COMPOSING FOR THE BIG ONES: a study of scoring and structure in slow movements from Karel Husa’s Concerto for Wind Ensemble and Concerto for Orchestra. This study examines the compositional element of instrument usage; in particular, the ways Karel Husa has used the timbral resources of wind ensemble and symphony orchestra. To this end, an analysis method was designed that illuminates relationships between scoring choices and structural function. Few studies have been centred on timbre or scoring; fewer still have considered scoring of contemporary works for large ensembles. Studies surveyed demonstrate analysis procedures which suit the works studied and the writer’s intended application usually performance. Rather than squeeze Husa’s works into procedures designed for others, this analysis process has been designed around characteristics of his works. In doing so, I revisited three general analysis texts from the 1970’s by Wallace Berry, Jan LaRue and Robert Erickson, bringing tog...

The purpose of this teacher action research project was to develop and field- test a music composition curriculum for middle school band and assess whether the curriculum was adequate for overcoming the obstacles of teacher-training, resources, time and large group composition. Three phases were completed: 1) an exploratory pilot phase (lesson plan and curriculum development); 2) a second pilot phase (lessons tested); and 3) a final phase (five band directors taught and assessed the curriculum). Research questions focused on the extent to which middle school band directors and their students were able to successfully follow the proposed curriculum. Five middle school band directors and their bands representing diverse ethnic and socio economic backgrounds were chosen to participate in the project as well as two composers who reviewed the curriculum and provided feed back. Each of the participating directors taught the proposed curriculum involving ten lessons over approximately two to five weeks. Initial data collection included the initial gathering of lesson plans and the development of a composition curriculum from journals, dissertations, living composers, audio and video materials, and two pilot projects with three different middle school bands. Additional data collection included field observations and notes, interviews with band directors and composers, and a final focus group interview with participating band directors. The final results will help contribute to the development of basic resources and strategies for music teachers to use to teach composition to middle school students and for college music education professors to teach pre-service public school music educators on incorporating composition into their classroom teaching.

“Whaaaaaaaaat!? I Don’t Get Classical Music: A Self-Help Desperation Guide” is a tonic for the perplexed, and a companion guide for those who feel classical music is forbidding, complex and grandiose. It is a concise and helpful book with humor and insight written by a composer and performer with a lifetime of experience. Beginning with patterns, pitches and instruments, author Dennis Bathory-Kitsz covers topics from performers to shrieking singers to the mysterious classical codes, from Beethoven (“the great hulk of a man”) through space music, tone poems, nationalism, and even composers insulting each other. Written in response to a student’s plea for help (“I’m desperate! I don’t get classical music!”), the book is not stuck in the distant past. Instead, “Whaaaaaaaaat!?” includes classical music—which the composer prefers to call “nonpop”—from ancient times right up to the present day, from Gregorian chant through electrons and gongs to nonpop fused with pop. Writes one of his students, “it accomplishes what a textbook does without being a textbook.” Another says, “It gets right into the dirty details of Western music and does so in a way that makes even the most novice listener feel like a professional.” Explored and critiqued by more than two dozen readers from complete amateurs to working professionals, “Whaaaaaaaaat!?” is insightful, exuberant, funny and, according to one music professor, “terrifically valuable as a corrective to bad thinking and its offspring, bad teaching.” In a short, readable 100 pages, Bathory-Kitsz shares the madness and mystery of classical music. Note: This book is available in printed form here. Your purchase will help support the second edition. https://www.amazon.com/Whaaaaaaaaat-Classical-Music-Self-Help-Desperation/dp/1530729521/

In recent musicology, scholars have identified the sun—and its light—as a topic of musical discourse. Despite these latest albeit brief mentions, no scholar has expounded or populated the topic beyond a few isolated cases, let alone offered speculation as to how the compelling analogy between light and sonorous expression might operate, either in the hands of the composer or in the mind of the listener. Unlike most other musical topoi, light and its modulations exist as conspicuously visual phenomena, and this raises an important question about how depictive topoi are perceived when listening to music: what does it mean to hear a sunrise? And, why might composers develop similar strategies concerning orchestral timbre and form in order to convey an experience devoid of sound? The dissertation examines orchestral depictions of sunrise and sunset from an interdisciplinary vantage point, by first proposing similarities and continuities between the ancient literary theory (rhetorical device or exercise) of ekphrasis on the one hand, and the evolution of the modern philosophical and psychological term ‘apperception’ on the other hand. Taken together, I argue that these seemingly unrelated modes of thought suggest the possibility for a theory of enargeia (vivacity) in music. Moreover, by considering recent developments in the perceptual study of timbre and orchestration, I propose several apperceptive features of orchestral sunrises and sunsets that demonstrate the enargic (vivid) capacity of orchestral sonority within such depictive contexts. The final chapter comprises analyses of exemplary orchestral works by Bartók, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Schoenberg.