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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
“All The Evil Music Has:” Musical Representations Of The Vamp In Interwar American Popular Media, Martha Schulenburg
“All The Evil Music Has:” Musical Representations Of The Vamp In Interwar American Popular Media, Martha Schulenburg
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation explores the vamp as a symbol of sociosexual deviance in film and American popular music of the 1910s and ‘20s. Abbreviated from vampire, “vamp” came to be used as a term for sexually voracious and predatory women in the early 20th century. Following the unprecedented success of the 1915 film A Fool There Was, vamps then became a staple in American popular media. My project examines the process of remediation and cultural dissemination at the dawn of mass media via the vamp in music. Vamps were pervasive in cinematic accompaniment, vaudeville, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley …
The Feminine Harp As Feminist Tool: Early Professional Footing For Women In Mid-Twentieth-Century America, Chelsea Lane
The Feminine Harp As Feminist Tool: Early Professional Footing For Women In Mid-Twentieth-Century America, Chelsea Lane
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In 1930s North America, women—for the first time—were accorded permanent principal positions in significant American orchestras. Edna Phillips, Alice Chalifoux, and Sylvia Meyer, all students of the legendary harp pedagogue Carlos Salzedo, have been celebrated as pioneers for the prestigious employment they obtained in the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, respectively, between 1930 and 1933. Despite the impressiveness of these accomplishments, however, the narrative of their “firstness” is not wholly accurate. In actuality, female harpists have occupied orchestral posts as acting principals, substitutes, and second harpists since the very inception of orchestras. The cause for their early …
Gendering The Virtual Space: Sonic Femininities And Masculinities In Contemporary Top 40 Music, Michèle Duguay
Gendering The Virtual Space: Sonic Femininities And Masculinities In Contemporary Top 40 Music, Michèle Duguay
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation analyzes vocal placement—the apparent location of a voice in the virtual space created by a recording—and its relationship to gender. When listening to a piece of recorded music through headphones or stereo speakers, one hears various sound sources as though they were located in a virtual space (Clarke 2013). For instance, a specific vocal performance—once manipulated by various technologies in a recording studio—might evoke a concert hall, an intimate setting, or an otherworldly space. The placement of the voice within this space is one of the central musical parameters through which listeners ascribe cultural meanings to popular music. …
“Leisure With Decorum”: Gentlemen Making Music In The Georgian Era, Lidia A. Chang
“Leisure With Decorum”: Gentlemen Making Music In The Georgian Era, Lidia A. Chang
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This project examines the musical activities of Georgian gentlemen with the goal of illustrating the ways that recreational music-making tested the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. While the English nobility could respectably engage in music-making, socialize with professional musicians (subverting, or temporarily suspending otherwise rigid class boundaries), and openly extol the virtues of Continental culture without compromising their gentlemanliness, English gentlemen walked a much thinner line. In pursuit of these claims I will expand the scope of primary sources beyond conduct books and novels to include selections of unpublished, peripheral accounts of recreational music-making as found in letters, diaries, …
Leonora Duarte (1610–1678): Converso Composer In Antwerp, Elizabeth A. Weinfield
Leonora Duarte (1610–1678): Converso Composer In Antwerp, Elizabeth A. Weinfield
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Leonora Duarte (1610–1678), a converso of Jewish descent living in Antwerp, is the author of seven five-part Sinfonias for viol consort — the only known seventeenth-century viol music written by a woman. This music is testament to a formidable talent for composition, yet very little is known about the life and times in which Duarte produced her work. Her family were merchants and art collectors of Jewish descent who immigrated from Portugal in the early sixteenth century to escape the Inquisition; in exile in Antwerp, they achieved enormous success and provided the means with which to educate their children and …
In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin
In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …
Gendered Practices And Conceptions In Korean Drumming: On The Negotiation Of "Femininity" And "Masculinity" By Korean Female Drummers, Yoonjah Choi
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Korean drumming, one of the most popular musical practices in South Korea, currently exists in a state of contradiction as drumming, historically performed by men, is increasingly practiced by women. Women drummers who enter this male-dominated realm confront the "masculinization" of the practice, which is naturalized and normalized through the field's discourse and performance. At the same time, they seek a "femininity" that may help them to survive in the field. To examine these gendered conceptions and practices, I draw on the ways in which contemporary Korean traditional drum performers, predominantly professional female drummers, conceptualize, experience, perform, reinforce, and/or resist …