Abstract
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The dissertation is in two parts, a musical composition and a theoretical study. Part I, Bethany (2004), is an original composition in a freely atonal style referencing the hymn tune “Bethany” (“Nearer my God to Thee”). It is scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet, percussion (two players), organ and string orchestra and consists of three movements: I Allegro (five minutes), II Moderato (four minutes), and III Adagio (two and a half minutes). Part II, Serial Influences on the Intuitive Composing Techniques of Shulamit Ran, discusses two compositions by Pulitzer Prize winner, Shulamit Ran (b. 1949), chosen for their inclusion of twelve-tone rows and for the position they occupy in Ran's career: Short Piano Pieces (Israel Music Institute, Tel-Aviv, Israel, 1967), written in 1962–63 when Ran was fifteen and sixteen; and Three Scenes for Clarinet (Theodore Presser Co., King of Prussia, PA., 2000), written in 2000 when Ran was fifty-three. The frequent chromatic turnover and dissonant harmonies that characterize these pieces do not result from strict serial principles but rather from a process of parsing the row and employing the resulting row segments as building blocks for the music. The rows' pitches, dyads, trichords, segments, and hexachords form a bank of motives from which Ran composes melodies, ostinatos, harmonic simultaneities, and background tonal centers. Composed thirty-seven years apart, Short Piano Pieces and Three Scenes for Clarinet illustrate Ran's interest in twelve-tone rows in both very early and recent compositions.
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