Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Singing Solidarity: Class Consciousness, Emotional Pedagogy, And The Songs Of The Industrial Workers Of The World, Tara Forbes

Wayne State University Dissertations

Singing Solidarity looks at songs and song culture in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from its inception to its decline near the start of WWI and examines how IWW songs engaged with, transformed, and directed workers’ feelings to “spur [them] to action” (Gould 47). Songs in the IWW repertoire created a sense of group identity and cohesion, supporting the IWW’s project of class consciousness and working-class solidarity. This solidarity, I argue, was felt rather than theorized. The felt solidarity of the IWW collective was intensified through the act of singing as a group, which was simultaneously an instantiation …

Distillation Of Sound: Dub In Jamaica And The Creation Of Culture, Eric J. Abbey

Wayne State University Dissertations

In the early 1970s, the culture of Jamaica shifted politically and culturally with the introduction of the mixing board in music. This writing centers on the ways in which technology created a culture of dub reggae that has gone on to affect the world. The major albums and engineers that influenced this change are the focus here. By doing so, we can view how large changes in technology affected the society of Jamaica and how this led to significant cultural development. With Raymond Williams’ definition of culture and Thomas Vendrys’ structure of Dub music, the culture is defined, furthered, and …

Filling The Gaps: Playing The Semiotic Network In The Extemporization Of Scores For Improvisational Theater, John Edwartowski

Wayne State University Theses

The Art of Scoring for Improvisational Theater draws on traditions whose origins are obscured by the fog of History and Myth. With no prior plan, a musician is tasked with providing accompaniment that creates or reinforces mood, era, location, or genre. Through such accompaniment, a musician reads and activates nodes in a semiotic network, to generate context, subtext, or both. Drawing from sources in Semiotics, Multimedia, Marketing, Sociology, Artificial Intelligence, Film Music History, Theater, Music Theory, and Musicology, as well as interviews with an array of Participants and the Author's personal experience, this paper seeks to articulate a framework of …

Structural Processing Of Language Components: Detection And Comprehension, Samantha Rose Crow

Wayne State University Theses

Although music and language share many perceptually functional characteristics, research endeavors are still focusing on the underlying neural circuitry. Past research has indicated a distinction of hemispheric lateralization between music and language processing. Recently, efforts have shifted to the notion of an initial general shared pathway in the brain with auditory stimuli differentiated in later processing to specialized regions. Therefore, both linguistic and musical components have been examined in numerous experiments to discern the possible influence of music and language components on auditory perception and comprehension, including their potential interaction. However, the effects of sentential prosody on early language structural …

Singing Down The Barriers: Encouraging Singers Of All Racial Backgrounds To Perform Music By African American Composers, Caroline Helton, Emery Stephens

Music Faculty Research Publications

This chapter investigates the barriers faced by singers of all racial backgrounds when performing spirituals and African American art songs and suggests ways to eliminate those barriers.

Barriers And Benefits: The Impact Of Learning Art Songs And Spirituals By African-American Composers On Voice Students From All Racial Backgrounds, Emery Stephens

Music Faculty Research Publications

An investigation into the barriers faced by singers of all racial backgrounds when performing spirituals and African American art songs and suggests ways to eliminate those barriers.

Presented at the 2006 International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), Washington, DC.