Browsing by Author "Kieffer, Alexandra"
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Item Be Somethin': The Eclectic Career of Richard "Dickie" Landry(2019-04-02) Bell, Brandon; Kieffer, AlexandraABSTRACT A New Mass for a New Collection: Richard “Dickie” Landry’s Mass for Pentecost Sunday by Brandon Bell This document serves two purposes. First, it is a substantial biography of Richard “Dickie” Landry, a virtuosic polymath who has found considerable success as a saxophonist, composer, photographer, and visual artist. Secondly, the document details Landry’s major work as a composer, his Mass for Pentecost Sunday, commissioned by Dominique de Menil for the 1987 opening of Houston’s Menil Collection. As Landry created his own art both as a musician and visual artist in addition to documenting the work of others through his work in photography, he occupies a unique position in the cadre of musicians and artists who turned downtown Manhattan into a hotbed of creative endeavors in the 1960s and 1970s. Musically, Landry is most closely associated with the Philip Glass Ensemble, of which he was a founding member. Outside of the ensemble, Landry developed a robust solo career through the use of the stereo quadraphonic system, an audio system that used delay processes thereby allowing him to create an accompaniment of a “choir of saxophones.” After leaving the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1981, he went on to work with celebrated musicians such as Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon, and the Talking Heads, as well as the iconic artist Robert Rauschenberg and the renowned theater director and playwright Robert Wilson. The turn of the 21st century found Landry back home in Lafayette, Louisiana, performing with the swamp pop supergroup Lil’ Band O’ Gold. In the visual arts, Landry assisted Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, and Gordon Matta-Clark as they created their masterworks in the lofts and galleries of downtown New York. He also developed his own, minimalist style in various mediums including, drawing, video, and eventually painting. Chapters One through Three form the first part of this document. Chapter One details Landry’s early life in Louisiana through his move to New York City in 1969. Chapter Two, the bulk of this first part, chronicles Landry’s heady activities between 1969-1981. The third chapter records Landry’s activities from 1981 to 2018. Chapter Four, the second part of the document, is dedicated solely to the Mass Landry composed for the opening of The Menil Collection.Item Celts, Saxons, and Milesians: Orientalized Nationalism in Young Irelander Ballads(2024-04-19) Webb, Emma G.; Kieffer, AlexandraIn resistance to the British Empire, the nineteenth-century political group known as Young Ireland promoted a bold Irish nationalism in their journal, The Nation, and ballad collection, The Spirit of the Nation. These ballads, intended to rejuvenate Irish musical culture, involved long-standing Orientalist pseudo-histories that traced Irish ancestry to eastern civilizations, namely the Phoenicians and Milesians. In opposition to British utilitarianism and white-on-white racism, these imagined identities helped articulate Young Ireland’s racial politics, as they interpolated a novel kind of nationalism into Irish traditional music. However, an examination of Young Ireland’s musical practices—their approach to setting traditional airs using recycled Jacobite poetic genres—reveals a friction in racial politics involving ideas of Orientalism, uplift, and Anglicization. These conclusions expand the current understandings of Orientalism in Irish music and lead to a deeper understanding of the complexities of Orientalism in Irish culture and history.Item Classical Music Serving the People's Republic: Political and National Ideology in the Butterfly Lovers and Yellow River Concerti(2017-04-19) Quah, Jessica X; Kieffer, AlexandraThis study examines the Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto (1959) and the Yellow River Piano Concerto (1969) in the context of musical culture and political ideologies in the early People’s Republic of China. Significant differences in the musical content of these concerti correspond to the evolution of the early PRC government’s ideal national image as defined in relation to both Western capitalism and the feudal China of the past. These pieces reflect Maoist-government-sanctioned political stances contemporaneous to these compositions through their handling of programmaticism, Western classical music idiom, and features common to traditional Chinese music. Situating these concerti in relation to historical and political developments, this investigation demonstrates that Butterfly Lovers and Yellow River occupy disparate positions in the realm of Chinese-composed Western concert music, and encourages a culturally sensitive approach to how these works are programmed, performed, and interpreted.Item Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 2: Americanism, Tradition and Modernism in its Relationship to W.H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety(2019-10-04) Cuellar, Scott Dean; Kieffer, AlexandraBernstein's Second Symphony, titled The Age of Anxiety after W.H. Auden's epic poem of the same name, is an essentially American work. In this document, I explore the relationship between Bernstein's symphony and Auden's poem in light of elements present in both works that are American in nature, with special attention to both artists' inclusion of multi-national and multi-cultural components in each work as a representation of America. I also examine the manner in which both Bernstein and Auden, as modern artists, position their works in relation to modernism movements in both poetry and music and how both artists chose to maintain a fundamentally traditional foundation in their language and aesthetic, while pursuing a progressive path for their art. Finally, I explore the ways in which Auden's poem appealed to Bernstein on a personal level, especially its overall narrative of the search for faith.Item Understanding the Process of Musical Cognition for Maximizing the Excellence of Individual Musical Performance(2023-09-19) Nikiforov, Osip; Kieffer, AlexandraThe purpose of this document is to examine and bring to light relevant studies and research on musical cognition in classical music performance that can be fruitfully utilized by professional performers in order to help augment excellence in performance. Because the nature of music performance is multifaceted, it is necessary to look at the process from the vantage of different scientific fields: brain science and performance psychology. The first chapter entirely focuses on the former and discusses such topics as auditory processes, music memory, and mental imaging. This chapter also includes my own qualitative study of my brain’s response to mental piano playing and emphasizes that it is important to start learning a musical work as soon as possible. The second chapter focuses on the importance of setting up goals for a musical performance and how deliberate practice works in tandem with achieving those goals. The third chapter fully dives into the field of psychology and explores cognitive performance strategies, the state of flow, handling performance pressure, and the benefit of mindfulness meditation. The document closes with some pre-performance strategies leading up to the stage appearance.