Digital Commons Network^™

“Started From The Bottom”: The Ascension Of Hip-Hop As A Sonic Art Form, Benjamin Nile Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

For over four decades, hip-hop has been a part of the American soundscape, drawing from influences of jazz, rhythm and blues, disco, etc. Hip-hop is one of the cultural bridges between African Americans and the world. This paper will focus on the artists, culture and its ascent to high art.

La Ricarda, Mestres Quadreny I L'Experimentalisme Musical Català Dels Anys Seixanta: De Com L’Arquitectura Va Esdevenir Música I La Música, Arquitectura, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Eren uns temps magnífics per a la creació: els concerts semblaven obres de teatre i les obres de teatre, concerts. Els músics feien d’actors i aquests havien de fer de músics. I la distinció entre el públic i els intèrprets també es diluïa, si és que no s’eliminava del tot. Els semiòlegs —o són semiòtics?— havien explicat que en tot acte comunicatiu hi havia un emissor, un missatge i un receptor; i precisament d’això es tractava, d’eliminar aquestes distincions. Ah, i en molts casos, tampoc no hi havia escenari, ni sala de concerts.

Music Pedagogy In Venezuela’S Plains: Making Space In Alma Llanera, Elaine Sandoval

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that the process of institutionalizing traditional música llanera (plains region music) education in Venezuela is informed by a hierarchical spatialization of the capital, Caracas, and the historically agricultural- and livestock-producing region known as the llanos, or the plains. Drawing on Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991), I argue that the representations of space that have defined the llanos region and música llanera often obscure the lived space of music-making and dwelling in the llanos. This dissertation is based on fieldwork in Guárico state between 2016-2018, where I observed the state-funded Alma Llanera program, which had been …

The World Is Your Pulpit: A Research-Based Performance On The Broder Singers, Amanda Seigel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My capstone project is a research-based performance about the Broder Singers, the first Yiddish actors. They performed primitive musical and theatrical pieces in Yiddish beginning in the mid-19th century in non-theatrical spaces such as taverns and gardens, in Eastern Europe. They were part of a larger movement creating secular Yiddish culture beyond the religiously proscribed expressions of traditional Jewish life. Largely born and raised in traditional communities themselves, they mocked wealthy religious community leaders, utilized gender drag, and compassionately portrayed impoverished people. This white paper explores the context of their work and draws on primary sources such as memoirs, published …

Intro To Jazz, Jon De Lucia

Open Educational Resources

OER Based Syllabus for MUS 145 Intro to Jazz course at City College. Covers the history and development of jazz along with basic music fundamental vocabulary.

The Urban Maroons Of Afro-Dominican Music, Paul Austerlitz

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

La Musique Dans Les Cultures Tech. La Synthèse Modulaire En Temps De Covid-19, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Depuis 1996, la synthèse modulaire matérielle est passée d’une pratique artisanale de fabrication d’instruments de niche soutenue par un petit nombre de musiciens, à un phénomène transnational, une véritable culture tech. Malgré cet engouement, elle n’a pas donné naissance à de nouveaux genres musicaux populaires, et il n’est pas certain que la « musique », quelle que soit sa définition, soit ce qui rassemble les amateurs de synthèse modulaire. Ce texte a deux objectifs : tout d’abord, il présente les résultats d’une recherche en cours menée en ligne et dans plusieurs pays concernant le rôle des objets technologiques dans la …

Performing Empowerment: Children's Rights And Musical Participation In Dakar, Senegal, Lynne Stillings

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides a critical examination of how music is used to introduce concepts of children’s rights to children and youth in Dakar, Senegal. I explore why music has been chosen as a tool of engagement and promotion, building on Senegal’s history of youth activism and music as a grassroots tool for inspiring social change and sparking political movements. Both international NGOs and local programs use musical activities, centering children as performers and songwriters, to address rights in Senegal including girls’ equality, the right to education, early marriage, violence towards women and children, access to healthcare, and street children. Outside …

Sacred Music In Colonial Era Hispaniola: The Evangelization Of The Taino People, Tito J. Gutierrez

Student Theses

During the 15th-18th centuries, the major European religious orders; the Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Jeronymites, journeyed to the newly colonized American territories in an attempt to convert the multitudes of natives peoples living there. Along with prayer books, crucifixes, and religious images, these missionaries brought sacred European music to American shores in an attempt to attract the native people to the Catholic faith.The use of music as a tool for conversion of native people in places such as Mexico, South America, California, and the South West United States, have been well researched and documented. However, the research of the spiritual …

Indian Classical Music In The New York Metropolitan Area: The Development Of A Transnational Ecosystem, Andre Fludd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the development of North and South Indian classical music communities in the New York metropolitan area from the mid-20^th century to the present. In this investigation, I primarily focus on local musicians from diverse backgrounds and communities rather than internationally recognized stars. In the instances where I discuss famous musicians such as Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain, I focus on how they impacted New York metropolitan area communities particularly and what their success can teach about international Indian classical music careers. The dissertation is organized chronologically, and I highlight vital people, non-profit organizations, historical moments, and …

A Roda De Choro In New York City: The Regional De Ny In A Global Imagined Community, Maurice Restrepo

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates two pillars of the NYC choro community: The Regional de NY and their roda de choro. It situates the group within a global community for whom choro has materialized a shared identity, explores instruments and their agency, and presents cultural themes and aesthetic priorities as conceptualized by the ensemble’s members.

O Tonalismo Como Força Colonizadora Na África, Kofi Agawu, José H. Padovani

Publications and Research

Resumo do tradutor: No ensaio, Kofi Agawu aborda a relação entre o tonalismo – entendido como “sistema hierarquicamente organizado de relações entre alturas” – e a música africana. A partir de diferentes exemplos e em diálogo com contribuições dos estudos decoloniais e da etnomusicologia, Agawu desenvolve uma interpretação crítica que busca compreender como aspectos da imaginação musical africana responderam à violência colonial imposta a partir de uma linguagem harmônica estrangeira. Após três momentos, em que busca respectivamente expor (1) aspectos do tonalismo na música africana da atualidade, (2) aspectos do pensamento tonal africano pré-colonial e (3) elaborações composicionais de criadores …

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

Introduction To World Music, Antoni Piza

Open Educational Resources

MUS102 Syllabus & weekly course schedule

The Making Of An Avant-Gardist: A Study Of Rafael Aponte-Ledée’S Early Life And Works (1957–1966), Noel Torres-Rivera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the interconnectedness of political and musical discourses in Latin America by examining the formative years of Puerto Rican composer Rafael Aponte-Ledée (b. 1938), a leading figure in the Puerto Rican avant-garde movement in the late 1960s. Through extensive archival research, oral history, and qualitative field work, I analyze his time as a student at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid (1957-1964) and at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires (1965-1966). With this, I address the intricate network of musical works, events, mentors, institutional discourses, textbooks, technologies, …

The American Symphony Orchestra Today: Problems In Community, Diversity, And Representation, Hilary Slade Jansen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the symphony orchestra and its socio-political context in the United States. Using three orchestral case studies—the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Venezuela’s El Sistema—I examine the ways in which American symphony orchestras have responded both today and in the past to the public and academic discourse around social inclusion. Interweaving musicology, sociology, urban anthropology, cultural studies, education, economics, ethnomusicology, economics, data from grant-giving institutions, and from symphony orchestras themselves, I seek to situate the wider discourse on social justice in the arts (which has, until recently, lived largely outside of academia) within a musicological …

Extracting Theory From Practice: A Computational Analysis Of The Persian Radif, Sepideh Shafiei

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies radif, the repertoire/system of Persian classical music, by developing a framework for computational research on vocal music performance. The radif consists of seven dastgāhs and five āvāzes (secondary dastgāhs). Each dastgāh consists of several pieces (gushes). Throughout this research, I draw on three areas of knowledge to study each subject: the historical aspects, the current theories, and the practice. When possible, I attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice by extracting the relevant information from practice. To this end, I use and modify existing computational methods for analyzing audio and symbolic data. The main subjects …

Emulating The "Country Fiddler": A Performance Analysis Of Fiddle Parodies And Impressions In Charles Ives's Second Violin Sonata, Emily Vold Weiss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In his violin sonatas, Charles Ives frequently parodies fiddling style, both through overt quotes of fiddle tunes, as well as inventive compositional devices that mimic the fiddler’s style of bowing, ornamenting a melody, or generally rustic performance. Given the breadth of these fiddling allusions, it is important that violinists who perform Ives’s sonatas understand the distinctive aesthetics of fiddle performance, including the numerous ways in which it diverges from classical performance. In this dissertation, I survey pedagogical writings on fiddling, notated tunes, and recorded fiddling performances in an effort to characterize the performance practices of fiddlers from Ives’s native New …

New Chinese Music In New York City: From Revival To Musical Transnationalism, Serena Yiai Wang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Pulitzer Prize (2011, Zhou Long’s Madame White Snake), a Metropolitan opera commission (Tan Dun’s The First Emperor, premiered 2006), and the Ives Living Award (Chen Yi, 2001) are just some of the high-profile awards and commission bestowed upon Chinese émigré composers who have studied and built their professional reputation in New York City. The works of Chinese composers constitute what I call “new Chinese music,” which I argue has played a defining role in New York City’s cultural landscape and in the development of Western art music in general. The influence of Chinese composers and their works …

The Singing Self: An Exploration Of Vocality And Selfhood In Contemporary Vocal Practice, Emily C. Eagen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Every vocal training technique relies on understandings of how a singer’s “voice,” both literal and metaphorical, participates in the act of interpreting the works of composers. Western classical singing, as codified by the early twentieth century, typically puts the singer in the role of the “medium” or “channel” for the composer. Later twentieth-century reactions promised liberation from the composer’s “voice” with a validation of the singer’s “authentic” or “natural” voice. This dissertation questions both sides of this binary and asks: what alternative models are possible? This work is in three parts. The first section provides an overview of pedagogical constructions …

The Alphorn In North America: “Blown Yodeling” Within A Transnational Community, Maureen E. Kelly

Theses and Dissertations

Musicians in North America have adopted the alphorn as a tool that builds community, enhances musical training, and interprets the Swiss tradition for a new generation. Meaningful combinations of experiences and identities combine to create a robust relationship and kinship among alphorn players in an intentionally international community.

Musical Borrowings, Copyright, And The Canard Of “Cultural Appropriation", Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

This essay reviews the basic contours of the cultural appropriation controversies as they have been waged in reference to music in both academic and vernacular circles. It discusses some of the debates that have involved white performers’ musical borrowings from African-American culture, and also musical flows outside the Euro-American mainstream. It explores relations of these ethical polemics to notions of copyright and argues that these can provide a moral guide to the propriety of many cultural interactions. It further critiques the terminological and conceptual distortions and obfuscations that have tended to plague discussions, both on scholarly and popular levels. These …

What Is Jazz?: Exploring The Question, Dominick Tancredi

Open Educational Resources

This writing assignment begins a semester-long exploration addressing the question “What Is Jazz?” Being introduced by film to two New Orleans jazz musicians, George “Kid Sheik” Colar (1908-1996) and Emanuel “Manny” Sayles (1907-1986), students will get a firsthand perspective of the various levels of commitment to the music these two individuals maintained as working musicians. They dedicated themselves professionally, personally, emotionally, and spiritually. They took inspiration from their life experiences. The films convey the message that jazz goes beyond the notes we hear.

The Rosalía Polemic: Defining Genre Boundaries And Legitimacy In Flamenco, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

In 2018, Spanish singer Rosalía attained international popularity with her innovative flamenco-fusion album El mal querer. Within the flamenco world, the Rosalía vogue provoked vehement and ongoing polemics, involving whether or not her music should be regarded as “flamenco,” whether she had the social credentials to be accepted as an innovator, and whether it was proper for her to adopt the persona of a ghetto-girl Gypsy in her hit music video, “Malamente.” These controversies reveal much about flamenco culture, and especially about the tensions inhering to its status as both a concert art form and a traditional idiom embedded …

Lives In Musicology: My Life In Writings, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Responding to an invitation from the editors of Acta Musicologica to tell the story of his life in musicology, Kofi Agawu describes his upbringing and early education in Ghana and his university studies in the UK and the US. In a career focused on teaching, research, and writing, he outlines a number of intellectual projects involving the analysis of African and European music. He ends by acknowledging renewed discussions of race and identity in the musical academy today, and hints at his own growing interest in African art music.

The Interface And Instrumentality Of Eurorack Modular Synthesis, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

In this essay, I will examine a couple of aspects of hardware modular synthesizers which, despite not being a “new” morphological form (most commercially sold synthesizers from the 1960s through the early 1970s were modular), experienced an extremely unlikely expansion of interest and activity in the mid-1990s. With a contemporary modular synth, users buy a powered rack that holds modules specific to one of several competing formats. For the two most widely adopted formats, Eurorack (sometimes called 3U in reference to the height of modules, or Doepfer A-100 after the first branded system to adopt this panel height) and MOTM/MU …

Indígenas, Africanos, Roma Y Europeos: Ritmos Transatlánticos En Música, Canto Y Baile, K. Meira Goldberg, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Resumen:

Hace algo más de un año, la Foundation for Iberian Music (The City University of New York), The Center for Iberian and Latin American Music (University of California, Riverside), el Centro de Estudios para la Cultura y la Comunicación (Universidad Veracruzana) y la Universidad Cristóbal Colón convocaron el congreso Indígenas, africanos, roma y europeos: Ritmos transatlánticos en música, canto y baile, el cual tuvo lugar en Centro Veracruzano de las Artes Hugo Argüelles (CEVART) en el Puerto de Veracruz, México del 11 al 13 de abril de 2019. Los artículos que siguen a esta introducción son una selección …

Introducción, Raquel Paraíso, K. Meira Goldberg, Jessica Gottfried Hesketh, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Ahora que escribimos esta introducción para las actas del congreso Indígenas, africanos, roma y europeos: Ritmos transatlánticos en música, canto y baile, (Puerto de Veracruz, México, del 11 al 13 de abril de 2019), es un buen momento para reflexionar acerca del viaje y el proceso que vivimos durante los días del congreso y el resultado escrito que nos deja mientras tejemos los hilos que aúnan los trabajos que ahora se publican. Estos veinte artículos son una muestra del pulso central del congreso, las coincidencias, tendencias e inquietudes intelectuales que reuniones académicas de ese tipo convocan. Si algo la …

University Music Students’ Choice Of Music Listening Sources: Use Of Library Resources As Compared With Non-Academic Streaming Services, Marianna J. Czeisel, Veronica D. Smith

Publications and Research

The rise of streaming services and decline of analog media have affected academic music libraries in their traditional role as a resource of listening materials. This study examines the listening-source preferences of college-level music students across multiple institutions through a survey in which students compared electronic non-academic streaming services and both electronic and analog library multimedia collections to determine the factors that lead to the use of one source over the other. Findings indicate a strong preference for non-academic streaming services over library materials, emphasizing the importance of convenience. However, the perceived quality of library materials remains high among participants.

Occitan Musicians, Immigration, And Postcolonial Regionalism In Southern France, Sarah E. Trouslard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in southern France, this dissertation analyzes contemporary Occitan musical expression in relation to postcolonial immigration. “Occitan” refers to a group of linguistic practices found in the south of France, including Provençal and Languedocien. Throughout this study, I discuss commonalities between postcolonial and regionalist history and theory, shedding light on notions of cultural citizenship that have defined French sociopolitics in recent decades. The historian Herman Lebovics (2004) coined the term “postcolonial regionalism” in reference to the impact of decolonization on regional protest movements in France during the 1970s. During that time, singer/songwriters of the nòva cançon …