Digital Commons Network^™

Mashing Through The Conventions: Convergence Of Popular And Classical Music In The Works Of The Piano Guys, Alina Kiryayeva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is dedicated to examining the symbiosis between popular music and Western classical music in classical/popular mashups––a new style within the classical crossover genre. The research features the works of The Piano Guys, a contemporary ensemble that combines classical crossover characteristics and the techniques from modern sample-based styles to reconceptualize and reuse classical and popular works. This fusion demonstrates a new approach to presenting multi-genre works, forming a separate musical and cultural niche for this creative practice.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter is further divided into two thematic discourses: genre and authorship. The research draws …

The Modes Of Intervention In Alvin Lucier’S I Am Sitting In A Room, Daniel Fox

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1969) is an icon of experimental music and sound art. The sizable literature addressing the aesthetic and philosophical implications of this piece rarely discusses the performance practice beyond what is indicated in the score itself. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) The meaning that is derived from the piece often hinges not just on what sounds are obtained, but on how they are obtained. 2) Over the past 50 years, changes in the performance practice have altered what constitutes the work: magnetic tape was used until 2000 when it was replaced …

The Performance And Patronage Of Baloch Culture Through Music (And Related Arts) In The Eastern Arabian Peninsula, George Murer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of Baloch musical—and ritual—idioms as cultivated (and variously innovated, embellished, patronized, and reconstructed) in the relatively prosperous and cosmopolitan urban environments of the coastal Eastern Arabian Peninsula—the third major concentration of Baloch population after Balochistan and Karachi. Due to historical and geographic particulars, the origins of Peninsular Baloch communities lie primarily in the Makran region that extends along the Arabian Sea coast and across the political boundary separating Iran and Pakistan. If musical activities play a significant role in orienting Baloch communities socially and politically, what are the presentational strategies implied in the foregrounding of …

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, …

'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 …

Object-Oriented Musicology: Some Implications Of Graham Harman's Philosophy For Music Theory, History, And Criticism, Eric Taxier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation brings the ideas of the philosopher Graham Harman (b. 1968) into a musicological context. His “object-oriented ontology” is widely known in continental philosophy, but it has not yet entered rigorous contact with musicology. Certain factors pose difficulties at first glance, such as Harman’s focus on metaphysical issues (originating in his critique of Martin Heidegger) and his rehabilitation of the widely criticized concept of aesthetic autonomy. But these are also sources of novelty that could make an object-oriented encounter with musicology fruitful. In the first chapter, I outline the main features of Harman’s thought. He critiques assumptions about the …

“I’M Real I Thought I Told Ya”: Developing Critical Media Literacy Through U.S. Latinx Digital Media Representations, Solange T. Castellar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how audiences engage with U.S. Latinx media representations through the practice of critical media literacy. I interrogate how media consumers construct critical media literacy through interacting with U.S. Latinx figures on digital media platforms, particularly on the social-media app, Twitter, and the user-generated video content platform, YouTube. Throughout this thesis, I argue that users on these platforms who engage with U.S. Latinx pop culture figures, like Jennifer Lopez and Belcalis Almanzar (Cardi B), read, digest, and comprehend a variety of multimedia images, texts, or videos, and that this engagement becomes an accessible form of critical media literacy, …

The Life And Death Of Mambo: Culture And Consumption In New York's Salsa Dance Scene, Carmela Muzio Dormani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades salsa dancing has become a global phenomenon, spawning a variety of styles and levels. Although formerly passed from person to person through Latinx family and community networks, salsa dance has long been practiced in a more codified way. Today, salsa is largely reproduced in dance studio classes, congresses, and competitions collectively referred to as “the salsa scene”. In New York City, the salsa scene retains vestiges of Nuyorican and Afro-Caribbean identity, though it is practiced by people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and marketed to a global base. Building on long term participation observation and nearly …

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.

Afro-Brazilian Music And Culture, Regina Castro Mcgowan

Open Educational Resources

In this course students will learn about the musical heritage Africans brought to Brazil and how through forced conversion and cultural adaptation, their traditions quickly syncretized into distinct Afro-Brazilian artistic expressions. This course will explore many musical traditions, including; Samba, Pagode, Baile Funk, Candomblé and Axé music for their social, religious and/or political significance, from the early twentieth century through today. In doing so, students will get to practice and learn the vocabulary and grammatical structures found in the music of these rich and varied genres, and acquire a familiarity with conversational Portuguese.

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 6.0, Robert O. Duncan, Joseph Bisz, Christina Boyle, Kathleen Offenholley, Maura A. Smale, Carolyn Stallard, Deborah Sturm

Publications and Research

The CUNY Games Network is an organization dedicated to encouraging research, scholarship and teaching in the developing field of games-based learning. We connect educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY and beyond who are interested in digital and non-digital games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching and inquiry-based learning. These proceedings summarize the CUNY Games Conference 6.0, where scholars shared research findings at a three-day event to promote and discuss game-based pedagogy in higher education. Presenters could share findings in oral presentations, posters, demos, or play testing sessions. The conference also included workshops on how to modify existing …

Recording Studios Since 1970, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Like many other specialty, purpose-built spaces, we tend to think of recording studios in instrumental terms, meaning that the space is defined in relation to the nominal type of work that the space is instrumental towards. While audio recordings have been made in spaces since 1877, not all of these spaces tend to be regarded as recording studios, partly since so many recordings were made in environments designed for other types of work; indeed, much of the first seventy years of US and UK recorded music history transpired at radio stations, concert halls and lightly treated mixed-use commercial spaces (e.g. …

A Heavy Rain Has Fallen Upon My People: Sindhi Sufi Poetry Performance, Emotion, And Islamic Knowledge In Kachchh, Gujarat, Brian E. Bond

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of the use and contestation of Sindhi-language Sufi poetry performance as a means of Islamic knowledge transmission and ethical self-formation in rural Muslim communities in Kachchh, a border district in the western Indian state of Gujarat adjacent to Sindh, Pakistan. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research with Muslim performers and enthusiasts of Sindhi poetry between 2014-2018, I first examine an ecology of performative and interpretive practices revolving around the musico-poetic repertoire of the poet-saint Shāh ʿAbdul Lat̤īf Bhiṭā’ī (1689-1752 CE). I argue that the pedagogical efficacy of Sufi poetry performance is undergirded by its …

Resource Ecologies, Political Economies And The Ethics Of Audio Technologies In The Anthropocene, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Understanding how recorded and amplified stage musics contribute towards producing the Anthropocene necessitates attending to complex transnational flows of material, capital and labor, and how they coalesce into technological objects. This is complicated by the wide array of sites, practices and knowledges involved during various stages of the production process, from initial resource extraction, to smelting, component manufacturing, technology assembly, and distribution. To develop a suitable technological ethics, and to understand what happens to environments and to human, animal and plant lifeworlds, requires one to resist abstraction and undertake a global accounting of resource ecologies with recourse to planetary-scale political …

Listen To Liston: Examining The Systemic Erasure Of Black Women In The Historiography Of Jazz, Victoria E. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

"First you are a jazz musician, then you are black, then you are a female. I mean it goes down the line like that. We're like the bottom of the heap." - Melba Liston (pg 2) The historiography of jazz has consciously and unconsciously excluded women. This exclusion is exacerbated when one examines the intersection of race and jazz for black women. This essay argues that due to overwhelming societal expectations, gendered language, and physical threats of sexual assault and violence, black women had to create alternatives spheres of affirmation and musical expression because jazz culture stymied their access to …

Fusiones Y Confusiones Del Concierto De Aranjuez En El Jazz: Reflexiones De Un Oyente, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Este artículo lo conforman una serie de reflexiones sobre Sketches of Spain (1960) de Miles Davis y Gil Evans, centrándose en su versión del Concierto de Aranjuez de Joaquín Rodrigo (1940). Inspirándose en los escritos de Edward Said y Homi K. Bhabha, el autor analiza la grabación como un artefacto cultural caracterizado por su “inestabilidad formal” y su “indefinición” o “condición intermedia” (in-betweenness) convirtiéndolo en un álbum que no es ni clásico ni jazz; ni español ni no-español; ni tradicionalista ni moderno, entre otras dualidades. Sketches es una obra de arte que desafía categorías y habita los intersticios de las …

The Fusions And Confusions Of The Concierto De Aranjuez In Jazz: A Listener’S Musings, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Reflections on Sketches of Spain (1960) by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, focusing on their jazz version of Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (1940). Motivated by Edward Said’s and Homi K. Bhabha’s writings, the recording is analyzed as a cultural artifact characterized by its “formal instability” and its typological “inbetweenness,” rendering it neither classical nor jazz; neither Spanish nor non-Spanish; and neither traditional nor modern, among other dualities. Sketches is an artwork that defies categories and inhabits the interstices of cultural expectations.

Vinyl As Event: Record Store Day And The Value-Vibrant Matter Nexus, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Why would anyone purchase expensive, natural resource-intensive, and seemingly obsolete material carriers of music when streaming providers provide unlimited access to over 40 million songs for a small monthly fee? As I will show, we can no longer assume that contemporary interest is driven solely by a collector’s market or because of the audible qualities of the vinyl listening experience, and must attend to the many ways people engage with record objects today – and by extension, the vinyl record as an ontological multiple. Through an analysis of Record Store Day 2015 and affiliated phenomena including YouTube unboxing videos, other …

Music And Jewish Practice In Contemporary Istanbul: Preserving Heritage, Bending Tradition, Joseph M. Alpar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of ongoing transformations in the sacred musical repertoires practiced by ḥazzanim (synagogue cantors) and their synagogue congregations in Istanbul’s contemporary Jewish community. I argue that clergy and laypeople alike negotiate their religious identities as Turkish Jews in the musical choices they make. While many try to maintain the community’s local music tradition, rooted in makam—the Ottoman Turkish melodic system—others attempt to broaden their repertoire with musics from Israel, the United States, and Ḥabad Hasidic Judaism. I examine adjustments made to the musical components of ritual as responses to decades of Jewish religious life as …

Reimagining The Flute Masterclass: Case Studies Exploring Artistry, Authority, And Embodiment, Sarah Carrier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work explores the flute masterclass as an aesthetic, ritualized, and historically reimagined cultural practice. Based on fieldwork that took place between 2017 and 2019 in the United States, in Italy, and on the social media platforms Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, I argue that the masterclass—an extension of the master/apprentice system that dominates learning in the classical music tradition—is characterized by embodied qualities of artistry and authority. These qualities are not inherent, but are perceived through subjective, social, familied, and affective bodies.

Chapter One outlines the main themes and the research design. Chapter Two is a case study that analyzes …

Music Making In Iran: Developments Between The Sixteenth And Late Nineteenth Centuries, Amir Hosein Pourjavady

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The primary question in this study is how the long-established maqāmmodulatory schemes evolved into a set of seven or twelve large-scale performance formats (dastgāhs) and what socio-cultural forces were behind this development. In doing so, this dissertation draws on a variety of sources including musical treatises, song-text collections, court chronicles, travel accounts, biographies, paintings, nineteenth-century albums of photographs and the early Persian 78 rpm records.

The first chapter provides a background on the role of courtesans and their accompanying instrumentalists in Iran between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The influence of upper-class courtesans on the urban musical …

The Incorporated Hornist: Instruments, Embodiment, And The Performance Of Music, M. Elizabeth Fleming

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Roland Barthes famously described the “grain” as “the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.” Stated simply, this project asks What is the body in the horn as it sounds? Instrumentality is typically understood as extension and expression beyond the boundaries of the body; brass instrument musicking, however, begins not where the sound emerges from the bell, but at the very least at the meeting point of the player’s breath, the surfaces of the body, and the tube of the instrument. This project of instrumental incorporation understands music as a …

Poems To Open Palms: Praise Performance And The State In The Sultanate Of Oman, Bradford J. Garvey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the musical constitution of moral, economic, material, and social relations between rural communities and the state in the Sultanate of Oman. I argue that communities embedded within the authoritarian state hegemony of the Sultanate form and affirm social relations with the state through its embodied proxy, Sultan Qābūs bin Ṣa‘īd Āl Bū Ṣa‘īd, via the reciprocal exchange of state-directed giving and praise poetry responses. The circuit of exchange catalyzes the social production of political legitimacy and ensures continued generous distribution by mythopoetically presenting such cyclicity as resulting from elite and non-elite mutuality. This praise poetry is rendered …

Afro-Cuba Transnational: Recordings And The Mediation Of Afro-Cuban Traditional Music, Johnny Frias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the way audio and video recordings and the internet have impacted, shaped, and helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene. My focus will be on the most popular and widely-recorded genres of Afro-Cuban music—rumba and the religious repertoire of Santería, particularly batá drumming—both of which I also perform regularly with other Cuban musicians in Miami. Incorporating interviews, online ethnographic research, and participant-observation as a musician, my research has three main arguments.

First, recordings of Afro-Cuban music helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene by increasing the popularity of these traditions outside of Cuba, including their amateur performance …

Imagining Africa: An Analysis Of Tropes And Motifs In Turn Of The Century Black Music, Shane Ortale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

References to Africa exist in different forms in diasporic music from every country in the New World. In the case of the United States, an abundance of song lyrics of black writers and musicians from the turn of the twentieth century contain imaginings of the African continent. This thesis analyzes the many ways that these depictions were produced within the minstrel and vaudeville genres. While these artists faced many obstacles that limited the scope of their lyrical content, they used diverse strategies to undermine the racist world in which they lived. By juxtaposing and conflating tropes about black folks in …

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 5.0, Robert O. Duncan, Joe Bisz, Julie Cassidy, Kathleen Offenholley, Carolyn Stallard, Deborah Sturm, Anders A. Wallace

Publications and Research

The CUNY Games Network is an organization dedicated to encouraging research, scholarship and teaching in the developing field of games-based learning. We connect educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY and beyond who are interested in digital and non-digital games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching and inquiry-based learning. The CUNY Games Conference distills its best cutting-edge interactive presentations into a two-day event to promote and discuss game-based pedagogies in higher education, focusing particularly on non-digital learning activities that faculty can use in the classroom every day. The conference will include workshops lead by CUNY Games Organizers on …

Cultural Transmission Modes Of Music Sampling Traditions Remain Stable Despite Delocalization In The Digital Age, Mason Youngblood

Publications and Research

Music sampling is a common practice among hip-hop and electronic producers that has played a critical role in the development of particular subgenres. Artists preferentially sample drum breaks, and previous studies have suggested that these may be culturally transmitted. With the advent of digital sampling technologies and social media the modes of cultural transmission may have shifted, and music communities may have become decoupled from geography. The aim of the current study was to determine whether drum breaks are culturally transmitted through musical collaboration networks, and to identify the factors driving the evolution of these networks. Using network-based diffusion analysis …

Studies Of Musical Borrowing: Borrowing As Compositional Tool In Béla Bartók's Second Piano Concerto And The Influence Of Luciano Berio On The Grateful Dead's Approach To Live Improvisation, Michael J. Crowley

Theses and Dissertations

J. Peter Burkholder’s typology of musical borrowing provides new ways of thinking about and understanding how composers and musicians incorporated influential ideas into their own compositions. This paper explores two cases of musical borrowing in order to gain a deeper understanding of the compositional styles of the chosen subjects. In the first study, I explore Béla Bartók’s use of Paraphrase, Modeling and Stylistic Allusion in his Second Piano Concerto, demonstrating how Bartók used borrowing as a compositional tool to develop his own innovative ideas. In the second study, I investigate how Luciano Berio’s compositional style influenced the Grateful Dead’s approach …

Meaning Beyond Words: A Musical Analysis Of Afro-Cuban Batá Drumming, Javier Diaz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of a musical analysis of Afro-Cuban batá drumming. Current scholarship focuses on ethnographic research, descriptive analysis, transcriptions, and studies on the language encoding capabilities of batá. However, this artistically sophisticated tradition demands a more in-depth study of its musical manufacture. Drawing from experience as a ritual batá player and as an oricha priest, I have completed the current study by following three primary analytical modalities: (1) sonic landscape, which encompasses: sound vocabulary, form, individual drum parts, and balance of musical elements; (2) timbral design, how the different batá sounds articulate meaningful and functionally distinguishable structures; (3) the …

Wukongism: Monkey King, Kungfu/Jazz, And Asian/American Performance, Sissi Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Wukongism offers one of the first non-western epistemic frameworks to examine theatre and performance that traverse beyond the shifting taxonomies of national, cultural, racial boundaries, and in particular, Asian/American theatre and performance. Wukongism, or shapeshifter consciousness, is built on the narrative of Sun Wukong the Monkey King, a supernatural shapeshifting character from the 16^th century classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. Juxtaposing physical shapeshifting (plastic surgery and performing of the racialized face) with institutional shapeshifting (reinventing and eliminating invisible and hypervisible boundaries), this dissertation project posits Wukongism as a means to examine the varying, fluid, and precarious …