Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
School of Music
Sub-Department
Music Performance
First Advisor
Walter Cuttino
Abstract
Samuel Barber’s Opus 10 songs are some of his most well-known vocal works. These settings from Chamber Music by James Joyce were published in 1939, but posthumous research by biographer Barbara Heyman and a complete vocal recordings project by Thomas Hampson, Cheryl Studer, and John Browning led to the discovery and recording of ten additional songs, including three more Joyce settings. Schirmer published these Ten Early Songs around the same time as the Deutsche Grammophon. Research has shown the dates of composition to be within days of the published Opus 10 songs, but no other information on these songs exists other than musical analysis from a few other doctoral research papers and opinions offered by the biographer. When the three posthumous publications are arranged with the Opus 10 songs by Joyce’s publication order from Chamber Music, all six songs start to show more connections than previously noted. It is the intention of this study to show the connective tissue that exists among these six songs, along with the circumstantial information around the compositional and poetic processes, in order to form a posthumous cycle titled Chamber Music: Six songs on texts by James Joyce.
Rights
© 2016, Michael Pierre LaRoche
Recommended Citation
LaRoche, M. P.(2016). Samuel Barber’s Settings of James Joyce’s Chamber Music: A Proposal for a Posthumous Song Cycle. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3914