The cross-fertilization and convergence between Eastern and Western cultures ranks as one of the most influential developments of the twentieth century. Surprisingly, few serious efforts have been made to integrate Chinese and Western traditions and styles into the same production and aesthetic space. My performance project, whose background and gestation this dissertation addresses, attempted to do just that.

My search for a Chinese source of inspiration ended when Prof. Chi Li of our Department of Ethnomusicology brought to my attention the only surviving collection of early Chinese texts with music: seventeen poems set to music by the celebrated Chinese poet and composer of the Song dynasty, Jiang Kui (ca. 1155-1221). My "Prelude" describes Kui's elusive love experiences with two remarkable sisters whose virtuosity on the pipa was a pivotal element in their relationships. With the assistance of Prof. Peter Kazaras (UCLA's Director of Opera) and my advisor, Prof. Winter, we identified three Western arias that could provide both dramatic contrast and continuity: Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck's "Divinités du Styx" (Ye Divinities of Styx) from Alceste (1767); Giuseppe Verdi's "Una macchia e qui tuttora" from Macbeth (1847); and Dido's Lament from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1688). The blending of these two seemingly disparate styles using the style of Nian bai, a recitative-like delivery used in traditional Chinese Kun qu opera, created a structure that derives its dramatic integrity and strength from these unlikely pairings.

Chapter 1 elaborates on "The Chinese Context" of Jiang Kui, while Chapter 2 discusses "The Western Connections" through Gluck, Verdi, and Purcell. Chapter 3 details the extraordinary power and significance of costume, makeup, facial expression, bodily movement, and use of the water sleeve adapted from Kun qu opera. Chapter 4 discusses not only our decision to employ a Chinese instrumental ensemble but the challenges confronted by Prof. Chi Li in orchestrating, arranging, and even composing under the inspiration of historical practices. My "Postlude" reacts to the overwhelmingly positive feedback we received from the premiere by outlining possible next steps in the evolution of this project, including opportunities for presentation in China.

While interculturality between East Asian and Western classical music has been explored extensively, little attention has been focused on the potential for interculturality between South Asian classical and Western classical traditions. I begin by assessing musical and extra-musical barriers to the achievement of this interculturality. My research then focuses on two composers, Walter Kaufmann (1907-1984) and Shirish Korde (b. 1945), whose distinct attitudes toward interculturality offer a valuable roadmap. While Kaufmann’s approach showcases an imaginative saturation of South Asian raaga within Western genres and forms, Korde engages with South Asian music in a more holistic manner, drawing on varied facets of raaga along with South Asian classical genres, forms, and aesthetics, to create a unique synthesis (following Dr. Yayoi Everett’s classification terminology) of South Asian and Western art music. Although Kaufmann worked for All-India Radio and wrote two acclaimed ethnomusicological textbooks on South Asian music, his study of Indian music was at times gently paternalistic, leading in some of his compositions to classic Orientalist tropes. With this backdrop, I elaborate on the evolution of Indian and Western musical interculturality since the British Raj through an exploration of Kaufmann’s Violin Sonata No. 4 (1940) and Korde’s Vak for Solo Violin and Taanpoora (2017).

This dissertation addresses the Ten Concert Etudes for Flute and Piano written by the prominent early twentieth-century Russian flutist, pedagogue, and composer Vladimir Tsybin (1877-1949). These works, virtually unknown in the West, are virtuosic miniatures comparable to prominent virtuosic cycles such as Niccol� Paganini’s 24 Caprices for solo violin or Fr�d�ric Chopin’s two main sets of �tudes for piano. The dissertation’s principal objective is to demonstrate—through the analysis of the expressive, stylistic, and didactic dimensions of these works—their high merit both as etudes and performance pieces. An additional goal is to familiarize the reader with a rare musician-flutist of the recent past who, despite a turbulent life in a very calamitous time, dedicated his entire life to music, bequeathing a significant legacy for future generations of flutists. The research for this work included learning and performing the Ten Concert Etudes, obtaining and working with the topic-related rare primary sources at the Russian State Library in Moscow, and familiarizing myself through various means with the details of the life and work of Vladimir Tsybin.

Transactions between musical androids and actual virtuosos occupied a prominent place in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instrumentalists and composers of instrumental music appropriated the craze for clockwork soloists, placing music in a position of increased social power in a society undergoing rapid technological transformation.

The history of musical automata stretches back to antiquity. Androids and automata, vested by audiences with spiritual and magical qualities, populated the churches of the broader populations and the Renaissance grottos of the aristocracy. As the Industrial Revolution began, automata increasingly resembled the machines changing the structure of labor; consequently, androids lost their enchanted status. Contemporary writers problematized these humanoid machines while at the same time popularizing their role as representatives of the uncanny at the boundaries of human identity.

Both instrumental performers and androids explored the liminal area between human and machine. As androids lost their magic, musical virtuosos assumed the qualities of spectacle and spirituality long embodied by their machine counterparts. In this process virtuosi explored the liminal space of human machines: a human playing a musical instrument (a machine) weds the body to a machine, creating a half-human, half-fabricated voice.

In the nineteenth century the virtuoso's hybrid status as exalted human and advanced machine was confronted by the far darker identity of industrial laborers tied to their rapidly modernizing equipment. Franz Schubert (1797-1828) composed his Lied, Gretchen am Spinnrade, a setting of a scene from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, featuring Gretchen sitting at a spinning wheel amidst the rapid changes taking place in the Viennese textile industry. The piano mediates between representation of a machine and human emotion. Schubert's Rondo in B minor, the "Rondeau brilliant," explores instrumental mechanics as an alternate human interior.

Just as audiences negotiated these contested identities for the human machine at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, we ourselves now face transformational waves of technology. Instrumental music and traditions of virtuosic performance still engage with the core issues of an industrialized society. Performers in this tradition inevitably explore the limits of human identity, even as that identity reconfigures itself in digital media and artificial intelligences.