A portfolio of original compositions

Abstract

This portfolio explores the development of a personal compositional voice situated within the pluralist aesthetic of polystylism. Building on the legacy of Alfred Schnittke and George Rochberg, polystylism is here considered not as a discrete style but as a critical attitude towards cultural and musical plurality, foregrounding fragmentation, juxtaposition, and stylistic heterogeneity. The commentary situates this approach within broader postmodern discourses, highlighting its resistance to aesthetic or cultural homogeneity and its capacity to accommodate complex negotiations of history and identity.

Central to this project is the application of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia, which provide a theoretical framework for understanding polystylism as the interaction of multiple musical voices within a dialogic field. The resulting compositional language resists the imposition of singular meaning, instead creating spaces of interpretive multiplicity. Literature functions as an important intertext, extending the dialogic potential of the music. In particular, the novels of Cormac McCarthy exemplify forms of stylistic hybridity and narrative polyphony that inform both the dramaturgical and referential dimensions of the portfolio.

Eight solo and ensemble works are analysed with reference to their strategies of stylistic confrontation, structural discontinuity, and multi-voicedness. These pieces collectively demonstrate how polystylism may serve as a productive means of engaging with questions of memory, history, and intertextuality in contemporary composition, offering a compositional practice that foregrounds dialogue, multiplicity, and the negotiation of meaning.

Date of Award	Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Simon Mawhinney (Supervisor) & Sarah McCleave (Supervisor)