School of Music and Dance Capstones and Terminal Projects

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Gesture and Agency: Inclusive Interpretation Tools for Hornists
(University of Oregon, 2021-11) Stanley, Justin Michael;
Performers are adept at creating lines and shape in the music we play. This comes from many hours of practicing, listening, playing with others, lessons, sectionals, and master classes. It also comes from studying musical form and music history. I argue that performance interpretation is analysis, and that interpretation can be enhanced by tools being created by scholars of performance and analysis. The pedagogy of musicality in the horn studio is improved through the shared agency (a term borrowed from theorist and performer Daphne Leong) of musical disciplines, including theory and musicology. To be inclusive of repertoires, I advocate for a greater use of analysis in music making by using concepts that are widely understandable, including gesture and agency. Many horn pedagogues already utilize these concepts, and their work is analyzed in Chapter 2. I propose that methodically adding theories of gesture and agency to horn pedagogy will provide a powerful tool to hornists – and all performers or pre-written works – to better perceive shape and structure in the music they prepare. Gesture and agency are methodically utilized in the analysis of Alice Gomez’s La Calavera and Robert Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro, Opus 70.