A systematic lack of a concise picture of the Istrian Scale outside its territory is mainly due to a unique cultural cross-section of Slovenian, Croatian, and Italian underpinnings. This paper follows the metamorphosis of the Istrian scale from its folkloric origins on the Istrian peninsula on the northeastern coast of the Adriatic Sea to its manifestation in modern classical compositions of Slovenian classical (art) music. Supported with samples of Istrian folk music, the research follows a succession of musicologists and their efforts to transform the folkloric idioms into a concise formula of a hexatonic tone row as well as the formation of the octatonic Istrian scale. The employment of this unique phenomenon in classical compositions is analyzed in piano pieces of Slovenian composers Karol Pahor and Danilo Švara.

Both during his lifetime, and throughout the years since, audiences of Maurice Ravel’s music have reported several uncanny sensations that scholars have found difficult to explain using traditional modes of musical analysis. Listeners tend to experience a sense of detachment or distance permeating Ravel’s works, as if the composer is intentionally setting up an emotional barrier between himself, the performer, and the audience. Scholars agree that these qualities mirror the composer’s personality and lifestyle, drawing comparison between such traits as his emotionally guarded social comportment and his dandyist sense of style, and the particular sounds and textures of his compositions. However, scholars differ in their presumptions about what underlying principles govern these “Ravel phenomena,” offering up a variety of psychological, aesthetic, and literary contexts as possible ways of seeing “behind the veil” of Ravel’s characteristic artifice. In Chapter One, I examine two of the most recent major books about Ravel, Stephen Zank’s Irony and Sound and Michael J. Puri’s Ravel the Decadent, exploring how each writer’s core theory illuminates the connection between Ravel as he composed and Ravel as he lived. In Chapter Two, using the Valses nobles et sentimentales as a case study, I observe how these theories are expressed in an actual piano composition, both alongside and independently of more traditional music

theory. Chapter Three presents my own proposed conceptual context for surveying Ravel, in which I argue that many Ravel phenomena exhibit and anticipate the existentialist principles that would be outlined by Jean-Paul Sartre only several years after the composer’s death. By comparing Sartre’s seminal texts of existentialism (Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism) with Ravel’s own comments on his process of composition, his attitude in social interactions, and his manner of dress and home décor, I demonstrate that Ravel possessed proto-existentialist senses of artistic process, of the nature of the self, and of the fraught relationship between the interior self and the gaze of the Other. Lastly, I conclude in Chapter Four with a discussion for performers, especially concerning the performance of Ravel’s piano music. Here I draw on the work of Carolyn Abbate, whose exploration of “musical automatons” as an influence on Ravel provides further connection to Sartre, who identifies performative, mechanistic behaviors as an inherent part of human existence.

The wide-ranging contributions of Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) embody the aesthetic priorities of the stile galant and mark the beginning of a pivotal era in the history of music. However, Haydn’s music, furnishing prototypes for the symphonic, string quartet, and sonata genres as we recognize them today, often falls prey to one of the enduring conundrums of modern reception history: namely, an expectation of his works, tinted by retrospective associations with fellow “classical” composers born up to five decades later, that neglects his compositional roots in an earlier aesthetic.

Invoking the seminal treatise Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739) of contemporary theorist Johann Mattheson, this study argues for a recontextualization of Haydn in light of the earlier traditions from which he emerged. It explores Haydn’s influences, contemporary keyboard instruments, and aesthetic priorities; his structural and compositional choices in the context of musical genres still very much in flux; and their implications for a historically-informed performative approach to his keyboard sonatas and trios.

The Spanish composer and pianist Isaac Albéniz (1860- 1909) is best known for his piano music, evocative of various locales within Spain such as Sevilla, Málaga, and Granada. Many of these pieces, including the virtuosic pieces that comprise his late magnum opus for piano, Iberia, draw inspiration from the Spanish region of Andalusia and its folklore, particularly flamenco. Due to Iberia’s success, Albéniz’s name and Spanish music in general have been associated with Andalusian folk idioms thereby making him and his Iberia an essential part of the development of Spanish nationalism. Although Albéniz was the author of several operas, zarzuelas, and other orchestral works, he is principally remembered for his early nationalistic piano compositions and Iberia.This document will discuss how the particular stylistic elements in Iberia came to be and the favorable conditions that made these pieces successfully received, particularly in France. The document will also explore the complex Spanish musical landscape during the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, as well as Spanish dependence on foreign influences and foreign approval and how these forces shaped Albéniz’s career and style. Albéniz’s music, especially in Iberia, was affected by his time living in France and his exposure to foreign trends, particularly to an exoticized image of Spain, seen as an Oriental nation, full of exotic folk traditions. This document will also argue that Albéniz was not merely a passive agent influenced by the development of these trends but a very active part of the musical and social scene at the time and that he therefore significantly influenced the trajectory of Spanish music.

Performers often struggle with a discrepancy between conventional music analysis and their own performing experience. While performing, they connect with music through intuition rather than through theoretical representations of the piece. Phenomenology responds to this issue by seeking knowledge of an object through direct experience, understood as consciousness of the object, as opposed to theoretical constructions. Some music scholars have written on this topic, but no performer seems to have studied the philosophical foundations of phenomenology and applied them in a manner accessible to a broad audience of musicians. That is the project I have undertaken in this document.

The piece of music I chose for this undertaking is the fascinating, variously understood first movement of Robert Schumann’s Fantasie, op 17. According to the phenomenological method, as defined in chapter 3, I describe the piece on a perceptual level in the subsequent chapters. I provide a link with traditional tools by integrating perceptual aspects of conventional analysis. Starting at the micro-level, the description progressively zooms out until a unified view of the piece emerges. Throughout the process, tension profiles visually render the perceptual experience.

This approach proposes that there is a main force, different from the thematic opposition underlying sonata form, which governs the overarching tension in the movement. This main force is a motif that initially seems peripheral because it appears as an adjunct to the other themes, but it actually constitutes the central shaping force of the piece. Overall, I discovered that interacting phenomenologically with music progressively shapes one’s mind such that musical relationships become the primary focus.