Date of Award

2014

Type

Thesis

Major

Music Education - Instrumental Concentration

Degree Type

Bachelor of Music in Music Education

Department

Schwob School of Music

First Advisor

Paul Vaillancourt

Second Advisor

Dr. Sean Powell

Third Advisor

Dr. Susan Tomkiewicz

Abstract

Usually, when a piece of music is taken out of context, that is, when it is learned and performed without studying the piece, the composer, the musical genre, or the historical significance, the understanding of it for the performer is narrow and limited and the performance is less than ideal. This leads to a substandard realization of the music. Contrarily, a musician should integrate research with the learning process as to enhance the comprehensive understanding of the piece, which ultimately results in a high level of performance. This idea is important for the complex and extensive musical repertoire of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. David Lang's solo percussion work, The Anvil Chorus, is case and point.

Lang was born in 1957 into an inartistic family. His interest in composition, and indeed classical music, was sparked at the age of nine when he was shown a film performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1 by Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic. The film brought forth the fact that Shostakovich was only nineteen years old when he wrote the symphony. Lang thought, "I have ten years and I could do it." Consequently, from that moment on, he did everything he could to nurture his ambition for composition. Lang stated in an interview, "my family was tremendously unartistic. I was not allowed to have music lessons when I was a kid, because my older sister had music lessons, and it had been a horrible failure." However, his persistent interest in composition forced his parents to find a private teacher, Henri Lazarof at UCLA. This marked the beginning of Lang's formal musical training in composition.1

Comments

Honors Thesis

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