Thesis Title Archive
Music Graduates, Spring 2021: (l-r) JuCe Brandon, Henry Oberholtzer, Sebastian Bishop, Mo Allyn* = Creative Thesis
§ = Complementary Recital/Performance
2024
- Drew Bayles, “Working Lives of Jazz Musicians: Labor and Value in Portland’s Jazz Scene in 2023/2024”
- * Malori Graves, “Hear Us Scream: Exploring Trans Voices/Expression in Music”
- * G Mack, “Music Sampling: At the Crossroads of Audio Innovation and International Property Regulation”
- § Rachel Modlin, “Spectral Shifts: Understanding the Collaborative Pianist through Genre, Listening Habits, Partnership, and Practice”
- Sid Perrett, “Radical Scenes of Noise: An Ethnographic Study of Noise Music in Portland, Oregon"
- Elias Sisneros, “Olympia Indie Pop: Creating an Independent Music Scene through Style, Ideology, and Genre”
- Sasha Zubieta, “Heard But Not Seen: The Life and Work of Female Composers in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Genre”
2023
- Lori Der Sahakian, “Constructions and Representations of the Middle East in Post-9/11 Pop and Hip-Hop Music”
- * Liam Goodwin, “Using Generative Structures to Aid Live Performance”
- Zoe Marchand, “The 21st-Century Minnesota Music Community: An Oral Present”
- Caleb Sciannella, “Game Sound Practices as a Result of Technological and Commercial Advancement”
2022
- Mia Ibarra, “Corridos tumbados: History, Aesthetics, and Location in Mexican-American Popular Music”
2021
- Molly Allyn, “Sound, Media, and Affect at Portland’s Black Lives Matter Protests”
- * Sebastian Bishop, “La orchestra psicodélica transcontinental: Musical Hybridity in Modern Latinx Alternative Music”
- Rollo JuCe Brandon, “Mambo Mambo: How It Got on the Dance Flo’”
- * Henry Oberholtzer, “Waveform Transmissions: Minimalism and Dynamic Expression in Techno”
- Piper Powell, “Gendered Images: Impositions and Consequences of the Cisnormative Framing of Western Music on the Listener and Artist”
2020
- * Sam Griffin-Ortiz, “Mystery Alive: Arca, Haraway, Harman, Gurdjieff, and the Beauty of Nonsense”
- * Elihu Knowles, “Aaron’s Night on Earth (Everywhere): An Exploration of Structure and Function in Long-Form Jazz”
- Jules Oh, “Reaching Inward, Feeling Outward: Nationalism, Globalism, and the People in K-Pop’s Korea”
2018
- * Benjamin Baran, “Pieces”
- Michael Goldman, “Keep Movin’ Forward: The Representation of Disabled Identity in Popular Music’s Depictions of Mental Illness”
- * Yiyang Wang, “Sketches of Motion: A Woodwind Quintet in Five Movements”
- Daniel Woodruff, “The Role of Generic Structure in Musical Analysis: Understanding Mulgrew Miller’s Improvisation”
2017
- Anastasia Hansen, “Getting Down in the House of the Lord: Musical Flexibility in Worship, Space, and Neighborhood in a North Portland Church”
- * Cole Kibel, “Coal on a Platter”
2016
- Wolfgang Black, “Community, Infrastructure, and the Internet in Portland Hip-Hop”
- * Adrian Boctor, “Hiding in the Spotlight”
- § Reed Elkinton, “Historical, Analytical, and Performative Perspectives on Maurice Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin”
- Peter Gunnar, “The Next Movement: Hip-Hop Collectives of the 1990s as Black Cultural Institutions”
- Vasiliki Ioannou, “Politics, Pleasure, and the Economics of Hyperreality: An Introduction to the Socio-Sonic Political Philosophy of a Contemporary Greek Techno Collective”
- Eugene Lee, “Articulating Japanese Voice in Vocaloid: Identity in the Wagakki Band’s ‘Senbonzakura’”
- § Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies, “Where’s Leon? (or) That Extraordinary Drama: Dancing Jazz, Negotiating Historiography, and Performing Americanism on the Cold War Cultural Tours”
- * Dylan Richards, “How to Disappear: Form, Unity, and Thematic Transformation in Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony”
2015
- * Jack Johnson, “Nobody’s Business”
- * Michael Mandeville, “Couples”
- Bronwyn Murray-Bozeman, “While Echo Shall in Sounds Remote: Foreign Influence in Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen”
- * Ian Nichols, “Trick Music”
2014
- James Clark, “I Fear That I’m Ordinary: The Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as a Serious Work”
- Eric Goldman, “Other Oceans: Rethinking Diegesis in Modular Video Game Scores”
- Duncan Law, “Musical Symbolism and Realist Opera: An Analysis of Debussy’s Pelléas et mélisande”
- * Chris McKelway, “Segni di vita (Incomplete) Sun-up Clothesline Cat’s Cradle: Form in the ‘Final’ of Claude Debussy’s Sonate pour flûte alto et harpe”
- Katherine Morics, “An Ethnographic Examination of Ideology in a Non-Profit Music Education Program”
- * Jon Pape, “For the Entire Family: The Political Dissidence of ‘Unsound’”
- Madelyn Villano, “Noise Beats: Technological Mediations of Style”
- * Roger Wallace, “Some Comments on the Percussive Piano and Some Original Music”
- * John Wilhite, “Lines and Figures”
2013
- Matthew Eilar, “Samuel Barber’s Vanessa and the Operatic Tradition”
- Daniel Henry, “Technology’s Role in Music Composition: The Origins and Influence of Dubstep”
2012
- Evan Foster, “The Chronic Groove of the 90s: How Gangsta Rap Swept America”
- Sophie Greaves, “A Closer Look into Mexican Nationalism: Carlos Chávez and the MOMA Exhibition 20 Centuries of Mexican Art”
- Nora Jones, “Men’s Space and Women’s Place: Sampling African American Female Singing Voices in Rap Music”
2011
- Kristine Schultze, “Britten Sets Hardy: The Song Cycle Winter Words”
2010
- Emidio Cantalupo, “Presenting and Representing Indian Music: The Prehistory of the ‘Great Sitar Explosion’”
- § Sida Cheng, “Aaron Copland’s Piano Variations: A Performer’s Guide”
- Tom Morrison, “From the Underground to the End of the World: Authenticity and Medeski, Martin & Wood’s ‘Homeless Music’”
- Brenna Wrye-Simpson, “Maurice Ravel’s Poetic ‘Transposition’: Musical Color, Narrative, and Form in Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé”
2009
- Patrick Henry, “Radiohead’s Kid A: Experimentalism and Difficulty in Popular Music”
2008
- * Ian Bunker, “Jazz Composition a la Basie, Brown, Miles, and Monk: or, Composing Music with a Little Help from My Friends”