Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0006-3663-9529

Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

DMA

College

College of Creative Arts

Department

School of Music

Committee Chair

Jeff Siegfried

Committee Co-Chair

Cody Norling

Committee Member

Andy Sledge

Committee Member

Jennifer Ripley Stueckle

Abstract

This dissertation examines contemporary saxophone repertoire through a formation-based analytical approach, using Ziwei Shi’s The Blue Lotus Blooms as a case study. It is organized into three parts. Part I establishes the conceptual and methodological framework by introducing the concept of “formation-based analysis,” positioning the “condition of musical formation” as its core. Further situating the study within scholarship on practice-based research, cross-cultural theory, and modernism/postmodernism. Part II provides a detailed analytical and performance-based investigation of the work, including the collaborative commissioning process, the application of Thaat as a pitch resource, the role of extended techniques and embodied endurance, and contrasting formation processes across movements. Part III expands the discussion to a broader aesthetic and historical level, demonstrating the limitations of stylistic categorization and articulating formation-based analysis as a methodological approach relevant to contemporary music and saxophone practice.

Grounded in practice-based research, this study aims to shift analytical focus from stylistic classification and score-based analysis toward the processes through which musical works are formed. Through the multiple interacting elements—including philosophical orientation, pitch organization, embodied performance practice, and performer–composer collaboration—The Blue Lotus Blooms demonstrates that musical structure emerges from multiple interacting conditions rather than from a single compositional system. By treating The Blue Lotus Blooms as a case study, this dissertation argues that contemporary saxophone works shaped by multiple interacting philosophical, technical, and collaborative conditions cannot be fully understood through traditional analytical methodologies, including but not limited to stylistic categorization, score-based analysis, and historical analysis, even though they provide useful understanding of this work; instead, to comprehensively understand it, it requires shifting the analytical focus to the processes of this work’s formation. This dissertation argues that, in such works, formation-based analysis is essential for understanding contemporary saxophone works whose structures emerge from the interaction of multiple conditions of musical formation.

Download

Share

COinS