Time and Again: Repetition and Fixation in Boléro, Barraqué, and Moellenberg

This dissertation serves as an investigative attempt to connect musical thought to my work in performance art as well as poetry, drawing from Maurice Ravel’s Boléro and Jean Barraqué’s Sonata for piano. Using my performance Only Time, I trace how my early work embeds repetition within its structure, taking inspiration from Boléro’s formal design. Using my poem SIS TER, I show how repetitive elements become objects of fixation when presented as surface features of the work, taking inspiration from Barraqué’s use of recurrent pitches in his Sonata. This paper will trace this trajectory in chronological fashion, as I accumulate techniques through these musical influences