movement work is only a small portion of what the character ultimately goes through as they mature. This portion of their narrative has been isolated with the hope of embodying a queer character of strength, and this piece begins with the character knowing, understanding, and having already come to terms with their own sexuality. The story outlined in this song cycle is one of hardship that ultimately leads to triumph, as a demonstration that overcoming queer suppression is an achievable goal.

This fifteen-minute cyclical mass uses excerpts from the text of the Mass Ordinary and is laid out into five movements and across three different languages: Kyrie (Latin), Gloria (Chinese), Credo (English), Sanctus (Chinese), and Agnus Dei (Latin). Rather than following the tradition of celebrating devotion, this mass tells the story of the abuse of power in political and religious leadership. Movements sung in Latin represent the devout Christian base whose motives and inspiration remain pure and divine. The English movement, Credo, has been altered from the original and represents the manipulation and distortion of scripture, truth, and facts by self-serving leaders and politicians. Finally, Chinese movements represent those who are persecuted for their convictions and their identity.

The turmoil of the Chinese movements is characterized by atonality and fast tempos with contrasting, meditative, lyrical B sections. The outer Latin movements contain the familiar Kyrie and Agnus Dei texts in triple canon with the orchestra. The English middle movement is simultaneously familiar and awkward, with harmonies that almost function, under an altered Credo text. After an aria-like passage, the orchestra takes the “I believe” figure and manipulates it in a modal fugato, culminating in a climactic version of the main motive. A repeated double-dotted quarter note—sixteenth-note rhythm followed by a fast tremolo in the castanets make up the central “bangu motive.” This motive is derived from traditional Beijing Opera, in which the bangu is the principal percussion element. As a rhythmic motive, fragments of it appear in every movement and in several different instrument groups. These fragments undergo various transformations before a version of it arrives as the final Agnus Dei rhythmic figure.

Martin Ellerby (b. 1951) is a prominent composer for wind and brass bands, and his Euphonium Concerto and Baritone Concerto are among the best and most challenging works in the euphonium and baritone repertoire. This project aims to assist the performer in learning these important works by utilizing specific practice strategies.

Each work has been performed and thoroughly examined by the author in order to develop and offer specific strategies for learning each piece. This project utilizes identification of themes and motives, existing methods, suggested exercises, and suggestions from the premiere performers in order to develop a strategic practice regimen for learning these important works. The discussion of each movement begins with a brief thematic overview to identify the motives and ideas used to construct each movement. The musical content discovered through thematic and motivic identification is used to recommend modified exercises from Arban Complete Method for Trombone and Euphonium edited by Joseph Alessi and Dr. Brian Bowman, Clarke’s Technical Studies for The Cornet by Herbert L. Clarke, The Brass Gym: A Comprehensive Daily Workout for Brass Players by Sam Pilafian and Patrick Sheridan, Scale and Arpeggio Routines for Undergraduate & Graduate College & University Students by Milt Stevens and Brian Bowman, and “The Carmine Caruso Method” as taught by Julie Landsman. Each exercise presented is aimed to target a specific challenge of the movement being discussed and will facilitate effective and efficient practice of each work.

I believe the human mind is not an accurate reproducer of objects and events, but a tool that constructs their qualities. Philosophers Bowman Clarke, James John, and Amy Kind have argued for and against similar points, while Daniel Hoffman and Jay Dowling have debated cases from a psychological perspective. My understanding of their discourse surfaces in Cognize Normal-Like Pleez, a video installation designed to capture the enigmatic connection between perceivers and the things they perceive. The composition encapsulates this theme through a series of five videos that disseminate confusing imagery paired with mangled sounds. The miniatures operate in sequence on computer monitors set inside a haphazardously ornamented tower. Though the original sources for each video communicate clear, familiar subjects, the final product deliberately obscures them. Sometimes sounds and images flicker for only brief moments, perhaps too fast for the human mind to fully process. Though some information comes through, important data supplied by the surrounding context is absent.

I invite the audience to rationalize this complexing conglomerate and reflect on how their established biases inform their opinion of the work. Each person likely draws from his or her experiences, cultural conditioning, knowledge, and other personal factors in order to create an individual conceptualization of the installation. Their subjective conclusions reflect my belief concerning a neurological basis for the origin of qualities. One’s connection to Cognize’s images and sounds, to me, is not derived solely from characteristics inherent to it, but also endowed by one’s mind, which not only constructs the attributes one normally associates with the images and sounds (as opposed to the physics and biology that lead to their construction), but also seamlessly incorporates the aforementioned biases. I realize my ideas by focusing the topics of the videos and their setting around the transmission of information and its obfuscation. Just as one cannot see or hear past the perceptual barriers in Cognize, I believe one cannot escape his or her mind to “sense” qualities in an objective, disembodied manner, because the mind is necessary for perception.

Rhythm is a work for percussion ensemble and narrator. The percussion ensemble includes five percussionists who each play multiple instruments. The narrator recites quotes from the book Meter as Rhythm by Dr. Christopher Hasty. The piece is in six parts with a short introduction (mm. 1-5). The structure is delineated by the quotes from Meter as Rhythm. The narrator describes an aspect of rhythm at the beginning of each section and the quote is sonically realized through the percussion ensemble.

This piece experiments with different timbres and rhythmic motives. Timbral variety is achieved through grouping instruments into woods, metals, and membranes and using combinations of those groups to delineate different sections and ideas. The rhythmic motives are based on the numbers 3, 5, and 7, and appear as rhythmic values, phrase lengths, and number of repetitions.

The first section states a definition of rhythm and contains all timbres and motives contained within the composition. The piece then explores the relativity of time and is represented by drums changing the speed of their notes. The third section discusses rhythm as repetition and is illustrated by repetitive rhythmic motives. The text then features rhythm as a subjective human experience and is reflected through polyrhythms played between ensemble members. What follows is a description of meter as a temporal measurement that is unchanged by rhythmic activity. By bringing back previous motives, this section reveals that all of the motives work within the same meter. In the final section, the performers play various subdivisions of the beat to show different aspects of proportion by dividing the beat in several ways.

The current project is a study of five violin sonatas by the German Baroque composer Johann Georg Pisendel (1687-1755), arranged for guitar. The first part of the document is comprised of an overview of Pisendel's life and career as a virtuoso violinist, primarily focusing on his time of employment with the Dresden Hofkapelle during the Saxon-Polish Union. This section also examines the history and issues surrounding the Royal Court of Dresden's Schrank II (Cabinet II) music collection, which holds all of Pisendel's manuscripts. Although many of his works were previously lost or attributed wrongly to other composers, new research from the 2008 Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) funded project: The Instrumental Music of the Dresden Hofkapelle at the Time of the Saxon-Polish Union aids in providing a comprehensive list and description of each of Pisendel's violin sonatas, either ascertained or conjectural. The second part contains arrangements of five selected violin sonatas for solo guitar. Together with the rationale pertaining to interpretive choices that were made in adapting each sonata for solo guitar, each work includes explanatory notes regarding its history and provenance. The analysis and arrangement of each sonata was conducted from facsimiles of the Schrank II manuscripts, which are currently available to the public through the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) online database.

This creative project thesis involves electronic music composition and production, and it uses some elements of algorithmic music composition (through recurrent neural networks). Algorithmic composition techniques are used here as a tool in composing the pieces, but are not the main focus. Thematically, this project explores the analogy between artificial neural networks and neural activity in the brain. This project consists of three short pieces, each exploring these concept in different ways.

Based on the techniques of spectralism and using Grisey's "Partiels" as a model, my thesis composition combines my desire to explore computer music, visual mediums, and my personal desire to create meaning in music through integrating manipulated recordings of "place" in a piece for string orchestra and fixed electronics. My thesis paper includes spectralism history, analysis of "Partiels," and analysis of my own composition.