Musical Inspirations

location_on Location: Emanuele B

(Links to papers / posters are embargoed until 4/7)

All times in Eastern Time Zone

• assignment_ind Dailey, C. “ Gustav Mahler: The Journey to His Compositional Voice ”
  Gustav Mahler has found his place among the influential composers of the romantic area. However, the journey to do so faced many obstacles both during Mahler’s life and the years following his death. Mahler’s musical “voice” grew from the young age of six (when he first began his compositional career), to 1901 with a level of maturity heard in his Second Symphony, which was later heard again in his Fifth and Eighth Symphonies. In order to display and convey this maturity, Mahler utilized temporal and spatial displacement within the orchestra to convey the ultimate meaning of the work. This paper will address Mahler’s career and the parallels that can be drawn from his second symphony to later works.
• assignment_ind Driver, K. “ Influence of Background Music Characteristics on Performance in a Complex Figure Task ”
  Recent research has suggested that certain qualities of background music can be optimized for specific categories of tasks. However, more longstanding data disagree with this claim, suggesting that background music is definitively distracting for many tasks. Newer findings base music characteristic recommendations on the possibility that the key and complexity of music may facilitate certain cognitive functions, such as attention and working memory. This is a promising possibility, especially in the context of occupational resources for individuals with neurocognitive and neuropsychiatric disorders or brain injuries. The present study was designed to explore the efficacy of two types of task-optimized background music (complex task-optimized and vigilance task-optimized) on facilitating both time of completion and accuracy score on the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCF) task. This task includes a copy and a recall portion, taking place 30 seconds apart. Data from 18 participants in the present study revealed no significant difference between completion or accuracy on either of the two portions of the ROCF task, indicating no effect of the background music on task performance.
• assignment_ind Jonczyk, J. “ From the 1800s to the 2000s: A Musical Board Game Journey ”
  During the 2020-2021 school year, I completed a research project through Baldwin Wallace’s Riemenschneider Bach Institute Scholar Program. I was able to research “Anne Young’s Musical Games,” a board game for music students created in the 1800s. Throughout this project, I studied the features provided by the board game and its purpose, as well as how these relate to modern music education strategies. I completed the project by creating my own board game in a similar vein, instead applying it to the modern music classroom. This presentation features the process and findings of said research, and it provides conclusions and discussion regarding the importance of games in the education system both throughout history and also in its place in the modern classroom.