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Abstract
The focus of this dissertation is the musical and technological gap between the performance demands of the viola etude repertoire, which reached a plateau in the late eighteenth century, and the twentieth century solo viola repertoire. If the purpose of practicing etudes is to perfect one's performance technique, then the technical demands of an etude should prepare the instrumentalist for the technical demands of an instrument's solo repertoire. Unfortunately, studying the standard, (eighteenth century) viola etudes does not prepare the contemporary violist for the technical demands of the later viola repertoire, such as the Bartôk Viola Concerto.
In Chapter I of the dissertation, I define the technical gap between the viola's preparatory etudes and its solo repertoire by tracing the development of the viola as an instrument and by describing the evolution of the viola etude and solo repertoires from their beginnings to their late eighteenth century pinnacle.
In Chapter II, I describe and discuss practice techniques and methods that help to solve the technical challenges of the Bartôk Concerto.
In Chapter III, I conclude the dissertation with examples of contemporary viola etudes, which I commissioned from three composers (Esa-Pekka Salonen, Paul Chihara, and Paul Coletti) to address, in general, the technical demands of the twentieth and twenty-first century viola repertoire and, specifically, the challenges of the Bartôk Viola Concerto.
