Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA), Bowling Green State University, 2015, Contemporary Music

Born and raised in Maine, composer Stuart Saunders Smith (1948) grew up immersed in a milieu that still echoed the influence of the nineteenth-century literary movement known as Transcendentalism. The work of key Transcendentalist figures, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, show the movement's emphasis on autonomy, intuition, pacifism, and social justice. But Transcendentalism also maintains a spiritual focus: a claim that each person is part of a single universal spirit—“Oneness.” However, this “Oneness” does not equate to homogeneity of ideas and individual voices. Rather, each person's divine worth grants them autonomy of thought and agency. Both the social and spiritual ideas of Transcendentalism have informed Smith's music, his writings on music compositional process, and his personal life. Amongst the Transcendentalist notions displayed in Smith's music, pacifism and anti-technologism appear in his use of intricate rhythms. A Thoreauvian anti-materialism can be found in Smith's limited use of instrumentation and in his concept of “percussion ecology.” Moreover, the Transcendentalist non-teleological stance is reflected in Smith's tendency to write evening-length pieces that disregard form, his recurring references to New England imagery, and his use of non-sequiturs. Finally, the idea of Oneness is demonstrated through Smith's endeavor to level the roles of composer, performer, and audience, shown particularly in works that Smith categorizes as “trans-media systems,” “mobile compositions,” and “co-existence pieces.” Other important Transcendentalist notions recurrent in Smith's work and compositional process include: intuition, experience, thought autonomy, isolation, self-reliance, and self-actualization. Smith's focus on these ideas has rendered his overall discourse and much of his compositions antithetical to musical formalism, which implies focus on technique and systematic development. Instead, Smith understands that a compositi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Roger Schupp (Advisor); Marilyn Shrude (Committee Member); Timothy Messer-Kruse (Committee Member); Thomas Rosenkranz (Committee Member); Robert Wallace (Other) Subjects: Music

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1968, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

The title of this dissertation, The Problems of Leisure in the Industrial-Era US, riffs on a phrase that became common amongst American academics in the 1970s: “the problem of leisure.” For the industrial-era American bourgeoisie, however, leisure wasn't a problem but many problems. The crystallization of leisure in its modern form—clearly defined, regularly recurring, and commercially exploitable periods of free time—created a host of fears and desires that, in turn, precipitated many different responses, including the two that I examine in this project: mid-nineteenth-century liberal efforts to control working-class uses of leisure time by “improving” working-class tastes, and the later efforts of modernists to distinguish their own uses of leisure from the purportedly more commercialized and degraded leisure practices of others, especially other within the middle class. The former efforts were spearheaded by William Ellery Channing, whose gospel of culture did two critical things. First, it insisted that culture, which Channing defined as the development of our God-given powers, required spiritual, as opposed to economic, forms of wealth. This argument helped to neutralize what I claim was the anti-capitalist potential of culture, the way it, more so than the older bourgeois conception of legitimate leisure (recreation), had the capacity to inspire a critique of the division of labor and of industrial capitalism more generally. Second, Channing's gospel posited the spread of “the means of culture” (“Self-Culture” 22)—in the forms of parks, picture galleries, lectures, and other publically provisioned, non-commercial forms of leisure—as the most effective solution to the amusement problem, the problem of working-class people consuming commercialized forms of pleasure that social reformers deemed morally degrading and socially disruptive. But my case studies of two other writers, Henry Thoreau and Ernest Hemingway, suggest that, as the demand for culturally san (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Elizabeth Hewitt (Committee Chair); Jesse Schotter (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature

Bachelor of Science, Walsh University, 2022, Honors

The aim of this thesis is to exemplify the application of transcendentalism and the resulting consciousness-raising in early feminism to ideas surrounding contemporary feminism in a small collegiate population at a private university with religious affiliation in the midwest United States. Similar research has neglected to address a college student population with majority religious affiliation at a private university. This research addresses how such college students define contemporary feminism, to what extent these students identify as feminists, whether or not feminist discussions are an active part of student participation in feminism, and what current ways these students participate in social activism in relation to feminist activity. Using a web-based questionnaire to investigate perceptions around contemporary feminism, this study's survey provokes an internal thought process in its participants concerning their views around feminism by applying a consciousness-raising framework. This showed that students at a private university with religious affiliation define feminism as focused on women's and equal rights; though a majority have feminist beliefs, these students are hesitant to label themselves as feminist. This study also showed that discussion around topics of feminism is somewhat prevalent amongst such a collegiate population, and this holds true for social activism s well. However, these numbers these data are more spread out due to their perceptions of feminism. The significance of the research and findings is that an application of transcendental history and consciousness-raising to contemporary feminism provided individuals with a new outlook on feminist objectives and ways to reach them.

Committee: Jeffery Warnke (Other); Eugenia Johnson-Whitt (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; Higher Education; Social Research; Womens Studies

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2021, College-Conservatory of Music: Piano

The 2012 reprint of the original Piano Sonata No. 2 “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860” by Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) can be assessed as a vital contribution to future generations who examine this composition. This reprint includes an introduction of the Concord Sonata in historical context by Stephen Drury, an expert in Ives' music, and complete Essays Before a Sonata written by Ives and published by The Knickerbocker Press in 1920, which is not included in the original and the 1947 revised editions. Despite the significance and symbolism that only can be seen in the 2012 edition, performers today primarily follow the 1947 edition of Concord Sonata as Ives thoroughly revised to restore his original idea of the work, mainly in the “Emerson” movement. Therefore, many have yet to pay attention and conduct less research on the 2012 reprint. To fill this lacuna, this document provides the comparison between the 1947 and 2012 editions of the Concord Sonata to make the 2012 reprint more widely acknowledged and to allow performers to use the reprint efficiently with the 1947 edition. A performance suggestion of each edition also aids pianists in interpreting Ives' musical intent and developing diverse approaches to the work.

Committee: Samuel Ng Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Michael Chertock M.M. (Committee Member); Awadagin K.A. Pratt A.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

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

What I Lived for addresses themes of identity and the projection of identity. In this series, the imagery combined in each piece constructs a narrative regarding the wearer's connection with nature, or feelings of biophelia. It becomes evident that more important than the wearer's actual communion with the outdoors is the notion that others would associate the natural world with the wearer. While such identities we construct for ourselves may not hold up over extreme testing, through the completion of this thesis body of work it becomes clear that they are nonetheless critical for self awareness.

Committee: Kathleen Browne (Advisor); Gianna Commito (Committee Member); Isabel Farnsworth (Committee Member); Sean Mercer (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

MA, Kent State University, 2015, College of the Arts / School of Music, Hugh A. Glauser

Charles Ives considered each one of the New England Transcendentalists heroes, having grown up reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and many other staples of the New England classics. Of all of the Transcendentalists, Thoreau was the writer whom Ives related to the most. His time in solitude in a cabin near Walden Pond fascinated the young Charlie, who read Walden with his father as a boy in Danbury, Connecticut. This thesis explores Ives's use of Thoreau in his compositions. The thesis itself is divided into two different parts: the first two chapters explore Ives's connections with New England Transcendentalism, his view of a pastoral ideal, and Thoreau's Walden, while Chapters 3, 4, and 5 include my own analyses of each piece that I chose to represent Thoreau. I started this process by analyzing Ives's Concord Sonata, piecing important motives together. Then, I explored different sources, such as Ives's Memos and Essays Before a Sonata, J. Peter Burkholder's All Made of Tunes, and Stuart Feder's “'Thoreau Was Definitely There': The Ives-Thoreau Connection” from Thoreau's World and Ours. Feder's article, which includes speculation of “Thoreau” pieces in a psychoanalytical and musicological light, provided me with a guide of which pieces to include. I analyzed each of these pieces in many different ways and concluded that through text, musical borrowing, motivic patterns, use of color, and Transcendental undertones, there are connections between these pieces. Through this, I analyzed other pieces to search for more connections to Thoreau, concluding that Thoreau is connected to many of Ives's works.

Committee: Richard Devore (Advisor); Frank Wiley (Committee Member); Theodore Albrecht (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2013, English

The rhetoric of cultural identity generally goes in two potential directions: One a universal line that insists on an overall pattern of integration and harmony among all peoples regardless of their differences, and the other a line which suggests that various cultures are so specific and different that they will eventually enter into clash, violence and war. Drawing upon Derrida's concept of differance, I will point out that such rhetoric as examples of current political discourses fail to open the concept of cultural identity through redefining its relationship with otherness. This will be accompanied by poetry of Rumi and Whitman to suggest that their literary language through its non-dialectic characteristics is familiar with the problematic of identity and has the ability to form a cross-cultural dialogue. Sufism And Transcendentalism: A Poststructuralist Dialogue envisages the possibility of dialogue against the background of political conflict. It is a comparative study of Rumi and Whitman in which the parallelism of poetic style and content goes further to find common ground in challenging the conventional definitions of self and other.

Committee: Keith Tuma Dr. (Committee Chair) Subjects: American Literature; Comparative Literature; Ethics; International Relations; Islamic Studies; Literature; Middle Eastern Literature; Middle Eastern Studies; Near Eastern Studies; Peace Studies; Philosophy; Religion

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2010, English

A thesis presented to the Honors Tutorial College, Ohio University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of English. In the thesis entitled “Emerson's Transcendentalism Revisited: The Creation and Collapse of the Western Fantasy,” the Western migration of the New England-based literary movement of Transcendentalism to the Ohio Valley is explored. Emerson's Nature and The American Scholar are set up as models of traditional Transcendental philosophy. An analysis of The Western Messenger, a Unitarian literary magazine published out of Cincinnati, establishes the fantasy which the magazine's editors hoped to establish in the West. Armed with their experience of Emerson's abstract, yet progressive ideas, the editors sought to create an idyllic society in the Ohio Valley. In the final chapter, a study of Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes reveals the collapse of the editors' fantasy as a result of rising materialism, utility, urbanization, and social inequality.

Committee: Dr. Elizabeth Thompson PhD (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature