Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2025
Document Type
Composition
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Music
Advisor
Eliot Bates
Committee Members
Jane Sugarman
Jason Eckardt
Antoni Pizà
Subject Categories
Composition
Keywords
trio, flute, oboe, violoncello
Abstract
When I began composing this work in the fall of 2019, I had already explored modes of representing birdsong, avian vocality, and interspecies vocal interactions in my music for nearly a decade. In approaching this piece, I asked: how might I counter or transfigure the flatness I perceived in my past compositional attempts at mimesis of birds’ singing? I found the compositional problem’s beginning in the fuzzy distinction between transcription and translation and the porous nature of that generative boundary. At two points in the piece, there are what I conceived of as transcriptions of two duets from two different Amazonian antbird species. In each conspecific duet, performed by different instrumental pairings (cello and oboe in the first; flute and oboe in the second), two individuals (a male and a female antbird) sing differently together, building a temporality of exchange. As part of the musical work and as instrumental materials, these duets are already not merely transcriptions but translations. Yet, within the piece, the “antbird” duets retain a specifically and relatively strict adherence to actual vocal acts of real birds—an identity that no other musical materials in the piece enact.
What happens through abstractions of translation that go further past that already fuzzy boundary of transcription? The antbirds’ singing—their songs—are now already inscribed and configured as part of a musical work. But what if that departure—the movement through increasing translational abstraction—drives the meaning-making of the work? Then the meaning-making in the musical work may take hold at two levels: that of the musical structure and that of the musicality of birdsong. Here is where the piece becomes quasi una fantasia—a kind-of lyric-fantasy. The two duets, as quasi-transcriptions, act like quotations—ideal representations or crystalline naturalistic objects—operating much like the Lied-specific themes that Franz Schubert quotes in his instrumental fantasies. The antbird duet “transcriptions” represent the avian real—the object of the higher-level structural imitation—in their counterpoint, temporality, tessitura/registers, timbres, dynamics, articulations, affects, etc. They are a perfect source, a wellspring, a truth. The musicality of birdsong, as a latency, is at once performed, exposed, amplified, and shaped through the crystallization of the musical structure, which takes hold through its translational abstractions.
Recommended Citation
Colwell, Charles P., "Quasi una fantasia for flute, oboe, and violoncello [2019–25]" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6463
Comments
This composition and the essay, "Hacer el Canto: Tracing Entanglements of Vocality and Interspecies Knowledge in the Imitative Practices of Costa Rican Naturalist Guides," together constitute the author's dissertation but are otherwise unrelated.