Because It Was There: Influence and Intertextuality in the Music of Michael Hedges
Open Access
- Author:
- Crosson, Dylan
- Graduate Program:
- Musicology
- Degree:
- Master of Arts
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- April 17, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Charles Dowell Youmans, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- Michael Hedges
Fibonacci Series
Fingerstyle guitar
Bartók
Minimalism
Steve Reich
Philip Glass
Terry Riley
Composition
New Age Music
New Age
Michael Manring
Windham Hill - Abstract:
- Over the course of his thirteen-year career, Michael Hedges revolutionized the fingerstyle guitar world through his revolutionary techniques. Despite these innovations, however—or perhaps because of them—Hedges’s accomplishments as a composer have been overlooked. Hedges’s underlying methods link him to a much broader, more celebrated tradition of composers. This thesis considers the music of Hedges from this standpoint, with particular attention to questions of compositional influence. Chapter One establishes Hedges as an “idiosyncratic minimalist” who simultaneously inherits the style from its founders while exercising his direct links to its roots. To do so, this chapter considers minimalism theoretically and culturally to show the complex nature of Hedges’s relationship with minimalism. Chapter Two investigates Hedges’s compositional uses of the Fibonacci Series and Golden Ratio. Tracking his fascination with the subject back to a book investigating the manifestations of the Fibonacci series in Bartok’s music, this chapter adopts this book’s methodology to search for such manifestations in the music of Hedges. In addition to adopting these methods, Hedges created his own ways to incorporate the Fibonacci series into his music. Through formal analysis and a study of Hedges-lead master classes, this chapter will explore his personal means of incorporating the Fibonacci series. By investigating Hedges’s interaction with minimalism and the Fibonacci series, this thesis positions Hedges as a composer with an extended arsenal of compositional techniques. On a broader level, this thesis further informs exploratory conversations regarding the interaction between classical and popular music.