Master of Music, University of Akron, 2015, Music-Composition

Symphonic Poem (For Orchestra)

Committee: Nilkola Resanovic Dr. (Advisor); James Wilding Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Music

MFA, Kent State University, 2024, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Inspired by the intriguing realm of epigenetics and the role of inheritance on a sociopolitical level, this project ventures into the captivating world of familial legacies and the imprints of trauma woven into both the threads of language and DNA. By navigating the social and political landscapes that have shaped the poets personal journey, poet and reader embark on a shared exploration, uncovering the profound ways in which inheritance molds beliefs, fuels self-discovery, and sculpts worldviews. Within this poetic tapestry, religious themes and the symbolic resonance of tomatoes emerge as motifs, imbuing the narrative with nuanced layers of meaning as it unravels the exploration of tradition and individual evolution. Frequently, these motifs serve as compasses guiding the reader through reflections on origin and identity—probing the extent to which our parents reside within us and the role trauma plays in both individual and communal creation. How to Eat Your Heirlooms, at its zenith, stands as a profound poetic odyssey through the realms of inherited pain, inviting readers to pause and attune themselves to the enduring echoes of the past resonating into the ever-evolving present.

Committee: Mary Biddinger (Advisor); Catherine Wing (Committee Member); Caryl Pagel (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Music Composition

The Inconsistent Continuities is a single movement chamber piece with fixed media. The Inconsistent Continuities was composed for Hypercube Ensemble, whose performing forces include saxophone, electric guitar, percussion, and piano. An additional fixed media component is being controlled over time by one of the performers. The piece's theme is inspired by my personalized perception of living and coping with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). The Inconsistent Continuities aims to sonically portray my personalized experiences living and coping with ADHD. Each ensemble member, plus the fixed media, personifies one or multiples of the three main ADHD traits: fixation; distraction; and inattentiveness. The single-movement piece comprises three sections. The first section establishes the four ensemble members as a theoretical “brain” attempting to formulate a musical melodic gesture or “idea.” This idea loops, signifying the characteristics of fixation. An external distraction from the fixed media then attempts to distract the ensemble from their original melodic thought. The musical content introduced by the fixed media is distant and obtrusive compared to the fixated thought from earlier. The remaining role (inattentiveness) is introduced during this section and attempts to bypass the first thought and the distraction. This section represents the mind being overly stimulated and the traits of ADHD that are more prevalent and controlling. The second section begins as a collective dialogue between all three characteristics that eventually reaches critical mass, followed by an abrupt breath inhale by the ensemble. This represents the mind being overwhelmed during social situations and everyday life while desperately seeking a moment of clarity. The final section unites each member, but the melodic idea of the piece changes, representing the mind solving the task or completing its thought through the tangential ADHD thought process.

Committee: Elainie Lillios Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Mikel Kuehn Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1957, English

Committee: Robert R. Hubach (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1957, English

Committee: Robert R. Hubach (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Cleveland State University, 2021, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

The essays contained herein seek to examine the quantity of identities allowed in a life, specifically when the life is female in nature and American in flavor. Not secondarily examined is the quality of freedoms provided within aforesaid examined identities. Methods of examination include sleepless nights, introspection, substance use, religious practice, and, of course, writing. No conclusive results were found, other than that much work remains to be done in the field of American female identity and freedom. Recommendations for further research include a deconstruction of the workday as provided by the Industrial Revolution and a redefining of equality as misunderstood by the middle and upper classes.

Committee: Hilary Plum (Committee Chair); David Giffels (Committee Member); Mary Biddinger PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Demographics; Evolution and Development; Families and Family Life; Fine Arts; Gender; Gender Studies; Higher Education; Home Economics; Individual and Family Studies; Mental Health; Personal Relationships; Religion; Religious Congregations; Social Structure; Womens Studies

Artium Baccalaureus (AB), Ohio University, 2020, French

Translation is likely as old as human language itself. From its ancient origins (Horace, Jerome, the Babel narrative) to the present day, writers and theorists have held changing and often contradictory views on the goals and values of translation. One important distinction is between approaches to translation that try to make the foreign text seem domestic, and those that try to preserve the foreign elements of a text even in a new language. In my thesis, I present the case for preserving foreign verse forms when poetry is translated into English, and provide a method for doing so in French-to-English translation. Also included are a brief theoretical history of translation, and a study in the historical practice of poetic translation. Finally, I provide a series of 32 translated poems by a representative selection of prominent poets from the 16th through the 19th centuries.

Committee: Christopher Coski PhD (Advisor) Subjects: Comparative Literature; European History; Foreign Language; Language; Literature; Modern Language; Modern Literature; Romance Literature

PHD, Kent State University, 2019, College of the Arts / School of Music, Hugh A. Glauser

Part I of this dissertation is a large-scale composition for orchestra and mixed choir entitled The Forgotten Child of Zeal. This is a programmatic work inspired by the classic 1995 role-playing game Chrono Trigger. The piece chronicles the story of an enigmatic young boy named Janus, who possesses innate magical powers, and his terrifying transformation into Magus, the dark sorcerer who terrorizes the world. The composition is organized into two contrasting movements, Premonition and Degeneration, which vary greatly in style, but are unified through a recurring 4-note “mystic motive.” There are also key quotations of Scriabin's Prometheus: The Poem of Fire and Prefatory Action within the piece, creating a bridge between the musical and programmatic content of all three works. The Forgotten Child of Zeal lasts approximately 22 minutes in performance. Part II of this dissertation is a theoretical paper that analyzes the pitch organization of the first movement of Alexander Nemtin's realization of Scriabin's unfinished masterpiece, Prefatory Action. Prefatory Action is a programmatic work written for orchestra, mixed choir, vocal soloists, and tastiera per luce (light keyboard), lasting roughly two and a half hours in length. The piece is divided into three massive movements entitled Universe, Humanity, and Transfiguration. Scriabin originally began writing Prefatory Action as a prelude to the Mysterium, which he envisioned as a divine musical ceremony that would transfigure the human race and end the universe. More than half a century later, Nemtin spent 26 years of his life completing the piece, using the literary text and musical sketches that Scriabin left behind as a guide. This paper is organized into six chapters – the first two chapters discuss the genesis of Prefatory Action and its subsequent realization, the middle two chapters explore Scriabin's post-tonal style, and the final two chapters offer an in-depth analysis of Universe.

Committee: Richard Devore Ph.D. (Committee Co-Chair); Frank Wiley D.M.A. (Committee Co-Chair); Adam Roberts Ph.D. (Committee Member); Mary Hricko Ph.D. (Committee Member); Gustav Medicus Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Music

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2019, English (Arts and Sciences)

This creative dissertation features a book-length work of Creative Nonfiction forwarded by a critical introduction on the relationship between form and content in examples of visual nonfiction writing. The visual essay is a genre of nonfiction that uses elements of design and active whitespace to drive storytelling and develop visual arguments across a text. “Beasts of the Interior” is a collection of visual essays considering the deterioration of homes and landscapes, and the ways these processes mirror the fissures between people living therein. The book combines personal, journalistic, and critical approaches to consider how histories are made by certain places, and what happens to each history when a place begins to shift. This is a project obsessed with structure, form, restraint, and the relationship between a page's form and its content. The book investigates the ways stories might behave more like objects do—like a cave system or a quilt pattern, a riverbed or a blueprint. Each chapter uses a borrowed structure to guide the reader between the walls of a hundred-year-old home, down a bat-infested dry riverbed, or across a farm run by an eco- cult. In the final chapter, this book's coda, this project turns back on itself and considers formlessness instead.

Committee: Dinty Moore W (Committee Chair); Eric LeMay C (Committee Member); Bianca Spriggs (Committee Member); Courtney Kessel (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Communication; Design; Education; Experiments; Gender; Gender Studies; Language; Language Arts; Multimedia Communications; Performing Arts; Rhetoric; Textile Research; Womens Studies

MA, Kent State University, 2015, College of the Arts / School of Art

Richard Serra completed Afangar, a sculpture sharing the name of Jon Helgason's poem, in 1990. Serra was invited to complete this work for the Reykjavik Arts Festival and was granted special permission to build the site-specific sculpture on the treeless landscape of Vesturey, the Northern landmass of Viðey, an island northeast of Reykjavik, Iceland. It is composed of nine pairs of columnar basalt stones mined from Hreppholar and transported to Vesturey. The locations of the stone pairs were selected by Serra in order to frame specific features in the surrounding landscape and were placed in a way so that a visitor can measure the changes in the land as he moves. After the sculpture was completed, Serra created numerous drawings (select drawings from the National Gallery of Iceland are discussed in this thesis) that provided him with a way to interpret what he saw. The drawings are linked to the location and underline the importance of walking and looking in Serra's work.

Committee: Carol Salus (Advisor); Reischuck Albert (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Art History

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2015, English

These poems investigate and question the gender roles set by popular culture, the media, and traditional poetry within romantic relationships. The poems explore the role of the environment on those relationships and is, overall, examining the break down of environment, communication, and love within the work. The poems could be viewed as a single serial poem where the play with space represents the silences in a decaying romantic bond. The sections work together, but are separated because of their individual interests and prosody of the poems within each. Wholly, the poems work to look at how a woman can resist a certain gaze: on the cover page, “Don't Make Me Be” is immediately followed by the author's name with little space between. There's a cleaving of author and text. As on the cover page, connections can both be made in the text, while also questioning why the assumption of a connection is made in the first place.

Committee: cheek cris (Committee Chair); Wagner Catherine (Committee Member); Luongo Margaret (Committee Member) Subjects: Womens Studies

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2014, English

Box, me—a mix of autobiographical narratives, persona poems, and appropriative strategies, among other approaches, uses the conventions of lyric intimacy to explore the social implications of familiar phrases. Confronting issues often left “behind closed doors”, such as stereotypes associated with gender, class and race, Box, me makes the implicit explicit. Appropriative techniques, in particular, explore methods of converting oppressive language into poetic agency—bringing into focus the blurred lines between pervasive catchphrases and their sociocultural implications. Building on activist poetry traditions, Box, me uses the space of the poem to bear witness to and contest dominant social and formal conventions.

Committee: Catherine Wagner (Committee Chair); cris cheek (Committee Member); Mary Jean Corbett (Committee Member) Subjects: Language Arts; Literature

Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 2008, Department of Languages

The Bronze Dame is an experiment, in which I attempt to blend the rigorous structuring of the East with the itinerant, gritty styling of the West. Many early, twentieth-century, Western influences can be found in my protagonist, Allen Crosse. Crosse is a blend of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, infused with the voice and countenance of Humphrey Bogart (who filled the shoes of both grim detectives on the Silver Screen). Crosse's world is inspired by the colorful language of Robert E. Howard and peopled with an eccentric cast, which aspires to the emotional and physical diversity of the casts in both Orson Welles' Touch of Evil and Michael Curtiz's Casablanca. I attempt to fill my work with characters as contrastingly different as those portrayed by Jack O'Halloran, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. I also attempt to give the narrative pace the uniquely complex, consistently interesting tone of Anton Karas' "Harry Lime Theme," which is featured throughout Carol Reed's The Third Man. Reed's Third Man showcases the snappy, intelligent dialogue of Graham Greene's screenplay—a display I endeavor to emulate. In terms of the East, I adhere to the "traditional" English formatting rules for the structuring of haiku (the vehicle in which I tell my tale): three lines, with a syllable count of five, seven, and five, in the first, second, and third line, respectively. However, I choose to omit the obligatory kireji (pause) that comes at the end of either the first or second line, opting instead for pauses when and if I see fit. I also choose to omit the kigo (season word), in which the renga (reference to the natural world) is set. The result is a terse, tightly edited voice that tells the story of a witty, perceptive hero, who, in Chandler's words, is the "best man in his world, and a good enough man for any other." True to form, the hero prevails—but not without losing a piece of himself to his dark, female antagonist in the process. This (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Steven Reese Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Jeffrey Buchanan Ph.D. (Committee Member); William Greenway Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2012, College-Conservatory of Music: Composition

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the symphonic poem thrived because it satisfied the key aspirations of its time: to relate music to the outside world and to integrate multi-movement forms, thus elevating instrumental program music to its highest level. Therefore, it became the apex of music, and composers chose it as the genre for some of the most important works of the period. However, due to an increased preference for musical abstraction over extra-musical inspiration in symphonic works, it quickly fell out of favor in the 1920s. Nevertheless, the ideals that led to the genre's displacement can be replaced with a twenty-first century aesthetic by updating the subject matter, returning to the multi-movement symphonic form, and ultimately reintegrating extra-musical inspiration and expressiveness in music. My dissertation updates the symphonic poem in this way by splitting the single-movement form and by simultaneously evoking emotion and current images from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident through satiric narration.

Committee: Joel Hoffman DMA (Committee Chair); Mike Fiday PhD (Committee Member); Douglas Knehans DMA (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

M.M., University of Cincinnati, 2007, College-Conservatory of Music : Music History

Hugo Wolf's music criticism in the Wiener Salonblatt (1884–1887) was published while he was actively composing his own symphonic poem Penthesilea, based on the play by Heinrich von Kleist. This criticism, along with comments in his letters (1887–1897) to friend Melanie Kochert, reveals that Wolf placed a high regard on works exhibiting originality, proper orchestration, form and compositional technique. After briefly tracing the history of music criticism in late nineteenth-century Vienna, this thesis establishes Wolf's compositional aesthetic derived from his critical opinions about instrumental music. A structural analysis of Wolf's Penthesilea, his only complete programmatic instrumental work, concentrates on thematic material, form, and texture and orchestration and establishes the methods by which he composed his own music. A comparison of Wolf's aesthetic criteria to his music shows that he adhered to his own compositional aesthetic in concept, but not always in execution.

Committee: Dr. Mary Sue Morrow (Advisor) Subjects: Music

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1986, Classics

Committee: June Allison (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2010, English (Arts and Sciences)

The Last Chance Texaco is a coming-of-age novella about a fifteen-year-old girl. The novella is told in prose and verse poems, and is in two parts. It is introduced by a critical piece that discusses narrative strategies in coming-of-age novels.

Committee: Mark Halliday Dr. (Committee Chair); Darrell Spencer Dr. (Committee Member); Sherrie Gradin Dr. (Committee Member); Lynette Peck Professor (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature

PHD, Kent State University, 2008, College of the Arts / School of Music, Hugh A. Glauser

The latter part of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries saw what is commonly accepted as a resurgence in music from the British Isles, but to this day, most of the actual music of this resurgence remains unknown to all but the most knowledgeable of art music aficionados. Among the composers active during this period, one of the most heralded in his day but little recognized now is Sir Arnold Bax (1883 – 1953). To the aforementioned aficionados, he is known for several substantial yet infrequently performed contributions to the symphonic repertoire, among them the tone poem Tintagel. Known in England as a composer, Bax carried on a separate life as a writer of poetry and drama in Ireland, working under the name Dermot O'Byrne. At the time of composition of the tone poem, Bax also wrote a four-stanza verse poem titled “Tintagel Castle.” Both were written for and dedicated to the pianist Harriet Cohen, with whom he was having an affair. The focus of this dissertation is an extensive look at the circumstances surrounding the composition of Tintagel, examining factors of development in Bax's compositional style, his personal life including the affair with Harriet Cohen, and the influence of Yeats and Irish culture on Bax's writings as Dermot O'Byrne. Using historical information drawn from biographical and periodical sources, in addition to musical analysis, and tools of comparative arts, I have developed comparisons between the tone poem and the poem, and examined the differences in mood and scope between these two works. The final section of this dissertation establishes historical context for Bax's Tintagel and his work in general within the genre of the symphonic poem and the realm of late-romantic/early twentieth century British music, presenting both composer and composition in a stronger light.

Committee: Dr. Theodore Albrecht (Advisor); Dr. Kazadi wa Mukuna (Committee Member); Dr. Frank Wiley (Committee Member); Dr. Lawrence Starzyk (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2011, English

Raw is a collection of poetry that has been in the making for quite some time and addresses issues the “common” man and woman are faced with on a daily basis. The poetry within this manuscript speaks to primordial urges and desires that are buried deep deep down, in places that only the imagination can explore. These visceral poems are “raw” in the sense that they will create an immediate reaction within its readers. Raw is a collection of poetry that cannot be ignored based on its subject matter and content. Committee: Albino Carrillo (Advisor); Andrew Slade PhD (Committee Member); Bryan Bardine PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Modern Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2012, Musicology

This dissertation focuses on Czech national hero Bedrich 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 Umelecka 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.

Committee: Francesca Brittan Dr. (Advisor); Daniel Goldmark Dr. (Committee Member); Mary Davis Dr. (Committee Member); Martha Woodmansee Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music