Date of Award
5-1-2016
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts
Department
Music
First Advisor
Walczak, Christopher
Abstract
Three Attempts at Time Travel is a piece for wind ensemble that is approximately ten minutes in length. It consists of a brief introduction and three continuous movements based on the same starting material. It is semi-programmatic, but it is not an attempt to depict a specific narrative. Rather, it portrays a scenario involving time travel. The concept of the piece begins with a person who uses a time machine to travel back to a certain point in time to change the result of an event in the their own life. During the piece, the person goes back to the same starting point three times with each “restart” resulting in a different outcome. On the final restart, a positive resolution is reached, but it is ultimately a conflicted ending because it is not the ending that the time traveler was aiming for. At the end of the introduction and each of the first two movements, a “time machine” motive consisting of: a Mahler hammer, a concert bass drum, a drum set, a thunder sheet, a suspended cymbal and a triangle occurs to signal the return to the original point in time.
Access
This thesis is Open Access and may be downloaded by anyone.