This exposition seeks to create a narrative of the 19th and early 20th centuries that brings art, music, and poetry together, hopefully triggering important connections that are often missed when focusing solely on one medium. My research is divided into 4 chapters (Prelude, Romanticism, Post-Romanticism, and Modernism), that present the major discussions of the various time periods. Each chapter concludes with my own reflections of how these aesthetic and contextual information can be used to create music. I have included recordings of improvisations based on poetry and art works that I have created by myself or with my trio Kalea to demonstrate what those outcomes could look like. To clarify, my intentions with these improvisations are not to sound like a particular composer or composer of that particular era (for that would be a research of its own), but to use the influence from those eras to create improvisations from a modern day perspective. Because I spent some time studying the basics of harmony on my instrument, I have also included a postscript that shares some of the methods I have used to acquire more tonal awareness on my instrument. 

INTRODUCTION

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