Vocal music: Phonetics, phonology, and musical structure. (with Original composition);

This paper is an examination of the phonetic and phonological aspects of text as they relate to musical structure. During the course of this essay, information gathered from the field of linguistic phonology, including the theory of vowel formants and the theory of distinctive features, will be applied in order to describe formal parallels between the phonology of various texts and the music which accompanies them. This paper investigates the extent to which the sound structure of a text determines structural characteristics of the accompanying music or, looking at the same issue from the opposite direction, how the underlying musical structure supports the particular phonological design of a text or the composer's interpretation of its significant phonic features.;Part II examines the role which the distinctive features of vowels play in the overall structure of the passage in Tannhauser consisting of the recitative "Wie Todesahnung ... " and the aria "O du mein holder Abenstern ... " (Act III, scene 2). The underlying structure of this passage is founded on phonic and textual opposition. To understand the extent to which the distinctive features of vowels serve as a basis for the musical structure, it is necessary to expand the phonetic, or acoustic, view of speech sound, taken in the first chapter, to include that of the relational and oppositional, the realm of phonology.;In Part III, a compositional project of mine directly related to the issues presented in this paper is outlined.;In Part I, the phonetic properties of the last stanza of Mahler's "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" are considered in relation to other aspects of the song's structure. In this example, pitch-registral-temporal associations established early on in the piece are used to highlight and support the distinctive phonetic design of the last stanza of the poem. The tonal structure and other structural characteristics of the last stanza are discussed in relation to the support which they lend to the projection of the last stanza's sound structure.