Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/11343/320

Filters

2019 - 2019 1 2020 - 2023 1
Reset filters

Settings
Statistics
Citations
Subject: historical musicology × Start date: 2019 × Type: PhD thesis ×

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Item
    No Preview Available
    Liminaire: Performance Contexts and Cultural Dynamics of the Saxophone in Australia, 1853–1938
    Chapman, Ross Daniel ( 2023-06)
    This project explores the largely untold first eighty-five years of the saxophone in Australia. For a unique Australian context it examines, and ultimately challenges, the long- and widely-held view that the instrument was solely a product and expression of popular or ‘lowbrow’ musical culture; instead, it argues that the saxophone’s character in Australia between 1853 and 1938 was enduringly cosmopolitan, stylistically diverse across the cultural strata, and a mirror to evolving notions of Australian identity. A five-chapter dissertation, weighted at 80%, details the saxophone’s Australian efflorescence in a variety of performance contexts from the goldrush to the cusp of the Second World War. A number of landmark performers and performances are established, including the headline discovery that the instrument debuted in Australia before being first heard in the United States. Drawing on categories established by John Whiteoak, this study incorporates ‘approved’ musical settings that were seen to reinforce social cohesion, such as the concert stage and the bandstand, and ‘anonymous’ settings, including the commercially-oriented domains of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and jazz. Notions of liminality are employed to explain and contextualise the saxophone’s marginal, and yet still remarkably potent, place in musical and wider cultural and social life over this time. This argument is built on research into a wide range of primary sources, including historical newspaper and journal articles, sheet music, sound recordings, silent and sound film, and interviews with notable Australian musicians. An accompanying audio-visual folio, weighted at 20%, features 33 minutes of new recordings for saxophone ensemble, saxophone and piano, and concert band in march and art music transcription forms.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    The Figure of Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745) in the History of Emotions
    Kiernan, Frederic Murray ( 2019)
    The music of Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745) was not well known until the late twentieth century. In academic and public discourse alike, Zelenka has often been described as having led a miserable life, as a melancholic, hypochondriac misanthrope. While the accuracy of these claims has sometimes been questioned, no scholar has undertaken a genealogy of this construction of Zelenka. This thesis offers such a genealogy, arguing that the influence of stereotypes from Zelenka’s biography has accrued over time, while demonstrating that eighteenth-century source materials shed little light on Zelenka’s personality. The thesis also explores the question of why understanding who Zelenka was "as a person" has become such a point of concern in modern Zelenka reception. The thesis takes the figure of the composer-as-a-person as one part of a bipartite construction, the other being the metonymical composer-as-creative-unity (represented by a body of compositions), and it shows how these two parts have mutated and shifted in relation to one another since the eighteenth century, and have thus constituted a changing historical figure of Zelenka. However, this thesis constructs this history on a theoretical apparatus situated within the overlap of reception study and the history of emotions, an overlap which emphasises the close relationship between histories of interpretation and histories of feeling. This helps to explain how emotions have played a role in the historical development of the figure of Zelenka, and also how this inter-subjective entity has become part of the emotional conditions in which Zelenka’s music has been received. This thesis draws on extensive archival research, statistical approaches from music psychology, semi-structured interviews with scholars and musicians (or scholar/musicians), and it also proposes an innovative historical application of the BRECVEMAC model from music psychology to analyse reviews of recordings. This mixed-methodological approach helps to demonstrate that historical constructions of Zelenka-as-a-person influence the emotions of scholars, musicians and listeners in the present day, while also providing new ways of studying responses to music from within the history of emotions. By doing this, the thesis refreshes our historical view of Zelenka, and shows how “figures” of composers from the past can exert a coercive emotional influence over present-day musical, pedagogical and historiographical practices.