Piano and popular culture: how Snow White and Charlie Brown made it to the concert hall

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Date
2018
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University of Alabama Libraries
Abstract

The relationship of popular culture to the piano can be cited in any number of works from Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca to Liszt’s paraphrase of Rigoletto, not to mention the myriad themes and variations from various composers drawing on popular melodies from folk songs to operas. Composers’ fascination with popular culture has only increased with the passage of time. This document will focus on more recent inclusions of popular culture in works for piano. The works examined are specifically, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Peanuts Gallery, which draws inspiration from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip, Earl Wild’s Reminiscences of Snow White, and Greg Anderson’s arrangement of Three Waltzes for Two Pianos, which draw inspiration from the Walt Disney Productions adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The objective will be to determine whether or not these pieces draw upon the scores that are culturally attached to these characters such as the music that accompanies the Peanuts televised specials composed by Vince Guaraldi and the film score for Snow White composed by Frank Churchill. The piano works dealing with each animated classic will also be compared to one another to determine whether or not they share compositional choices or pianistic strategies to represent the characters, stories, or motives found in the original compositions.

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Electronic Thesis or Dissertation
Keywords
Performing arts
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