Digital Commons Network^™

Preserving The Historic And Cultural Music Of Louisiana Through School Music: An Ethnographic Case Study, Christopher S. Song

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this ethnographic case study was to examine the lives of teachers, students, community members, and culture bearers within a musical community located in South Central Louisiana. The geographic area of focus in this research was Vermilion Parish and its surrounding area, known as Acadiana, the heart of Creole and Cajun culture where Traditional Louisiana Music finds its origins. Participants’ intrinsic cultural understandings of Louisiana’s music and impact on school music programs was examined through ethnographic interview and observation. A resource pedagogy known as funds of knowledge was used as a theoretical framework meant to maintain participants’ intrinsic …

An Analysis Of The Musical Gestures In Osvaldo Golijov’S The Dreams And Prayers Of Isaac The Blind And Their Relationship To The Kabbalah Sefirot, Jeremy Gdaniec

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Osvlado Golijov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, scored for klezmer clarinet and string quartet, remains one of his most influential works since its premier in 1994. Inspiration for the work came from the writings of Rabbi Isaac the Blind, a prominent 13^th century figurehead in the branch of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah. In Kabbalah, symbols known as the sefirot are emanations of creation and the key to unlocking the divine secrets of the God-head. The analysis presented in this document combines musical gesture theory with Kabbalistic concepts for new perspectives on Golijov’s …

A Study Of Selected Vocal Works By Shande Ding: The Mysterious Sound Of Flute And Poems On Western Yunnan, Chuyan Luo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study aims to delve into and interpret “The Mysterious Sound of Flute” and “Poems on Western Yunnan” from a singer’s perspective while also providing guidance and recommendations for other performers. The research encompasses the history of Chinese art songs, a biography of Shande Ding, and an introduction to his compositional style. A comprehensive examination of each song includes background information, song analysis, translation, a Chinese lyric diction guide, and performance suggestions.

Art songs constitute a significant genre in music composition, and Chinese art songs have yielded numerous outstanding composers and captivating works over the years. Among these composers, Shande …

Introducing Chinese Folk Songs Through Arrangements For Trombone & Piano And Chamber Music, Tianyu Xue

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The scarcity of trombone in traditional Chinese music reflects the limited exposure and education for the trombone in China. Additionally, Chinese folk songs have minimal presence on the global stage. This project will bridge this gap by developing a series of trombone pieces that incorporate Chinese musical elements, explicitly focusing on elevating Chinese folk songs through trombone performance. This initiative offers an opportunity for trombonists worldwide to delve into the richness of Chinese folk music. The core of this work involves selecting Chinese folk songs that represent diverse historical contexts, regional characteristics, and emotional content and then arranging them for …

Maria Rosa Ribas Monné: A Case Study, Rebeca Lemos Gonzalez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the musical legacy of Catalan composer Maria Rosa Ribas Monné, emphasizing the influence of the Catalan context on her compositions and recognizing the contributions of Spanish women in music, particularly in cello music. Through an in-depth exploration of Maria Rosa's life, musical perspective, and analysis of her works "Faust", "Disperato,"and "Record d'una música," this study unveils pivotal insights into her artistic journey. Additionally, it includes a comprehensive catalogue of her compositions, providing a detailed overview of her musical output.

The dissertation begins by examining how M. Rosa Ribas' deep connection to Catalan culture, influenced by poet Màrius …

Effects Of Music Instruction For 3-4-Year-Old Children On Cognitive Development And Spatial Skills, Veronica Perez Espinosa

LSU Master's Theses

The impact of music instruction on child cognitive development has been examined by researchers in many contexts, but not as often in very young children. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of music instruction on the spatial and cognitive skills of preschool children ages 3-4. Participants in the study were 68 three- to four-year-old students who received weekly music instruction at a private school in South Louisiana. Of the 68 participants, and using a quasi-experimental design, 30 students in three intact classes were randomly assigned to receive a movement song treatment and the other 38 …

Producing Digital Reflections Of Reality Through Intercultural Filmmaking And Multisensory Engagement, Trai Thomas

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the author’s production of three intercultural, multisensory films situated in New Orleans, encompassing elements both narrative and documentary genres. Intercultural cinema exists in a setting where people of different cultural backgrounds live together in power-inflicted spaces of diaspora, colonialism, and cultural apartheid and the development of the story is centered around exoticism, fetishization, and fascination with the other (Marks 2007, 1). Multisensory media primarily engages through visual perception and auditory input, which create cultural knowledge stored as long-term memory files in the brain (Marks 2007).

Conflict And Race In Literature & Law. The Case Of Americanah, Emanuela Ignatoiu Sora

Comparative Woman

In Americanah, the 2013 novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, there is a scene when one of the characters, Laura, speaks of her Ugandan classmate who did not get along with an African-American colleague. Laura is surprised as, for her, all persons of color are similar, with no understanding for their differences in background, personal stories and experiences. The novel depicts and critiques this very categorization of race, which flattens differences, conflating groups and individuals who might share very little, if anything. For a long time, law (with its stipulations, precedents and rulings) has operated in a similar manner, disengaging …

Death, Dreaming, And Diaspora: Achieving Orientation Through Afro-Spirituality, Liz Johnston, Jaime Elizabeth Johnston

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Enslavement, colonization, and the systems that uphold racial injustice were and still are a series of new, unfathomable, and challenging experiences that prompt individuals within the diaspora to seek orientation. How does a human cope with centuries of attempts at the systematic destruction of their humanity, culture, and identity? How can they reclaim that identity, especially when so much of it seems lost? I address these questions by utilizing texts from the expansive body of work regarding ethnographic-historical-religious studies on Afro-spiritual practices to better analyze instances in literature in the ongoing practice of diasporic orientation. In this project, I argue …

Time, Place, & Purpose: The Performance Of Creole Identity In Louisiana, Rachel N. Aker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Though much of the early development of Louisiana Creole culture can be found in New Orleans, the culture spread and continued to grow throughout the rest of South Louisiana in both similar and different ways. Expanding beyond Joseph Roach’s treatment of Creole cultural performances in New Orleans in Cities of the Dead (1996) and journeying across land and water, this project identifies more Creole cultural performance as they emerge across place and time. I present Louisiana and the Gulf South as a kind of inland archipelago, with the currents of culture-creation moving in and around distinct community enclaves. The flow …

Women, Animals, Food: Planetary Perspectives On The Non-(Hu)Man, Samu/Elle Striewski

Comparative Woman

The paper comparatively reads Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Pirtha, and Puran Sahay (1995) and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) to trace the ways in which both novels show the complex intertwinement of the climate crisis with gender, class, race, subalternity, anthropocentrism, and veganism. Bringing together Gayatri C. Spivak’s notion of “planetarity” with ecofeminist philosophy and literary criticism, the article proposes a planetary ecogender reading of the two texts and their representation of the non-man, non-human, and non-subject. Building up further on Jacques Derrida’s critique of carno-phallogocentrism, the pedagogy of a relational ethics of “nurturing” is hence presented …

Interculturality, Creolization, And Globalization In "Ángeles Nómadas" By Minelys Sánchez, Cecily Bernard

Comparative Woman

No abstract provided.

Becoming Avian: Amazonian Featherworks From The John P. O’Neill Collection, Madeline R. Blanchard

LSU Master's Theses

In 1998 ornithologist John P. O’Neill donated an ethnographic collection of 434 objects he was gifted from researcher Charles Fugler or purchased from persons in Pucallpa, Peru, during his time there studying Amazonian birds. I evaluate 18 feathered objects. According to O’Neill, the cultures responsible for the items are the Cashinahua, Aguaruna, Achual, and Arawak. Eighteen of these items are beautifully crafted arrangements of feathered clothing and objects. The collection includes five headdresses, five bouquets, a hat, a necklace, three tassels, a backrack, a scarf, and a hair tie.

The objects and the seventeen species of bird used are active …

A Metropolitan French Isolate In North America: The French Language In Saint-Pierre-Et-Miquelon, Marc Cormier

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

No abstract provided.

France Within Louisiana Law, Government, And Media, Nicolas Garon

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

No abstract provided.

Entre Ombre Et Lumière : L’Artifice Et La Réflexion Sociétale Dans La Princesse Maleine De Maeterlinck, Anoosheh Ghaderi

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

No abstract provided.

Expressing Outrage, Re-Inventing Hope: Performing Nationhood In Nigerian Standup Comedy., Babasinmisola Fadirepo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The intersection of the Nigerian national identity and popular culture has been overwhelmingly located in the Nigerian movie industry and the Afrobeats, the flourishing Nigerian popular music. Further, when intervention about the Nigerian national identity is located within standup comedy performances, such analysis is vastly linguistic analysis of the performance. Through the lens of performance studies, this dissertation extends the discussion of the Nigerian national identity to standup comedy performances. In addition to the linguistic analysis of select Nigerian standup comedy performances, this work considers the location, costumes of comic acts, and the settings of the performance studied. Simply, this …

Reasoning The Voice: Toward A Diagnostic And Prescriptive Technique In The Teaching Of Singing, Carlos E. Santelli

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Voice pedagogy literature often draws a parallel between a doctor’s ability to diagnose illness and prescribe treatment, and a voice teacher’s ability to identify vocal obstacles and design solutions. The core of these parallel procedures lies in an ability to utilize critical reasoning skills within highly specific contexts. Medical literature describes this as “clinical reasoning” and has studied it as a learned process. Voice pedagogy literature has traditionally described this as an innate process which is solely developed through experience. This document broadly examines the ways in which medical literature has broken down clinical reasoning into specific cognitive processes and …

Roleplaying Games And Performance, Benjamin Joseph Munise

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Roleplaying Games and Performance calls to mind popular appearances of roleplaying games on stage and screen, like Stranger Things or Qui Nguyen’s popular play, She Kills Monsters. However, inquiry into the way roleplaying games appear in these titles reveals the way they have been instrumentalized to serve the ends of their respective mediums. Scholars writing about roleplaying games also tend to leap straight to analyses of video games, with many words spilled over World of Warcraft while a live site of analog performance sits before them. In this work, I address the tabletop roleplaying game as a medium with …

Times Of Crisis: A Comparative Discourse Analysis Of U.S. And Mexican Presidential Rhetoric, Kassandra Gonzalez-Ramos

LSU Master's Theses

Language is a communicative tool that in the possession of politicians holds the power to be persuasive and aggressive, empowering and uniting, or disruptive and dividing. Previous research has relied on numerous methodological approaches to analyze political discourse from different viewpoints to reveal the manner in which politicians as part of political institutions transform and manipulate language. The current investigation performs a critical discourse analysis (CDA) based on the framework developed by Van Dijk (1993,1997) in order to demonstrate the speech act realization in a total of 14 political speeches delivered by American presidents Biden, Trump, and Obama and Mexican …

Reverberations Of Boarding School Trauma In Upstate New York, Grace A. Miller

Comparative Woman

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices …

Magpies, Bridge And Goddess: Unearthing The Hidden Symbols And Rediscovering The Lost Goddess In Chinese Qiqiao Festival, Juan Wu

Comparative Woman

The Qiqiao Festival, also known as the Qixi Festival, or Chinese valentine’s day, is a festival celebrating the annual meeting of the Cowherd and Weaver Maid in mythology. The most influential version focuses on the romance or love theme; however, it ignores its underlying historical context, gender tension and mythical belief. This paper takes the texts, rituals and materials related to the Qiqiao festival to investigate its origin and evolution. First, it takes the anthological case of the Qiqiao festival in Xihe county to explore its core image of the holy bridge and Goddess Qiao. Second, it traces the bridge …

Understanding Consumers' Use Experience On Electrically Heated Jacket: A Study On Online Review Using Topic Modeling, Md Nakib-Ul Hasan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The demand for heated jackets is anticipated to be fuelled by frequent temperature drops, severe winter weather, and increasing outdoor activities. Electrically heated jackets (EHJ) are primarily marketed through online distribution channels and expansion of online sales channels is expected to boost the global market. Consumers are increasingly relying on online reviews from other consumers to help them decide what to buy. Businesses also actively monitor and manage their online reviews to build trust in their brand and make it more likely that customers will buy. Traditional approaches for assessing customer behavior, such as market research surveys and focus groups, …

'Space Is The Place:' Afrofuturism In Black Popular Music, Tamyka Jordon-Conlin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on developing a theory of Afrofuturist music. Afrofuturism is an umbrella term used to describe Black cultural productions that reflect on the African diasporic culture of the past while imagining potential futures, often while appropriating imagery of technology and science-fiction tropes. With the intent of redefining notions of blackness, Afrofuturist artists create alternative historical narratives and speculative future projections. These productions create space that allows the Afrofuturist to discorporately negotiate the limits of Black subjectivity. Poet, activist, and avant-garde musician Sun Ra is credited as the progenitor of Afrofuturism, and his model has since been adapted by …

Entities: A Field Of Imaginary Games, Thrasyvoulos Ioannis Kalaitzidis

LSU Master's Theses

With this body of work, I am looking for visual symbols that help communicate unuttered meanings through storytelling and stimulate an affectual response to the viewer. This exploration is presented in two different forms: a surreal sculptural installation and a board game. The installation consists of large-scale sculptures made from light and soft materials (polyurethane foam, plastic waste, paper) that are available to move inside the gallery, while the board game is presented as a set of 3D prints with instructions on how the participants can play it. The materials used in the installation suggest a way to transform waste …

Creating Musical Scores Inspired By The Intersection Of Human Speech And Music Through Model-Based Cross Synthesis, William Alexander Thompson Iv

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research addresses the development of machine learning techniques used to create musical scores and performances that are inspired by the intersection of speech and music. Machine learning models are created from MIDI files that are transcribed from datasets of musical audio recordings and human speech audio recordings. Through the creation of succinct models, model based cross synthesis is possible. Models trained on musical MIDI data are asked to replicate MIDI data that approximate human speech. Alternatively, models that have been trained on MIDI data that approximate speech are asked to replicate musical MIDI data. The product of these developed …

Responsible Classrooms: Unfinalizability, Responsibility, And Participatory Literacy In Secondary English Language Arts, Emma Jamilah Gist

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines participatory literacy practice in secondary English language arts classrooms. While literacy achievement in this context is often measured according to a student’s ability to receive and repeat predetermined information within the scope of mandated curricula and standardized tests, this study attends specifically to classroom literacy practice that centers authentic, unanticipated, dialogic student response. Within its consideration of literacy practice, this study applies the Bakhtinian notion of unfinalizability to consider those conditions that allow for learning experiences that are not predetermined but are rather uniquely, unpredictably, and unrepeatably co-constructed by individual students, student groups, and teachers. These unfinalizable …

Grotesque Masculinities In The Works Of Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, And Padgett Powell, Matt Brandon Blasi

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“Grotesque Masculinities in the Works of Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, and Padgett Powell” explores how these authors use the grotesque to complicate, distort, and criticize hegemonic white Southern masculinity as represented in contemporary American literature. In “Grotesque Masculinities,” I argue that the presence of the grotesque mode in these author’s works offers a unique critical perspective by which to better understand how masculinity is constructed by and for white Southern men in literature, and how alternative configurations of identity are not only possible, but necessary to decenter whiteness and heteronormativity as dominant categories. Using what sociologists refer to as body-reflexive …

Literacy's Levels: An Analysis Of Neoliberal Literacy Sponsorship In The U.S., Misty Dawn Fuller

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

While much scholarship has considered Deborah Brandt’s concept of sponsors of literacy, there remains a need to consider relationships between literacy sponsors and larger implications of literacy sponsorship at national and institutional levels. Utilizing academic theories, U.S. federal government budgets and financed reports, and discoursal analysis, this dissertation investigates literacy sponsorship at the federal, postsecondary institutional, postsecondary institutional writing programmatic, and individual levels to tease out how, and in what ways, through “enabling” and “supporting” literacy these sponsors also” regulate, suppress, and withhold literacy” (Brandt 166). Rhetorical analysis determines that, at the U.S. federal level, literacy is promoted as a …

Reading And Understanding: A Defense Of Heideggerian Hermeneutics And Philogy, Phillip M. Gandy

LSU Master's Theses

This paper addresses methodologies espoused by the hermeneutic tradition begun under Martin Heidegger. I argue for the methodologies of Philology, Destruktion and the use of poetic language in order to understand and communicate fundamental truths about Dasein. I demonstrate that these methods provide us, hermeneutically, with a closer and more precise understanding than simple communication in common speech.