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“800 Years We Have Been Down”: Rebel Songs And The Retrospective Reach Of The Irish Republican Narrative, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

From the glamorous, cross-dressing “Rebel, Rebel” of David Bowie, to the righteous Trenchtown “Soul Rebel” of Bob Marley and The Wailers, both varied and various musical articulations of cultural and socio-political rebellion have long enjoyed a ubiquitous presence across multiple soundscapes. As a musicological delineator in Ireland, however, ‘rebel’ conveys a specifically political dynamic due to its consistent deployment as an all-encompassing descriptor for songs detailing events and personalities from the Irish national struggle. This paper sets out to examine the specific musical delineator of “rebel song” from both musicological and politico-ideological perspectives with a view to interrogating its appropriateness …

Impressions On The American Cowboy: End Of The Trail, Ghost Town And Rough Men, Jude Edmund Markey-Smith

Senior Projects Spring 2022

“Impressions on the American Cowboy” seeks to consider, expose, and investigate the symbol of the cowboy in our culture–– in all of its twisted romance. After reflecting on my personal experiences as well as various historical texts and works of western fiction, I set out to make my own western-themed work. My intention is to comment and explore the so-called “man problem” across disciplines in live performed time and space. This work attempts to think critically about how and why cowboy culture has persisted, and to delve into this particular and troubling projection of masculine consciousness.

Travelin' To The Promised Land: Symbolism Of The Jordan River In African Spiritual, English Hymn, And American Folksong Selections, Hope V. Dornfeld

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

These program notes originally accompanied a performance of three vocal pieces: Deep River, On Jordan's Stormy Banks, and Poor Wayfaring Stranger. The notes analyze the role of the Jordan river in each piece, focusing on their historical context, first performances, and issues of authorship. As part of a performing arts research project, the program notes also address the method of expression and creative process that went into preparing the performance of these pieces.

The songs included in this presentation all speak to the journey from earth to heaven. In each piece, the Jordan River is found to symbolize a …

“Beer & Hymns” And Community: Religious Identity And Participatory Sing-Alongs, Andrew Mall

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

As a series of loosely-organized events, “Beer & Hymns” started at the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2006 and migrated to the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina in 2012. Local Beer & Hymns gatherings meet at bars, breweries, clubs, and pubs across the U.K., the U.S., and around the world. Most are not affiliated with a church or Christian denomination, instead relying on the energy of independent local organizers. Some attendees are regular churchgoers, other are not, but all find community in these sing-alongs—congregational singing, that is, outside of traditional congregational contexts. Beer & Hymns is exactly what it …

Palestinian Evangelical Christian Music In Bethlehem, Israel/Palestine, Abby Smith

Senior Honors Theses

Often the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is portrayed as Jewish vs. Muslim, Hebrew vs. Arab. There is little room in the international dialogue for minorities such as Arab Christians. Though Palestinians have a rich culture of Arabic musical and poetic heritage, they are unable to produce their own new songs. In this study I interviewed three members of Immanuel Evangelical Church on their experiences and opinions on local Christian worship. The findings show that Palestinian Christians may feel unable to write worship music because of a prevalent feeling of inadequacy and a lack of musical training. I propose several …

Songs And The Soil, Mark Garry, Louise Reddy

Books/Book Chapters

Published in conjuction with an exhibition. The exhibition engages with the subjects of landscape and music/sound—exploring each element from historical, social and culturally associative perspectives; where landscape is recognised as a fluid term articulating physical space, idealised space and social space that reflects a convergence of physical processes and cultural meaning, and where song act as a response to, or archive, of personal, historical or socio-political instances. Several works engage landscape and musical sound intersect. The exhibition integrates a broad range of media,positions and responses to these research subjects; including two film works, a six-hour soundtrack for a room, sonic …

Enduring Music: Migrant Appalachian Communities And The Shenandoah National Park, Madeline Marsh

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This paper is an archival study of the displaced children of families formerly living in the Shenandoah National Park which spans from Strasburg to Waynesboro, Virginia. The study looks at interviews, from the JMU Special Collections archives, of these children in the 1970-80s, nearly fifty years after their forced migration from the 197,438 acres that comprised the park. Change and pressure during the 1930s-40s combined with national policy began the nostalgic preservation and veneration of the culture of these people of the Blue Ridge Mountains; through the archives, a clear and diverse picture of the perspectives and lifestyles of people …

Ultramontane Piety And Catholic Sociability: The Prescription And Practice Of Identity In Acadian Patriotic Songs, Jeanette Gallant

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The emergence of ultramontane thought during the Catholic Enlightenment in eighteenth-century France had wide-reaching effects in Catholic communities beyond Europe. One such community was a francophone colonial minority population in Atlantic Canada called the Acadians who, as Canada became a nation-state in the second half of the nineteenth century, came under the control of ultramontane nationalists working to protect Acadian cultural rights from the English-speaking Protestant majority. This paper looks at the role that music played in the transmission of ultramontane thought with these new socio-political circumstances. The Acadians, exiled for seven years during Canadian colonization, were resettled in disparate …

"Then To Death Walked, Softly Smiling": Violence And Martyrdom In Modern Irish Republican Ballads, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

This article critically considers the representation of death within the song tradition of modern Irish Republicanism. I explore how such representations have changed in parallel with the various ideological metamorphoses that Irish Republicanism has undergone, specifically in the twentieth century. I argue that the centrality of self-sacrifice has resulted in the development of ballad narratives that deliberately obfuscate on the issue of Republican violence, resulting in the deaths of all Republican militants (regardless of cause or context), ultimately portrayed as a form of heroic self-martyrdom.

San alt seo, déantar anailís chriticiúil ar léiriú an bháis i dtraidisiún amhránaíocht Phoblachtach na …

Rustic Roots And Fiddle Hell: An Ethnography Of Fiddle Camps In The Northeastern United States, Flannery Blanchard Brown

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

'Sing Unto The Lord A New Song--Just Not That One!' A Case Study Of Music Censorship In Free Will Baptist Colleges, Jon Edward Bullock

Masters Theses

Like so many of the world’s other religious institutions, the Christian church has a long and well-documented history of using music to enhance and enliven the spiritual experiences of believers. Many of the church’s greatest champions throughout history have spoken about the inherent power of music, but as history always seems to demonstrate, along with power comes the need for control. As long as church leaders have used music to attain spiritual progress, they have also censored music that threatens to impede that progress. Even today, many church leaders still rely on music censorship to protect the future and identity …

Tunetracker: Tensions In The Surveillance Of Traditional Music, Bryan Duggan, Norman M. Su

Conference papers

We describe the design and deployment of the first system ever to dynamically track and publish records of folk music playing. TuneTracker is a software system that has been, at time of writing, deployed at a pub in Dublin, Ireland for five months. It captures, stores, and posts the names of tunes played in Irish traditional music sessions on a public website. This paper makes two contributions: (1) drawing from a two year ethnographic study of trad musicians, it details the design and development of a system to track and publish traditional musicians’ practices while respecting the ethos of tradition, …

Disruptive Voices In The American Musical Discourse: Comic Song Performance In The American Parlor, 1865-1917, Kevin Steven O'Brien

Masters Theses

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the American song sheet industry vastly increased in size. This mass mediated form reached a broad number of consumers, who performed this music in their homes, identified with it, and shaped the new discourse on their identity as they did so. Simultaneously, Americans were re-shaping their cultural conceptions of music, in a process Lawrence Levine chronicled as the emergence of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” distinctions. Performing music in the culturally sacralized space of the parlor was meant to be an edifying experience and a display of genteel, “highbrow” identities. Performing comic songs (comic …

"You're Pretty Good For A Girl": Roles Of Women In Bluegrass Music, Jenna Michele Lawson

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the past and current roles that female bluegrass musicians achieve within the music industry in the United States. Using sociological concepts by Judith Butler, Simon Frith, Mavis Bayton, and, importantly, Thomas Turino’s ideas of participatory and communal versus performative and individual, I demonstrate women’s complex musical, social, and cultural positions in bluegrass culture.

While women continue to make strides in achieving recognition in the bluegrass genre, society still hinders them from finding complete acceptance alongside male musicians. As bluegrass music is based on patriarchal foundations set by its creator, Bill Monroe of the Blue Grass Boys, female …

Bluegrass Nation: A Historical And Cultural Analysis Of America's Truest Music, Leslie Blake Price

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

“Fusion” Musics And Tunisian Identity In The Age Of The Global Stereo, Rachel Colwell

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Introduction (excerpt)

In this paper I will explore how contemporary Tunisian musicians have engaged with and adopted various “foreign” or “external” musics by melded them in myriad intricate and often controversial ways with the tunes, rhythms, and symbolic meanings of their own historically local musics. Equally, or perhaps more importantly, I will address how audiences throughout Tunisia have received these musical “fusion” projects and movements and will touch upon the responses of Tunisian diasporic communities and cosmopolitan cultural formations within and beyond the borders of the country.

I will present two case studies, the work of Anouar Brahem and the …

A Place In The World: Mh2o’S Construction Of A Peripheral Identity, Ryan Schutt

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Hip Hop and, more specifically, Rap music, has been a culture rooted in the notion of the social periphery, the section of society excluded from mainstream, capitalist, bourgeois society. It has historically been a way for this voiceless, disenfranchised, and alienated population to criticize, question, and protest its societal position. The Movimento do Hip-Hop Organizado uses this medium as a way of politicizing and mobilizing the excluded members of Brazilian society. Using Hip-Hop, the organization constructs a socially informed, politically aware, and critically conscious community that is united through their common identification with Hip-Hop culture and MH2O. The case is …

Peace Through Music: Music And Multiculturalism In Fiji, Felice Carey

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The music of Fiji is as diverse as its population, and acts as both a mirror and catalyst to the culture. Indo-Fijians and indigenous Fijians have been the main players in Fiji’s multiculturalism, and are therefore focused upon. This paper explores the ways in which music is used to extol the benefits and cope with the problems of Fiji’s multiculturalism through cross-cultural listening (viewed from a perspective of radio) and fusion music. Fusion between Indo-Fijian and indigenous Fijian music is especially important – although extremely rare, it is in many ways a metaphor for attempts at racial reconciliation in Fiji.. …

Folk Music In The Ouachita Mountains, Shayna Rachel Sessler

Honors Theses

The Ouachita Mountain Region of Arkansas, neglected in much formal research, has a rich and active heritage of folk music which should be made accessible.

Interview With Charles And Nancy (Martin) Perdue Regarding Sarah Gertrude Knott (Fa 459), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Oral Histories

Transcription of interview with Charles and Nancy (Martin) Perdue conducted by Michael Ann Williams in 1995 about Sarah Gertrude Knott. Williams was a Folk Studies professor at Western Kentucky University. She used these interviews when writing her book: Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

July 1993

Shake, Rattle & Roll

Vol. III, no. 2 featured the Eric Gales Band, as well as rappers Skinny Pimp and 211.

December 1992

Shake, Rattle & Roll

Vol. II, no. 6 featured Billy Lee Riley and a preview of the 1992 Jazz Homecoming.

A Selective Study Of Negro Worksongs In The United States, Margaret E. Hilton

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

Volume 74, Number 04 (April 1956), Guy Mccoy

The Etude Magazine: 1883-1957

Fiftieth Anniversary of the Music Educators National Conference

In Memorium: Edwin Franko Goldman (1878-1956)

Personal Memories of Cortot as Artist and Teacher

Diction in Singing

National Interscholastic Music Activities Commission

MTNA in Action Music in Focus National Federation of Music Clubs . . . America's Most Far-Flung Musical Organization

Phi Mu Alpha (Professional Music Fraternity) . . . What it is and What it Does

National Association of Teachers of Singing

Story of Sigma Alpha Iota

Stepping Stones to West Point (interview with John A. Davis, Jr.)

Volume 73, Number 12 (December 1955), Guy Mccoy

The Etude Magazine: 1883-1957

I Heard the Bells

Christmas Concerts at Grand Central

It Shouldn't be a Battle (interview with Otto Harbach)

Soviet Russia's Top Pianist Makes Sensational Début in America

To Cosima—With Love

Great Church Rebuilds Its Organ

Orchestra in the Daily Life of Your School

Music Postage Bill Passes Senate

Volume 71, Number 12 (December 1953), Guy Mccoy

The Etude Magazine: 1883-1957

Music at Christmas (Poem)

Performer—or Artist? (interview with Bidu Sayão)

Messiah Sunday (interview with Gordon Bachlund)

Backstage with the TV Scene Designer

Impressions of a Musical Journey to Africa

Ole Bull Returns to Pennsylvania

Rare Bit of Singing and Dancing

Much to Do About Conducting

What is Your Carol I.Q.?

Who Was this Christmas Outcast?

Volume 58, Number 12 (December 1940), James Francis Cooke

The Etude Magazine: 1883-1957

Promissory Notes

Light That Shineth in Darkness

Carols for the Feast of Christmas

Music as an Avocation (interview with Mrs. Vincent Astor)

Bill of Musical Rights

Christmas Music in the Little Town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: Unusual Customs in the Bustling Industrial City that Make Music a Religion, and Religion, Music

Radio Staff Pianist: What It Takes, and What He Makes

What Is Behind the Popular Song (interview with Eddie Cantor)

For Unto Us a Child Is Born: The Story of Handel's The Messiah

Musician Decorates for Christmas

Christ Reigns To-Day: A Hymn of Christian Faith

Quick Work! Remarkable Feats in …

Volume 55, Number 02 (February 1937), James Francis Cooke

The Etude Magazine: 1883-1957

Enesco Talks on Menuhin

How the Piano is Coming Back

How to Become a Better Pianist (interview with Isidor Philipp)

Advantages of a Poor Piano

Role of Music in Prisons

Tour of Early Keyboard Instruments in the Nation's Capital

Cure for Musicians' Cramp

Catering to America's Musical Tastes (interview with David Rubinoff)

Graceful Gavotte: A Dance to Which Several Influences Have Contributed

Pupil's Right

Benjamin Franklin's Interest in Music

Teaching Interpretation Through Thought Force

Old Music Arrives; Order Sent in '87 Is Filled by Firm

Czerny's Many-Sided Etude, Number Sixty-Five

Measure for Measure

Aids in Overcoming Finger Stiffness

Relating Music …

Volume 54, Number 11 (November 1936), James Francis Cooke

The Etude Magazine: 1883-1957

Reflections from a Musical Life

Bird in Grand Opera

My Symphonic Debut in the Films

Pep in Music

For That Weak Left Hand

Harp in History

Woman's Struggle for Recognition in Music

Forgotten Pedal of the Piano

Gift of Liszt to Grieg

Spirituals to Symphonies: A Brief Survey of Negro Music in America, from the Jubilee Singers and their Spirituals to the Playing of Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony by the Philadelphia Orchestra

Chicago Symphony Orchestra (founded by Theodore Thomas)

Gala Days with Liszt at Weimar

Photo-Chart for the Piano Accordion

New Piano Accordion Field

Securing Finger Control

Jazzy Repartee

Volume 53, Number 11 (November 1935), James Francis Cooke

The Etude Magazine: 1883-1957

Hobbies for Everybody

Wagnerian Singer (interview with Kirsten Flagstad)

Dolls' Music Festival

Have Musicians a Sense of Humor

What About Radio? (interview with Wilfred Pelletier)

Bach and Handel Compared

Very American Story of Emma Abbott: In Which Poverty Becomes the Vestibule to Success

Rubinstein's Famous Song Der Asra, As Arranged by Liszt: A Soliloquy on This Widely Known Composition

Memorybook Pages of a Musical Pilgrim: Presenting Messages and Music from Many States

Musical Embroideries at the Piano

Why Counterpoint?

How Music Lovers May Become More Truly Musical