What Dreams May Come - Ambient Suite for Jazz Orchestra

<p>What Dreams May Come is a five-movement suite for jazz orchestra, intended to create a calm and relaxing listening experience. The project is inspired by the mystery of dreaming, and it attempts to communicate musical ideas which reflect the relaxed state one is in when sleeping. The aims of What Dreams May Come are to highlight the timbral combinations available in a jazz orchestra and to draw on characteristics of ambient music to give the listener a relaxing atmosphere. This exegesis explores timbre both in music that served as inspiration for this composition and in the composition itself, and it describes how emphasising timbre in my compositional process affected other musical elements of the piece. Chapter 1 explores Brian Eno’s ambient album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, specifically looking at the role of timbre and texture in the album, and at the overall structuring techniques used by Eno on the album to create coherency. Chapter 2 analyses two compositions for jazz orchestra by Maria Schneider, “Nocturne” and “Sea of Tranquility”, examining the role of timbre in the compositions, as well as the ways Schneider uses soft dynamics and harmonic techniques to structure the pieces. These two chapters look into how Eno and Schneider, in different ways, both highlight timbre in their compositional approaches and processes. Each chapter dives deep into timbral and textural analysis, with additional analysis of form and harmony. Chapter 3 reflects on the ways these two composers informed What Dreams May Come, focussing on how I used techniques from Eno and Schneider to challenge myself in composing for jazz orchestra. In the course of the project, I strove to tap into music’s therapeutic qualities, putting this idea at the forefront of my intentions as a composer. Using dreaming as aesthetic and conceptual influence, Brian Eno’s ambient music as inspiration, and Maria Schneider’s compositions as a musical guide, I have been able to produce a work which not only challenges traditional jazz orchestra techniques but also relaxes listeners by complementing their environments.</p>

What Dreams May Come - Ambient Suite for Jazz Orchestra

<p>What Dreams May Come is a five-movement suite for jazz orchestra, intended to create a calm and relaxing listening experience. The project is inspired by the mystery of dreaming, and it attempts to communicate musical ideas which reflect the relaxed state one is in when sleeping. The aims of What Dreams May Come are to highlight the timbral combinations available in a jazz orchestra and to draw on characteristics of ambient music to give the listener a relaxing atmosphere. This exegesis explores timbre both in music that served as inspiration for this composition and in the composition itself, and it describes how emphasising timbre in my compositional process affected other musical elements of the piece. Chapter 1 explores Brian Eno’s ambient album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, specifically looking at the role of timbre and texture in the album, and at the overall structuring techniques used by Eno on the album to create coherency. Chapter 2 analyses two compositions for jazz orchestra by Maria Schneider, “Nocturne” and “Sea of Tranquility”, examining the role of timbre in the compositions, as well as the ways Schneider uses soft dynamics and harmonic techniques to structure the pieces. These two chapters look into how Eno and Schneider, in different ways, both highlight timbre in their compositional approaches and processes. Each chapter dives deep into timbral and textural analysis, with additional analysis of form and harmony. Chapter 3 reflects on the ways these two composers informed What Dreams May Come, focussing on how I used techniques from Eno and Schneider to challenge myself in composing for jazz orchestra. In the course of the project, I strove to tap into music’s therapeutic qualities, putting this idea at the forefront of my intentions as a composer. Using dreaming as aesthetic and conceptual influence, Brian Eno’s ambient music as inspiration, and Maria Schneider’s compositions as a musical guide, I have been able to produce a work which not only challenges traditional jazz orchestra techniques but also relaxes listeners by complementing their environments.</p>

The Serial Concept in Pousseur’s Votre Faust

The product of an eight-year collaboration between Belgian composer Henri Pousseur and French writer Michel Butor, Votre Faust (Your Faust) (1969) engages in a critical dialogue with the operatic genre and the Western tradition through a multifaceted exploration of the Faust theme. This chapter analyzes the opera’s intricate design, highlighting the extensive influence of the serial concept in Pousseur’s compositional approach. It discusses the opera’s origins, setup, and plot elements; Pousseur’s innovative harmonic techniques; the dense web of musical and literary quotations concentrated in the central locale, the fair; and the work’s complex mobile structure, a unique blend of aleatoric performance mechanics and elements of audience participation.

Harmony Simplified

The syntactic norms of common practice harmony are well known, but we lack good explanations for them. A theory of convergence is offered to explain how dominant and predominant harmonic functions work in tonal music. A geometric Tonnetz and concepts of triadic orbits and simple triadic voice leading are then developed to distinguish different types of harmonic progression, neighbouring, sequential, and cadential, with distinct formal functions. The concepts of triadic convergence and triadic cycles are then generalized to the diatonic dimension of the Tonnetz, leading to analogous concepts of enharmonic convergence and enharmonic tour useful for understanding nineteenth-century harmonic techniques.

Kinematic dynamos in spheroidal geometries

The kinematic dynamo problem is solved numerically for a spheroidal conducting fluid of possibly large aspect ratio with an insulating exterior. The solution method uses solenoidal representations of the magnetic field and the velocity by spheroidal toroidal and poloidal fields in a non-orthogonal coordinate system. Scaling of coordinates and fields to a spherical geometry leads to a modified form of the kinematic dynamo problem with a geometric anisotropic diffusion and an anisotropic current-free condition in the exterior, which is solved explicitly. The scaling allows the use of well-developed spherical harmonic techniques in angle. Dynamo solutions are found for three axisymmetric flows in oblate spheroids with semi-axis ratios 1≤ a / c ≤25. For larger aspect ratios strong magnetic fields may occur in any region of the spheroid, depending on the flow, but the external fields for all three flows are weak and concentrated near the axis or periphery of the spheroid.