Dissertation Index
Author: Evans, James E. Title: Fluid Dynamics: Representations of Water in Music Institution: University of Kentucky Begun: January 2017 Completed: February 2021 Abstract: Water has remained a subject of all kinds of musical works since at least the middle ages. These musical works lack the concrete representational capacity of paintings, photographs, and films, relying instead on more abstract metaphorical constructs to convey water imagery. Current scholarship on water music typically centers on Romantic and Impressionist works and does not examine the process of signification by which musical signs portray water. The principal goal of this study is to determine how musical devices convey specific aspects of bodies of water and how such devices interact and contribute to musical depictions of streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans. I find that evocations of motion in the form of waves and flow are especially important to portrayals of water; furthermore, music depicting motion can combine with devices evoking water’s other characteristics to create detailed, multifarious depictions. I give special attention to John Luther Adams’s water compositions, which are notable for their thorough depictions of bodies of water and represent a relatively new phenomenon: the focused musical depiction. Keywords: musical signification, metaphor, anaphones, water, John Luther Adams TOC: Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Survey of Music and Meaning Chapter 3: The Roots of the Musical Water Depiction Chapter 4: Reproducing Water in Sound Chapter 5: Bodies of Water in Musical Works Chapter 6: The Focused Musical Depiction Epilogue Contact: James Evans jeevans01@gmail.com |