Digital Commons Network^™

Lay It On The Line: The Life And Music Of Gladys Bentley, Bianki Torres, J.

Doctoral Dissertations

This work is a historical biography of Gladys Bentley and her blues music. She was a cross-dressing entertainer from the Harlem Renaissance and performed popular songs with added, sometimes improvised sexual innuendo. This study considers the performances of her recorded and written material as trans music, meaning, that black music provided a platform to determine racial, gendered, and sexual cultural expressions changing over time, however, always rooted in black vernacular culture. Using showbills, promotional material, studio recordings and short autobiography, this study follows Bentley’s career as “male impersonator” and the effects lesbian/gay (queer) culture had on her blues. Also, I …

An Examination Of Music Majors’ Exercise Motivations And Readiness For Change, Jason Ruggieri

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examined hypothesized differences in college students’ exercise behaviors, motivations, and readiness for change. Previous research confirms longstanding health benefits of regular physical activity and corresponding wellbeing and mortality risks of a sedentary lifestyle. Despite this evidence, people become increasingly more inactive over time. Overall, college students perpetuate these life-long sedentariness trends. Music students encounter physical performance demands unique to degree programs, endorsing more physical and mental health complaints than most undergraduates. Self-determination theory and the transtheoretical model of behavior change postulate individuals with strong self-directed motivations and willingness to enact behavior changes are more likely to be physically …

Hiplife Music In Ghana: Postcolonial Performances Of Modernity, Nii Kotei Nikoi

Doctoral Dissertations

This research project examines the operation of development discourse in popular culture, how it is reproduced, contested and how alternatives are imagined. It is a post-development study of the production and consumption of Ghanaian hiplife music videos and culture. It explores how hiplife makers challenge development discourse and advance alternative ideas of social transformation. Considering the enduring (and damaging) legacies of colonialism, hiplife as a site of relative freedom of expression is fertile for the potential production of a decolonial vocabulary to heal colonial wounds— undoing colonial sensibilities imposed on the colonized. The project reveals that mainstream male hiplife stars …

Contralto Marian Anderson As Goodwill Ambassador, Jolie Rocke

Doctoral Dissertations

Marian Anderson was an internationally-acclaimed contralto and goodwill ambassador for the United States government. In her role as a political asset, she utilized her talents to evoke a perception of the United States that differed from past assessments involving race relations. To provide an understanding of how she became an icon and asset to the State Department, three theoretical frameworks are applied—performativity, prototype, and social semiotics. In classical theories of performativity, classification separates us into categories and hierarchies, while concepts help us to categorize, understand, and predict the material world. Scholars have defined identity as a series of citational acts …

Male Zwischenfächer Voices And The Baritenor Conundrum, Thaddaeus Bourne

Doctoral Dissertations

This study will examine the Zwischenfach colloquially referred to as the baritenor. A large body of published research exists regarding the physiology of breathing, the acoustics of singing, and solutions for specific vocal faults. There is similarly a growing body of research into the system of voice classification and repertoire assignment. This paper shall reexamine this research in light of baritenor voices. After establishing the general parameters of healthy vocal technique through appoggio, the various tenor, baritone, and bass Fächer will be studied to establish norms of vocal criteria such as range, timbre, tessitura, and registration for each Fach. …

An Examination Of Music Majors' Perceived Barriers To Complying With An Exercise Program, Matthew William Seitz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focused on a mixed-methods exploration of the barriers and motivation to exercise in a sample of music majors at a large southeastern university. Due to dietary concerns and other obstacles to engaging in regular exercise, musicians are at a greater dietary and cardiovascular risk than the general population. Previous research has revealed music majors, in general, do not identify as exercisers. This comes with its obvious health risks. Self-determination theory and exercise identity literature posits individuals who more strongly identify as exercisers and who are more intrinsically motivated to exercise will workout more often and more consistently than …

“The Blackness Of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity In 20th/21st Century African American Culture, Casey Hayman

Doctoral Dissertations

The central claim in this dissertation is that much contemporary African American cultural expression would be better conceptualized not as “post-black,” as some would have it, but as what I call “meta-black.” I use the preface “meta-” because while this contemporary black identity also resists sometimes constrictive conceptions of “authentic” black identity from within the African American community, I diverge from theorists of “post-blackness” in observing the ways that, as Nicole Fleetwood observes, blackness necessarily “circulates” within a technologically-driven mediascape, and these postmodern black subjects work within and against the constraints of this aural-visual regime of blackness in order to …

The Genesis Of Aaron Copland's Piano Variations: Sketches, Drafts, And Other Manuscript Sources, Lillie Gardner

Doctoral Dissertations

Aaron Copland’s Piano Variations, composed in 1930, is his most important work for piano and one of the most significant works of his entire oeuvre. It is a staple of twentieth-century American piano literature and it has been analyzed in many published works. However, practically no studies have examined the sketches for the Piano Variations, which exist at the Copland Collection at the Library of Congress. The Collection includes five folders relating to the Piano Variations: the sketches, the final manuscript, two copies of the manuscript with handwritten edits, and the published score with Copland’s handwritten orchestration …

Capitals Of Punk: Paris, Dc, And The Circulation Of Urban Counternarratives, Tyler William Sonnichsen

Doctoral Dissertations

In the history of underground music in the punk era, few cities’ scenes have garnered as much respect and influence as Washington, DC. Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Scream, Rites of Spring, Fugazi, and a deep catalog of other regional groups have accrued legendary status among fans of hardcore and have become subjects of popular books and documentaries. However, few accounts have investigated DC’s underground influence on other urban landscapes outside of the United States. This dissertation focuses on that relationship between DC and another iconic Western capital with a largely unheralded hardcore punk history, Paris.

Using qualitative, ethnographic methods, this …

Individual And Intra-Individual Differences In Interest During Instrumental Music Classes In Suburban High Schools, Beth Ann Turner

Doctoral Dissertations

Individual differences in interest (how students’ interest differs from one another in response to the same experiences) and intra-individual differences in interest (how each student’s interest changes across different experiences) are theorized to play a part in a complex system of interactions between students, lesson content, and educational context. In this study, 360 students from two suburban high school instrumental programs in Northern California rated an average of 12 classroom tasks and music selections on the dimensions of interest, meaning, involvement, complexity, and comprehension. Expected relationships between interest and the other variables were informed by literature on situational interest in …

Burnout In Young Adult Performing Artists, Benjamin Hyun Stocking

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the experience of burnout in adolescent/young adult performing arts (i.e. a World-Class junior drum & bugle corps) at the beginning of their competitive training season. Specifically, this study took particular interest in investigating the predictive influence of psychological variables such as performance anxiety, psychological coping skills, and coping functions in predicting who was more prone to burnout as well as who returned or dropped out after the competitive season.

Data were drawn from an archive of 144 drum corps performers, representing one world class drum and bugle corps at the beginning of …

The Aurality Of Rhetoric: A Critical Hermeneutic Of Cape Breton’S Rhetorical Music Community, Gregory J. Dorchak

Doctoral Dissertations

Although the field of rhetorical studies has expanded from the notion that rhetoric only applies to speeches, there has been little attention paid to the rhetoric of sound. This project focuses on the rhetoric of sound, specifically the musical rhetoric of the community of Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia, Canada. Cape Breton has a long history of maintaining a traditional music community, with its origins in Scotland. The fiddle music of Cape Breton is renowned as a genre of Celtic music. This project looks at the rhetorical acts of the musicians and investigates how these acts of vernacular rhetoric …

The Secular Latin-Texted Works Of Adrian Willaert, Jonathan Harvey

Doctoral Dissertations

In addition to a large body of extant works including masses, hymns, psalm settings, motets, chansons, madrigals, canzone villanesche, and instrumental ricercares, sixteenth-century composer Adrian Willaert (1490 – 1562) also wrote nine settings of secular Latin texts. These nine works can be divided into three categories: five civic motets (Adriacos numero, Haud aliter, Inclite Sfortiadum princeps, Si rore Aonio, and Victor io salve); three settings of excerpts from Virgil’s Aeneid (O socii and two settings of “Dulces exuviae”); and one unique, enigmatic outlier (Flete oculi). These pieces are rarely …

Utilizing Computer Programming To Analyze Post-Tonal Music: A Segmentation And Contour Analysis Of Twentieth-Century Music For Solo Flute, Kate Sekula

Doctoral Dissertations

Two concepts will be synthesized in this dissertation: 1) the creation of accessible computer applications for melodic segmentation and contour reduction and 2) the application of segmentation and contour reduction to analyze twentieth-century post-tonal works for unaccompanied flute. Two analytical methodologies have been chosen: James Tenney and Larry Polanski's Gestalt segmentation theory and Robert Schultz's refinement of Robert Morris's contour reduction algorithm. The investigation also utilizes Robert Schultz's concept of diachronic-transformational analysis in conjunction with contour reduction. While both segmentation and contour reduction are invaluable analytical tools, they are meticulous and time-consuming processes. Computer implementation of these algorithmic procedures produces …

Action And Instrument Specificity In Musicians, Christopher Logan

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to test the hypothesis that the visual perception of musical stimuli activates the motor system of expert musicians in ways specific to their primary instrument. In two experiments, trombonists, non-trombonist musicians, and non-musicians were asked to decide if the second note of a two-note visually presented sequence was higher or lower than the first. Participants responded by moving a joystick forward or backward to indicate a higher or lower response (Experiment 1) or by pressing buttons on a computer keyboard to indicate their response (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, response times for trombonists were …

Embodied Rhythm Interventions For Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders (Asds), Sudha M. Srinivasan

Doctoral Dissertations

The current randomized controlled trial compared the effects of novel, embodied, rhythm interventions - music and robotic - with those of a standard-of-care, stationary, academic intervention on the social communication, behavioral, and motor skills of 36 children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) between 5 and 12 years of age. Children were matched on age, level of functioning, and services received prior to randomization. The study lasted for 10 weeks with the pretest and posttest sessions conducted during the first and last weeks of the study. Training was provided in the intermediate 8 weeks, with 2 sessions provided each week. Between-group …

Alban Berg’S Sieben Frühe Lieder: An Analysis Of Musical Structures And Selected Performances, Lisa A. Lynch

Doctoral Dissertations

Alban Berg’s Sieben frühe Lieder, composed between 1905-08, lie on the border between late 19^th-century Romanticism and early atonality, resulting in their particularly lyrical and yet distinctly modern character. This dissertation looks in detail at the songs with an emphasis on the relevance of a musical analysis to performers. Part I provides an overview of the historical context surrounding the Sieben frühe Lieder, including Berg’s studies with Schoenberg, stylistic features, biographical details, and analytic approaches to Berg’s work. The primary focus of the dissertation, Part II, is a study of each individual song. Each analysis begins …

Wölferl's Own Howl: Musical Characterization In The Rollengedichte Of Hugo Wolf, John C. Pierce

Doctoral Dissertations

By the end of the nineteenth century, the era of the German Lied as a significant artistic expression had begun to draw to a close in favor of larger forms. In the late 1880s, Austrian composer Hugo Wolf reclaimed the Lied, and in his hands the genre enjoyed a last great flowering. Today, Wolf is known almost exclusively for his songs, in contrast to his predecessors and contemporaries. What sets him apart from the others most importantly is his process regarding the setting of text, of transmuting poetry into music. The main purpose of this dissertation is to explore this …

Individual Differences In Emotional Response To Music, Sarah Kathleen N. Fischer

Doctoral Dissertations

Although emotional experiences with music have been enjoyed for millennia, research involving music has focused primarily on emotions perceived rather than felt, and not much research exists into differential emotional response to music as a function of individual differences. A recent study (Djikic, 2011) looked at the effect of music on personality, but it did not assess emotional state before or after listening. In an extension of that study, the present research explores how changes in emotion may be related to self-reported personality. Relationships between extraversion and neuroticism, emotional state before and after music listening, and liking the stimulus were …

"Rapping About Authenticity": Exploring The Differences In Perceptions Of "Authenticity" In Rap Music By Consumers.", James L. Wright

Doctoral Dissertations

Historically, social scientists have not only marginalized rap music as a viable unit of scholarly analysis, but failed at attempts to understand the thoughts and actions of rap music consumers. This study analyzes the connection between rap music’s (and the artists’) authenticity and how those perceptions of authenticity affect music consumers’ decision making process, thus providing a possible explanation as to why music fans purchase rap music. The goal of this research was to see if the reasons rap music fans provide explaining the rationale behind their purchases match the images and perceptions presumably held by the general public about …

Accounting For Taste: The Early American Music Business And Secularization In Music Aesthetics, 1720--1825, Peter S. Leavenworth

Doctoral Dissertations

This study redefines popular music in early America as sacred music sung and performed in most churches and, starting in the 1790s, theater music imported from England. Rather than more static secular ballads and traditional dance pieces customarily understood as popular music, sacred and theater music intersected with more people more often and did so with more participation. Conflicting tastes of practitioners of religious music and secularizing influences from the theater created a series of reforms and counter measures that featured regional, as well as personal, fractures in American society. These personal and public debates, carried out in diaries, letters, …

Performing Texts; Playing With Jazz Aesthetics, Richard (Rick) Walters

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite all the critical attention jazz has received in recent years from scholars in other fields---literature, history, political science, cultural studies---very little headway has been made in understanding what jazz aesthetics are and how they might inform other forms of cultural and artistic expression. Part of the difficulty lies in the time-bound, performative nature of the artform and the fact that it is primarily a non-discursive means of expression; that is to say, jazz does not translate well.

This dissertation attempts to evoke and inhabit jazz aesthetics rather than trying to define, categorize or delineate them. Alternating between close reading, …

Learning To Read Music Cooperatively In A Choral Setting: A Case Study, Andrew Inzenga

Doctoral Dissertations

Two volunteer cooperative teams of ninth grade girls were studied for six months to discover whether and how they learned to read music. The two teams represented novice students and students who had received private instruction. Study teams represented the population of the freshman Girls Chorus. Teams met regularly during daily chorus rehearsals, with only occasional help from the director. These meetings were analyzed through video tape recordings to observe if students employed traditional teaching and learning strategies to assist each other in learning. It was determined that team members regularly use certain teaching and learning strategies to assist in …