▼ The problem of analysis of postmodern works has generated many different analytical techniques, most of which concentrate on either structure or meaning. This project is an attempt to create an analytical technique that will examine both structure and meaning. Thus, it attempts to answer the following questions: How does quoting a piece of music change its meaning? How can an analyst compare the same or similar material in disparate contexts? What are the technical, musical and extra-musical markers of certain tropes or ideas? Finally, what methodologies or tools can be used or created to effectively carry out these analyses? This study will culminate with an analysis of quoted materials in the third movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia for 8 voices and orchestra (1968 - 69). Postmodernism is historically viewed through the lens of deconstruction, as explicated by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and others; this approach promotes the idea of “incredulity toward metanarrative” and usually concentrates instead on technical aspects rather than meaning. This study instead concentrates on Frederic Ferre´’s reconstructive model of postmodernism, which has its roots in ecology. In this model, disparate elements of a piece of music - including quotations from other musical works - are examined as if they were life forms and landscapes interacting with each other. This approach allows the analyst to create graphs showing how the life forms from a quoted piece of music alter and are altered by the landscape of the quoting piece. Chapter 1 is a brief examination of the history of quotation in music, including authoritarian versus anti-authoritarian uses of quotation. In Chapter 2, the project looks at the development of postmodernist thought and compares deconstructionism to reconstructionism. Following that, there is a discussion of postmodernism and quotation in music, and an overview of the literature on discontinuous forms. Chapter 3 gives background on the concept of irony, drawing upon the work of D. C. Muecke, Richard Rorty, Linda Hutcheon and others. Chapter 4 develops the methodology using Ferre´’s reconstructive postmodernism as a model and the concept of “timbral space” or “orchestrational space” as a launching point, and Chapter 5 applies this methodology in an analysis of the third movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia through formal, motivic and harmonic structure. The final chapter details the conclusions - there are moments of high, medium and low levels of irony in the work, based on the number of parameters (form, motive, harmony) that are altered in the transfer. The graphic analyses present yield many interesting pieces of data about the work, and the methodology can be adjusted to look for other important information in a given piece of music. Advisors/Committee Members: Cahn, Steven.

▼ This dissertation aims to identify and elucidate many of the primary musical elements that constitute the American musical theater style in the second half of the twentieth century. I demonstrate how this musical style was united by the common presence of these elements yet significantly changed over time through their development. Unlike the majority of music-analytical studies of this period, I eschew concentrating on any single composer or piece. Instead, I utilize individual musicals, songs, and composers for their participation in an overall musical theater style. At the same time, I appreciate the individuality of these composers and works by acknowledging their particular contributions to various musical elements. Following an introductory chapter, this dissertation organizes the main stylistic components of musical theater into three larger categories: sonority and accompaniment; hypermeter and text setting; and issues of expression, chromaticism, and modality. Advisors/Committee Members: Berry, David.

▼ At this time, the extant analytical work on Krzysztof Penderecki’s music falls into two basic categories: those works that address his earlier, more strictly avant-garde compositions in terms of Sausseurian binary parametric oppositions, or those that consider his more mature works, such as the St. Luke Passion, solely in terms of foreground motivic content. As insightful and valuable as many of these studies are, none has addressed the notion of an emergent comprehensive pitch structure in works such as the Passion, in which Penderecki was developing a personal and thoroughly contrapuntal compositional style based on what was for him a new method: the use of twelve-tone serialism. My assertion is that a unified and pervasive organization of pitch, beyond Penderecki’s purely aesthetic intuition, does indeed exist in the Passion. At the heart of this organization is the structure of the work’s two twelve-tone rows, i.e. how the rows and subsets thereof “carve out” pitch-class space as they unfold in musical time, which proves to determine the intervallic content of the work’s seemingly disparate motivic elements despite the fact that few of these motives even partially constitute literal row segments. My study provides an explication of this relationship between the Passion’s twelve-tone rows and the work’s foreground material as well as analyses that address excerpts from the be-ginning, middle, and conclusion of the work. The composite image that these analyses reveal is that of a basic serial structure, extrapolated through various intervallic and graphic connections into a multitude of motives, the newly evident relationships among which form a narrative that interacts meaningfully with the passion story itself. Penderecki’s compositional ingenuity and originality are already well-known; what this study demonstrates is his consummate mastery of motivic organization and text setting, the acknowledgement of which is long overdue. Advisors/Committee Members: Roig-Francoli, Miguel.

▼ This study introduces the concept of spatial acquisition and demonstrates its applicability to the analysis of twelve-tone music. This concept was inspired by Krzysztof Penderecki’s dis-tinctly spatial approach to twelve-tone composition in his Passion According to St. Luke. In the most basic terms, the theory of spatial acquisition is based on an understanding of the cycle of twelve pitch classes as contiguous units rather than discrete points. Utilizing this theory, one can track the gradual acquisition of pitch-class space by a twelve-tone row as each of its member pitch classes appears in succession, noting the patterns that the pitch classes exhibit in the process in terms of directionality, the creation and filling in of gaps, and the like. The first part of this study is an explanation of spatial acquisition theory, while the second part comprises analyses covering portions of seven varied twelve-tone works. The result of these analyses is a deeper understanding of each twelve-tone row’s composition and how each row’s spatial characteristics are manifested on the musical surface. Advisors/Committee Members: Roig-Francoli, Miguel.