UC San Diego

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

At the Intersection of American Sign Language

and the Performer-Percussionist: A Hybrid Practice

by

Christopher Richard Clarino

Doctor of Musical Arts in Contemporary Music Performance

University of California San Diego, 2019

Professor Steven Schick, chair

This dissertation investigates the shared spaces between American Sign Language (ASL), percussion and performance art and addresses the following questions: Does my work successfully merge these disciplines into a singular practice? In this hybridized practice, is corporeality fundamentally relatable? For example, might a layperson relate to the playing of a drum more deeply on an emotional and physical level than the playing of a viola harmonic? Similarly, in ASL; are inherent qualities of the language – facial expression, non-manual markers, personification, and explicitly visual referents – also relatable to the layperson in the same way? Do these build a bridge to the middle ground of my practice?

These topics and questions will be addressed in the context of the following works: Carolyn Chen’s Threads (2012), Lydia Winsor Brindamour’s early morning (dew, spiderweb) (2016), Tiange Zhou’s Me/Monologue (2018), Larry Polansky’s VEDITZ (2018), Yiheng Yvonne Wu’s Your Hat (2018), and my adaptation of Franz Schubert’s Erlkönig (1821). Through musical analysis and deconstruction of the works mentioned, I have attempted to answer the technical and cultural questions that have risen through preparation and performance.