Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Musical Arts

Program

Music

Advisor

Kofi Agawu

Committee Members

Norman Carey

Ursula Oppens

Paul Steinbeck

Subject Categories

Musicology | Music Performance | Music Theory

Keywords

United States, Western Classical Music, performance, Black music, interculturality, jazz

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the piano music of Ed Bland, a politically and philosophically vocal composer active in the second half of the twentieth century, whose music draws on both the European and American twentieth-century avant-garde, and on African American vernacular music genres from ragtime to hip-hop. A review of the historical and personal context for these pieces, and a detailed examination of the compositional processes used in this music, work together to demonstrate how Bland thought about the relationship between different musical genres and languages.

Through this combination of theory of musical genre, historical and biographical study, and detailed analysis of Bland’s 31-piece set of solo piano music entitled Urban Counterpoint, Bland’s music is used to gain insight into the modern reality of stylistic pluralism in music. This integrated methodology will bring light both to this heretofore unresearched music, and to the relationship of two poles of twentieth-century music in America—Black music and the tradition inherited from European classical modernism. A brief biographical introduction will be presented, followed by an analysis of Bland’s artistic philosophy, encompassing musical genre, the relationship of Western classical music to African American genres, and his own compositional method. From Chapter 2 on, analysis of specific pieces of Urban Counterpoint will illustrate his compositional method, culminating in Chapter 5’s corpus-level analysis of the set as a whole.

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