Ethnomusicology Commons^™

Social Power Of Jazz Festivals, Olga Bekenshtein

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Jazz festivals occur in all parts of the world, small cities and metropolises, urban and rural landscapes, stadiums, churches, streets, and abandoned factories. Being a part of the entertainment industry, they have the potential to impact social change. Jazz festivals help us reconsider notions of identity and community, and their communal experience has the potential to undermine dominant social norms. The industry of jazz festivals is based on Black music and has a history of positive and negative social outcomes. Evaluating festivals through the symbolic meaning of music provides an optic into how festivals marginalize and exploit African American cultural …

Talk This Way: A Look At The Historical Conversation Between Hip-Hop And Christianity, Joshua Swanson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Christianity and Hip-Hop culture are often said to be at odds with one another. One is said to promote a lifestyle of righteousness and love, while the other is said to promote drugs, violence, and pride. As a result, the public has portrayed these two institutions as conflicting with no willingness to resolve their perceived differences. This paper will argue that there has always been a healthy conversation between Hip-Hop and Christianity since Hip-Hop’s inception. Using sources like Hip-Hop lyrics, theologians, historians, autobiographies, sermons, and articles that range from Ma$e to Tipper Gore, this paper will look at the conversation …

Tearing Down The Wall: An Analysis Of Pink Floyd’S 1979 Rock Opera, Darla Testino

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

Passing The Baton From Detroit To Berlin: Techno’S Introduction To The Global Scene, Rebekah M. Thomas

Backstage Pass

Podcast describing the history and cultural impact of the techno music trend in the 1980s and 1990s.

“The Personal Is Political”: The Power Of Female Voices In 1970s Pop Music And Beyond, Jennifer Morrow

Backstage Pass

This essay examines how, in the male-dominated structures of the popular music industry, narratives about women have been marginalized, ignored, and undervalued. The female singer-songwriter, my research suggests, is, by definition, a contradiction and subversion of traditional gender roles, and this position has been claimed by female musicians as a form of rebellion and resistance. In the scope of my research, I focus on how female pop artists have embraced songwriting as a medium for authentic self-expression, and how these narratives have been embraced as autoethnographies that represent the collective experiences and frustrations of women in a patriarchal social landscape. …

Agency And Contemporary Recording Production, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Recording production is a complex, multistep, typically collaborative process that entails a shifting set of individuals inhabiting changing roles within spaces that house consider­ able amounts of specialized technology. As these roles and technologies feature promi­ nently in the aesthetics of Anglophone and Francophone popular music, they have been studied within such milieus for the longest period. This scholarship tends to understand the creative act as either the result of a prominent individual or something determined by the technologies used within studios. However, recent ethnomusicological scholarship has shown it is much more difficult to clearly situate agency within recording production, …

Williams, Michael Ann (Fa 459), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid and interview transcriptions for Folklife Archives Project 459. Interviews related to Sarah Gertrude Knott and the National Folk Festival conducted by Michael Ann Williams and Hillary Glatt as part of a joint project for the Kentucky Oral History Commission and Western Kentucky University. The audio interviews did not come with this collection. Interview transcriptions may be accessed by clicking on the "Download" button to the right and then clicking on the hyperlinks in the finding aid.

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

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 …

Time Machine Research And Approach, Tarek Bouraque

Theses and Dissertations

Time Machine is a hybrid documentary that explores the logics of enslavement, colonialism, eurocentrism and their interconnectedness in our globalized world. Mustapha Azemmouri, born in 1502, undertakes a journey to the 21st century to recount his own story of enslavement and exploration, and reflects on a collective puzzle of 500 years of hidden history.

Exploring Moroccan Music Through Experiential Learning, Tai Knoll

Honors Projects

As a music educator, I value a comprehensive and well-rounded music education that is inclusive and dynamic – an education that introduces students to the global world they live in and fosters compassion and understanding of cultures different from their own. However, I did not fully understand how I could provide that for my students and how to do so in a respectful and appropriate way that did not other or appropriate the culture I was attempting to honor. That desire to learn more about teaching world musics and representation in the classroom drove me to pursue answers through the …

Sounding The Nile: River Politics, Environment And Nubian Musical Expression, Regan L. Homeyer

Music ETDs

ABSTRACT

In the mid 1960s, almost 100,000 Egyptian Nubians, people Indigenous to the Nile River Valley, were removed from their ancestral homeland due to the creation of the Aswan High Dam. In the years surrounding their displacement, Nubian musicians in Cairo and villages in new settlement areas gathered traditional Nubian songs and composed new songs to form a distinctive Nubian musical repertoire. This thesis addresses contemporary Nubian musical performance and the role of these reclaimed and newly-written songs in maintaining and revitalizing not only Nubian languages and culture, but especially senses of self in relation to place and, above all, …

Paul Robeson, Carnival, And The 2018 National Eisteddfod, Mark Rhodes

Michigan Tech Publications

No abstract provided.

Afrosonic Noise: A Transnational Black Feminist Musicological Study Of Global Black Joy In Black North American Rock Music And Afro Argentinian Music Performance., Jerika M Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I have decided that my academic mission, at this juncture at least, is to find common links between 2 groups of people that have come to know themselves through paralleling but colonially different environments. Perhaps it is wise for me to explore the similarities between Afro Argentine Black Music and African North American Music in closer ethnomusicological detail using feminist praxis—after all both communities are part of the African Diaspora and producing Black music. I do this by reconstructing a very limited genealogy of Black Femme’s and their contribution to their respective musical communities. I draw parallels between the global …

Devil In The Strawstack, Devil In The Details: A Comparative Study Of Old-Time Fiddle Tune Transcriptions, Kalia Yeagle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis asks what transcriptions of old-time fiddle tunes might tell us about their underlying purposes and the nature of transcription. How could differing approaches to transcription reflect the intentions of the author, and what are those intentions? What does this suggest about how aural information is prioritized? Through a comparative analysis of three transcriptions of the same recording—Tommy Jarrell’s “Devil in the Strawstack”—this thesis examines how musical information is prioritized and how transcribers have adapted their methods to better reflect the nuances of old-time music. The three transcriptions come from Clare Milliner and Walt Koken (The Milliner-Koken Collection …

Nuper Rosarum Flores: The Cathedral Conundrum, Jacy A. Stahlhut

Musical Offerings

In 1436, Pope Eugenius IV consecrated the newly-completed Santa Maria del Fiore, more commonly known as Florence Cathedral. The completion of the cathedral’s dome was an incredible feat of great significance to the city of Florence, whose cathedral had remained unfinished for over one hundred years, and the splendor of the dedication ceremony reflected this reality. Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay was commissioned to write a motet for the occasion, and the resulting work, Nuper rosarum flores, has sparked a great deal of controversy in the musicological realm. In 1973, musicologist Charles Warren claimed that the isorhythmic proportions of …

Is La Bohѐme A Verismo Opera?, Leah P. Bartlam

Musical Offerings

Verismo is an Italian term that came to be used in reference to literature, theatre, and opera during the end of the nineteenth century. According to William Berger, “verismo is often translated as ‘realism’ but the word is closer to ‘truth’ in Italian.” The term was applied to literature beginning in the 1870s, and began to be applied to opera during the 1890s. However, it has never been particularly well understood. Evaluating it today is especially difficult because the modern perceptions of the term are not quite the same as the original meaning. La bohѐme was composed by Giacomo …

Gustav Mahler The Protomodernist, Austin M. Doub

Musical Offerings

Steeped in a cultivated European tradition and burdened by several personal tragedies, Gustav Mahler undeniably shaped the course of classical music leading into the twentieth century. Holding fast to late Romantic stylistic conventions including complex rhythmic concepts, emotional and expansive melodies, and a strict adherence to form allowed the forward-thinking composer to seamlessly introduce modern elements into his symphonies. Through Mahler’s commanding symphonic output, the composer successfully maintained strong Austro-German stylistic principles while propelling the genre forward. In these symphonic writings, modern techniques of tonal decentralization, chromaticism, quotation, and paraphrasing are met with cohesive and compelling narratives to create balanced …

The Mighty Handful: The Effect Of Nationalistic Music On Post-War Russia, Ella Uren

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

The Culture Of Upper Peninsula Jam Sessions, Joan L. Roberts Mrs.

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.