Date Available

5-15-2020

Year of Publication

2020

Degree Name

Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA)

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

College

Fine Arts

Department/School/Program

Music

First Advisor

Joseph Baber

Abstract

The main purpose of this monograph is to provide a faceted study of Marin Goleminov’s Concerto for Viola No.1, a work of art complexly revealing its creator’s constructive study of style – including national style. It is hoped that this will, among other things, assist in deepening relevant performances and researches.

This document examines the M. Goleminov Concerto for Viola and Orchestra no.1, 1950 (Концерт за Bиола и Oркестър Hомер 1 Марин Големинов, р.1908–п.2000). It would bring essential features of it to the attention of a broader audience, perhaps beginning with inquisitive violists. If, with the necessary selectivity, this project addresses relevant historical, theoretical, poetic, and technical aspects. Herein, it also actively if non-exhaustively contemplates several simultaneous personal and cultural contexts. Some senses of Goleminov’s mature period, that in which the Concerto emerges, are uniquely compelling. This monograph considers these while considering applicable aspects of Bulgarian folk and European art music worlds. It elucidates theoretic and poetic features of Goleminov’s masterpiece largely by glimpsing the research impetus that perhaps most deeply marks it. The composer’s vigil intended to find and express authentic personal and national voices – finally within a ‘complexly complex’ set of circumstances – is indicated here.

This resourceful work for the viola is rife with eclectic if strategic solutions. The latter suggest far more than the relatively superficial, contemporaneous grafting of folk tunes together on a perhaps as-vaguely classical corpus. Original etudes by the author that are variously derived from salient episodes in the Goleminov Concerto are also included here. Each also pertains to relevant technical issues, and a hopeful notion of the violist-interpreter as a kind of ‘after-the-fact co-composer’ - that is, by virtue of a hoped, ever more robustly empathic responsiveness enlivening the work by bringing interpretation into a relative intimacy with its unique genesis). Here we also suggest how a certain harmonic-emotive ambivalence in the work may perhaps be uniquely well-served by the instrumental voice for which it is written. This ambivalence is also addressed in terms of Goleminov’s active researches on – according to his own theorization – the binary spring of Bulgarian style: Thracian bodiliness in rite-like rhythm in confluence with Slavic-Orthodox spirit – the latter, in ever-extending, proto-liturgical [that is, melodic] narrative. Pedagogical and technical points pertaining to the Concerto’s amalgam-like invention (as well as to its responsive performing) should assist players in an ever more imaginative grappling with this unique attempt at national [or, somewhat as much, micro-administrated ‘socialist-nationalist’] style.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2020.202

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