▼ The focus on trumpet music during the high baroque often leads to some neglect of seventeenth trumpet music, music of the Austro-Bohemian Empire in particularDespite the fact that clarino technique was not yet fully developed, the music of this period still exhibit virtuosity. Through an examination of a number of compositions, I hope to show how certain composers were not only able to draw on music from the past for inspiration in some of their works, but were also able to advance the technical demands required of trumpets. With these advancements, it will become clear how trumpets were able to be more skillfully integrated within ensembles of strings and other instruments. Advisors/Committee Members: Bennett, Peter.

▼ Through the analyses of treatises, scores, letters, and technologies spanning four centuries, this multidisciplinary history of rhythm charts the various, shifting meanings in musical time and movement as pedagogies and performance practices became increasingly influenced by clockwork machines—-and Johann Maelzel’s metronome most conspicuously—-over the course of the modern age. Depicting how “musical time” constitutes an ever-changing belief system in what “time” means, this study charts the ascendance of a new musical-temporal ontology brought about by Western performance-culture’s increasing reliance on metronomes.This history explains how scientific methodologies and machines—-promoting metronomic time above all else—-were first actively applied to musicians and their performances in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The influential work of modern scientists, pedagogues, and only later composers—-with their precision-oriented beliefs in metronomic time and rhythm—-eventually helped to create a new performance-practice tradition, a new musical culture in which mechanical objectivity became a prevailing aesthetic in the twentieth century. Highlighting the writings of philosophers such as Mersenne, Diderot, and Rousseau; musicians such as Quantz, Beethoven, and Stravinsky; scientists such as Wundt, Scripture, and Seashore; and pedagogues such as A. B. Marx, Christiani, and Jaques-Dalcroze, the narrative explicates how and why this temporal revision occurred, and what outcomes followed when scientific modes of metronomic action were imposed upon past, subjective musical practices. As this history of musical time, metronomes, and musicality uncovers, the very meanings and cultural values underlying “rhythm” and “tempo” have palpably changed since the twentieth century due to a heretofore-unacknowledged paradigm shift: a metronomic turn in which the once-innate musical “beat” became both conceptually and audibly mechanized. Advisors/Committee Members: Davis, Mary.

▼ John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s life-long collaboration is one of the richest performing arts partnerships of the twentieth century, one that led to radical new modes of expression in music and dance. This dissertation offers a comprehensive study of their first collaboration, Credo in Us (1942), a satiric dance-drama about a dysfunctional married couple set in the American West. Cunningham and Jean Erdman jointly created the choreography and Cunningham wrote a scenario and script inspired by James Joyce and French surrealist poetry. Conceived just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Credo offers a window into a unique moment in American cultural history, when exiled European artists escaping Nazi persecution arrived in New York and engaged with their American counterparts. Cage was immersed in this thriving community of artists while living in Peggy Guggenheim’s home, where he met the luminaries of the European avant-garde, including Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and André Breton. It is in this vibrant context that Cage creates his score for Credo, which is significant for two interrelated reasons. First, it embraces a collage aesthetic, juxtaposing a diverse range of musical styles and sounds, from folk music and jazz to phonograph samples, radio sounds, and “found” percussion noises. Second, Cage’s incorporation of random elements in the score anticipates his later embrace of indeterminacy and chance procedures in the post-war period, a move that had profound implications in music, art, literature, dance, and theatre that resonate to this day. This study takes an interpretative approach that encompasses the interdisciplinary elements of Credo, as well as its historical and social context. Its focus is on the interrelationship between the dance, script and music and how the collaborative process informed Cage’s embrace of a collage aesthetic. This illuminates the ways in which Cage’s aesthetic engagement with the European avant-garde and collaborative work with choreographers informed his most significant compositional experiments. From this perspective, Cage appears less as an iconoclastic trickster working alone on the margins of the music world, and more as a voracious Dadaist embracing ideas from a wide range of sources to challenge the boundary between art and life. Advisors/Committee Members: Davis, Mary.

▼ Roman vocal chamber music of the middle decades of the seventeenth century constitutes one of the largest repertoires of the Baroque period, one which is also among the least studied. Just as the polyphonic madrigal served during the sixteenth century as the ideal medium for developing new ideas with far-reaching consequences, mid-seventeenth century Roman vocal chamber music was a proving ground for developments of lasting importance in melodic style, formal structure, and the establishment of functional tonality. Scholarly interest in this repertoire has begun to gather momentum during recent decades, but there has been relatively little study of the elements of musical language which characterize the repertoire as a whole, and as they differentiate the individual styles of each composer. This study develops a model for analyzing mid-seventeenth century vocal chamber music that takes into account features of melodic style, text-music relationship, and tonal language. Part I presents an overview of the historical context, production, reception, sources, and musical language of vocal chamber music in mid-seventeenth century Rome. This provides a frame of reference for detailed analyses of nine representative works by Antonio Francesco Tenaglia (c. 1615-1672/3) in Part II. While the works of any of the principal Roman composers of the period might have served the primary goal of developing an approach to studying the repertoire, focus on a single composer provides the scope for delineating features of individual style with greatest clarity. Tenaglia is an ideal choice because many features of his melodic and rhythmic style are particularly distinctive, and because his surviving output maintains a consistently high standard of musical inspiration and craftsmanship. Features of Tenaglia's style are compared with those of other composers, especially Giacomo Carissimi. From these comparisons emerges a secondary theme of opening the way to an appreciatiation of a little recognized composer, whose skill and imagination consistently matches, and sometimes surpasses that of the most famous composers of the age. This study concludes with an exercise in musicological detective work, using the profile of Tenaglia's style which emerges from the analyses to evaluate the probability of his authorship of five pieces of uncertain ascription. Advisors/Committee Members: Bennett, Dr. Peter.

▼ The performance of piano variations on simple popular songs was a practice embraced with great earnestness by young ladies in mid-nineteenth-century American domestic settings. Variation settings of “favorites,” in their great array of styles, techniques, and theatrical effects, served as important vehicles for defining pianistic activity of the time and played a mediating role in relation to a number of the dichotomies characterizing nineteenth-century American musical culture. This study addresses issues of cultural context, education, performance, and compositional convention related to such works, exposing their usefulness in bridging the aims of “cultivated” and “vernacular” music that appear to have polarized middle-class entertainment during this period. Beyond this function, the genre provides a valuable frame for examining the role of pianistic expertise amidst the mostly female populace of drawing room performers. Accompanying this study is a representative collection of thirty-five variation compositions based upon familiar songs of the day. The pieces span the period of 1800 to 1865, roughly outlining a time of great cultural and economic change from the post-Revolution decades into the Civil War. The works chosen also span the ranges defined by such terms as “complex” and “simple,” or “brilliant” and “easy.” This differentiation is but one of the dialectical frames, discussed in literature of the time, that show arduous effort on the part of nineteenth-century minds to assess the musical values of young America. In order to support a perception of the piano variations as sitting on the cusp of a “highbrow/lowbrow” divide, a thorough investigation of American antebellum manifestations of that divide is provided. Full examination of this tension shows the unique place of the variation genre in relation to such dualistic discourse in nineteenth-century musical life. The findings suggest that this unusual showcase for female virtuosity is a protected avenue made available to domestic pianists, in part, because of its mediating association with appealing vernacular songs, as well as its disassociation from the monumental “genius” of other more complex instrumental forms. Nineteenth-century composers and publishers alike recognized the place for such a bridge, and pursued its development with great purpose. Advisors/Committee Members: Bennett, L. Peter.

▼ This dissertation focuses on Czech national hero Bedřich Smetana whose life and works have long been associated with Czech nation-building and notions of idealistically Czech sounds. The purpose of my project is to examine how Smetana came to occupy this position: Who was responsible for this construction? Who gained from it? And what role did Smetana himself play? Answering these questions requires the examination of not just the composer, but the powerful organization he helped found in 1863 called the Umělecká beseda (“Artistic Society,” or UB). The UB was at the center of Czech artistic and political life during the nineteenth century and still exists today. Its members used the organization’s influence throughout its history to publish writings on Smetana that have profoundly shaped modern understandings of the composer. Beginning in the 1870s, UB members produced carefully curated collections of materials related to Smetana (criticism, editions of the composer’s letters and diaries, and even scores), which they harnessed as tools in a series of political campaigns. During the twentieth century, UB critics selectively published Smetana studies to suit the ideologies of the Communist administration. Today, UB scholarship and the political circumstances surrounding its production make understandings of the composer inseparable from political advocacy. Here, I use UB publications along with those of the organization’s critics to reveal Smetana as a figure whose biography has been appropriated for deliberately political ends since the organization’s founding. Doing so opens a window onto the wider complexities of Eastern European nationhood and reveals how music, scholarship, and Smetana have shaped political ideologies through the twentieth century. Advisors/Committee Members: Brittan, Francesca.

▼ Between 1845 and 1891, Anne C. Lynch Botta hosted one of Manhattan’s premiere salons, holding weekly conversazione in her home, where she welcomed a host of famous writers, musicians, artists, and intellectuals. A prominent socialite and a dynamic social force, Botta shaped the cultural dialogue in New York for a half-century. This project examines the place of music in Botta’s salon: How did Botta’s salon influence musical life in nineteenth-century America? Who were the musicians who attended her salon and what repertoire did they perform there? How was this music perceived and why was Botta’s salon considered a leading cultural center for nearly fifty years? To answer these questions, it is necessary to explore not only the music and musicians connected to Botta’s conversazione, but also music’s relationship to the fashion, literature, poetry, and politics that animated her gatherings. Botta’s salon both reflected and projected a cultural sensibility, and she introduced the United States to a cosmopolitan discourse that remains fundamental to the debates surrounding American music today. By training a lens onto the relationship between music and Botta’s conversazione, this dissertation provides a more comprehensive understanding of music’s value, place, and meaning during this critical period in New York’s cultural history. Advisors/Committee Members: Davis, Mary E.