Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
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ItemPractices in contemporary flamenco guitar: a creative journey( 2023-05)This PhD investigates creative practices in contemporary flamenco guitar performance. The PhD comprises two parts: a performance portfolio (70%) and a dissertation (30%). The performance portfolio includes 190 minutes of live and studio recordings, comprised of original works, and arrangements of solo and group pieces. The dissertation draws on my own journey into the artistic field of flamenco, and it reflects on creative practices involved in the formation of my contemporary flamenco guitar style. This PhD argues that creativity and forming one’s own style are the key aspirations of gaining access to the artistic field of flamenco, an art form that is widely considered as both traditional and forward learning. This study outlines my process of style formation on the flamenco guitar - one that is steeped in the aural tradition - by focusing on practices of emulation, and the distillation of various structures within flamenco. Engagement with the aesthetic codes and practices of flamenco voice and dance are integral to this process, as is the transcription of recordings. These processes underscore my generation of new flamenco music on the guitar.
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ItemThe 24 Monographs of Frederick Septimus Kelly( 2022)This thesis presents an analysis of Frederick Septimus Kelly’s 24 Monographs for piano in light of the composer’s private writings. Through a comparative analysis between the Monographs and other piano works, connections are drawn between Kelly and the composers who impacted him. These connections are illuminated by Kelly’s diaries, which are held at the National Library of Australia. In the past, these have revealed much about the composer’s life for biographers, but this analysis has sought from them a better understanding of Kelly’s music. Among its findings are clues to the meaning of the title ‘Monograph’, a regimented harmonic ordering of the 24 pieces and a strong connection to the piano writing of Johannes Brahms.
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ItemAn Analysis of Gideon Klein’s Music: Renewing Perspectives on a ‘Holocaust Composer’( 2022)Gideon Klein (1919-1945) was a Czech-Jewish pianist and composer born in Prerov. He later moved to Prague to pursue his high school and tertiary musical education until the invasion and annexation of Czechoslovakia, and establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by Nazi Germany. His education was halted, mere months into his tertiary studies, and his performance career was curtailed to private performances, until he was deported to Theresienstadt on 4 December 1941, where he was interned and later moved to Furstengrube and murdered in late-January 1945. Musicologists and students have tended to focus on the final period of Klein’s life, often dismissing the works prior to his internment. Investigations often analyse specific works, interrogating them in isolation. My research takes a broader stance on Klein and his works, investigating his entire corpus demonstrating that his compositional development was continuous throughout his life. Klein’s identity has been reconstructed by scholars within a ‘resistance’ narrative. I seek to renew perspectives on Klein by offering new interpretations of compositional choices. I reveal previously overlooked continuities across Klein’s oeuvre and present him as a composer consistently interested in pursuing modernist techniques across his tragically short life.
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ItemSelf-Sampling in a Multimedia Practice: An Exploration of Sampling Transformation Techniques & Typologies( 2022)Digital sampling has become a prevalent creative technique in contemporary music and multimedia practices. It allows a practitioner to sample existing recorded media and recontextualise it through a multitude of transformation techniques, offering a potent creative tool that has been utilised by many artists to create new works and develop an individual artistic aesthetic. The transformation of media also allows the identity of artistic works to remain fluid - rather than fixed - as the recontextualisation of media pluralises the outcomes of singular events. This practice-led research project comprises a folio of multimedia works and an accompanying dissertation that investigate the use of self-sampling: where the sampled media originates from within the practice itself, rather than being externally sourced. This allows an individual creative aesthetic to emerge through the transformation and recontextualisation of self-made media. A secondary benefit to this approach is that the legal and ethical issues that influence sample-based practices are avoided by removing externally-sourced media; instead focusing on the techniques of transformation, without concern for sample ownership. Alongside these legal and ethical concerns, the process of examining sample-based music can be difficult due to the reliance on aural analysis methods - as heavily transformed samples may escape identification without additional knowledge of the media origin. The analytical tools used in this process can also suffer from a lack of standardised terminology and inconsistent methods of sample categorisation. To aid the process of analysing the works, a Typology of Sampling Transformation Techniques has been developed and is presented in this dissertation. This typology is used to analyse and categorise the techniques of transformation that have been used within the folio of works, uncovering methods and approaches of the creative practice that may otherwise remain veiled.
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Item“Biographical Milestones”: Interpreting Sixty Years of Larry Sitsky’s Stylistic Evolution in Australia (1959–2019) Through a Comparative Analysis of His Solo Flute Works( 2021)This thesis interprets the stylistic evolution of Australian composer, Larry Sitsky, by categorising his compositions (1959–2019) into five distinctive ‘periods’. An analysis of Sitsky’s six solo flute works composed between 1959 and 2019 provides a framework for this examination. The near-equidistant placement of the solo flute works within Sitsky’s compositional timeline renders them useful milestones from which to analyse his creative evolution. The underpinning research question asks what identifies the stylistic characteristics of Larry Sitsky’s works across his compositional evolution, as seen through the prism of his six works for solo flute? This research draws upon historical and descriptive musicological methodologies and uses case studies and analysis as the main tools. The stylistic periods are identified through an analysis of the distinguishing compositional influences, devices, and styles used in Sitsky’s compositions at various stages in his career and explores how these characteristics were influenced by extramusical stimuli and contemporaneous compositional developments. Sitsky’s compositional evolution reveals a process of constant and conscious transformation across five periods. First, Sitsky’s “Early Mature Period”, dating from 1959 to 1962, is characterised by his efforts to embrace a more modern idiom in his earliest mature compositions. Second, the “Modernist Period” from 1963–1969 exhibits his exploration of Modernist compositional techniques such as serialism, aleatoricism, and musique concrete. The composer’s adoption of Expressionism and engagement with Asian and mystic stimuli is observable in the “Mystic Expressionism Period” which dates from 1970–1982. Sitsky’s fourth period, the “Armenian Period” traverses the years 1983–1986 and includes a series of works for solo instruments inspired by Armenian folk-music. Fifth, the “Late Mature Period” reveals a neo-romantic though eclectic synthesis of earlier compositional experiments from the years 1987–2019. By exhibiting the characteristics of the five chronological periods, Sitsky’s flute works embody a microcosm of his compositional oeuvre. This thesis also identifies distinctive stylistic qualities that contribute to a ‘Sitskian’ aesthetic, such as: an Expressionistic character, chant topics and portamento; chromatic or bitonal ‘smudging’; irregular rhythms and polymetre; mosaic and episodic forms or improvisatory structures; small recurring chromatic cells; decorative fioritura; the portrayal of a musical progression from one ‘state’ to another; and, the use of non-programmatic extramusical springboards inspired by mystical or mythological sources. By drawing upon an historical examination of Sitsky’s compositional trajectory and artistic context in Australia from the late 1950s until 2019, this thesis situates Sitsky’s compositional periods in relation to several sociocultural developments. While existing scholarship on this composer has explored aspects of his compositional language, none provide a detailed explanation or contextual overview of the compositional shifts. This thesis addresses a scholarly lacuna by clearly identifying the characteristics and context of Sitsky’s stylistic evolution. It also addresses a gap in scholarly engagement with Australian flute music. By connecting the musical analysis to related historical and social aspects, this thesis offers a many-dimensioned illumination of an aspect of this era of art music composition in Australia.