Abstract: Nicodemus! The Beds are Burning Again: The Ascension of Gorgomath is a 22-minute concerto for piano and chamber orchestra that explores the use of narrative as a means of unifying disparate musical languages into a cohesive single-movement structure. The narrative, as implied by the fourteen programmatic indicators within the score, features a protagonist, Nicodemus, and an antagonist, Gorgomath. Additional contrasting elements essential to the plot are: the burning beds, outer space, the ultimate weapon, and the three rituals. The programmatic indicators, to be listed in the program, function as a framework from which the listener can fabricate their own version of the story.
The narrative begins with “The beds are burning,” a heavy-metal inspired musical theme characterized by a pervasive rhythmic structure interspersed with virtuosic piano displays. Full orchestral forces add to the intensity of a relentless motor rhythm heard first in the piano. Following “Ritual I,” a transitionary theme of soli strings and piano, Nicodemus’s theme develops, a musical antithesis to “The Burning Beds” theme. It employs a simple melodic loop over a basic four-chord harmonic structure, reminiscent of 8-bit video game themes, and is voiced as piano accompanied by tremolo in the woodwinds and strings.
Nicodemus’s journey into space begins with a rapid deceleration in tempo. The following slow ternary form includes a funerary dirge bookended by the piece’s most lyrical piano writing, expressed by the rise and fall of melodic octaves. The pounding neo-Shostakovian strings of “Ritual II” transition directly into the development section, “Nicodemus seeks the ultimate weapon.” Nicodemus’s theme undergoes significant transformation, assuming the guise of stride piano and North Indian tabla music. These styles are unique to this section, as is their orchestration of high, sustained winds alternating with orchestral hits between low strings and percussion.
The piece’s recapitulation, “Meanwhile…,” begins with a return of the burning beds. Here, “Gorgomath’s Theme,” identifiable by the instability of its 7/16 motor rhythm is briefly foreshadowed. It appears in its entirety in the coda, “Boss Battle.”
The resulting work uses original narrative to blend polystylistic elements into a cohesive single movement structure with a dramatic musical arc.

Abstract: The first objective of this work was to review the existing literature relating to popular music analysis to determine if standards of harmonic practice within hard rock and heavy metal music have been considered and established. This led to the review of the analytical methods of Guy Capuzzo, Christopher Doll, Walter Everett, Allen Moore, and Ken Stephenson. For the needs of this study, Everett's work (and to a lesser degree, Stephenson's work) is primary as it best summarizes the harmonic schemes used in the pieces analyzed.
Three songs were selected within different subgenres of hard rock and heavy metal: thrash metal (Metallica, “Master of Puppets”), neo-classical metal (Yngwie Malmsteen, “Far Beyond the Sun”), and commercial hard rock (Guns-N-Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle”). These pieces were analyzed extensively to understand the primary harmonic resources that are at work in each. Additionally, the three pieces were compared with regard to their formal elements, melodic materials, texture, and dynamics to draw conclusions about what similarities they share and also how they differ. Depending on the piece and the section under consideration, these three examples exhibited a reliance on modal structures, blues-based materials, and common-practice influences.

Abstract: This dissertation chronicles the cultural, musical and performative fronts during two centuries of struggle and negotiation between Mapuche and Chilean societies. The perspective is mainly ethnomusicological, including two years of fieldwork in the Araucanía region, concerning new genres of Mapuche fusion music such as rock and hip-hop. This writing demonstrates how Mapuche expressions and representations accrued various forms of value during Chile's modernization—including colonization, nation building, the emergence of modern social movements, and the implementation of neoliberal policies—and how artists contend with and subvert those values today.
The opening chapters are historical. Following the invasion of Araucanía in the 1880s, Mapuche political activism eventually gained traction by carefully managing a relationship with the Chilean political establishment, while also cultivating a unique approach to political processes that incorporated preexisting rituals. Concurrently, the Mapuche transitioned from adversaries to objects of study, while concepts such as folklore took root in Chilean society. As popular culture took note of Mapuche sounds and symbols toward the mid-twentieth century, non-Mapuche artists and activists codified their progressive ideologies through their embrace of indigeneity, exemplified in art music, and most famously, nueva canción.
Based directly on fieldwork, the second half of the thesis discusses how Mapuche cultural continuity has involved both the recovery of traditions and the incorporation of non-traditional elements. I describe the conversion of a mingako ritual into a festival of music and poetry in the Mapuche comunidad of Saltapura. This transfer from agriculture to expressive culture demonstrates the diminishing value of Mapuche lands, parallel with the increasing value of their expressions, under neoliberal multiculturalism. Meanwhile, Mapuche heavy metal and hip-hop groups such as Pewmayén and Weichafe Newen build their music around ancestral principles of sound, ritual and language, raising the question as to whether Mapuche musical elements thus become ingredients of popular music, or whether popular music becomes Mapuche for incorporating these elements. Through detailed discussions of this music and its broader contexts, this dissertation issues a critique of the culture concept underpinning neoliberal multiculturalism, inherited from the investigations of the Mapuche during the early republican period.