Digital Commons Network^™

Analyzing Harmony In Bulgarian And Bulgarian-Influenced Choral Arrangements From The Radio To The Screen, Annie Beliveau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates developments in arrangements and compositions made for Bulgarian choirs between 1950 and 2025. Arrangements from Bulgaria’s communist period (1944-1989), when musical radio broadcasts were tailored to promote nationalist sentiment, eventually reached the ears of foreigners on the other side of the Iron Curtain via recordings and ensemble tours. These obrabotki (arrangements of folk tunes) became popular in the “world music” boom of the 1980s, and foreign composers soon began to create new compositions for Bulgarian choirs to sing on albums and in scores for film, television, and video games. Over time, the uses of Bulgarian choir in …

Urban Counterpoint (1992–2003): The Piano Music Of Ed Bland, Joseph Vaz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the piano music of Ed Bland, a politically and philosophically vocal composer active in the second half of the twentieth century, whose music draws on both the European and American twentieth-century avant-garde, and on African American vernacular music genres from ragtime to hip-hop. A review of the historical and personal context for these pieces, and a detailed examination of the compositional processes used in this music, work together to demonstrate how Bland thought about the relationship between different musical genres and languages.

Through this combination of theory of musical genre, historical and biographical study, and detailed analysis …

Vibe Diggers: The Sampling Of Brazilian Music In Hip-Hop, Romulo De Carvalho Moraes Barbosa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the trend of musical borrowings of 1970s MPB (música popular brasileira) by contemporary American hip-hop producers, especially in terms of what they have called a “Brazilian vibe.” A lot has been said about sampling already from legal, sociological, and historical points of view, but less has been said about its aesthetic procedures, and even less about the wider implications of a tendency for using transnational sources. In the case of MPB, hip-hop artists seem to understand the music they sample through an often vague, intuitive representation, which fuses qualities of those recordings with an intersubjective mood, a …

Conga Santiaguera: A Century Of Innovation And Competition, Nick Herman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Santiago de Cuba is home to the island’s biggest, oldest, and most famous carnival.  Any local resident will confirm that “sin conga no hay carnaval (without conga there is no carnival).” In Santiago, conga refers to a vibrant street procession, the music that drives it, and the ensemble that makes the music.  Conga Santiaguera: A Century of Innovation and Competition presents a musical history of the conga from roughly 1910 to 2010.  This project, https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/conga employs an eBook, musical analysis, oral histories, and audiovisual media to show how the conga has been constantly reinvigorated by innovation, competition, and Afro-Diasporic …

Reimagining Puerto Rican Sonic Identity: Musical Style And Creation After Hurricane María., Gabriel E. Bouche Caro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the manifestation of Puertorriqueñidad (Puerto Rican identity) in concert music composed after Hurricane María (2017), a catastrophe that catalyzed a profound shift in Puerto Rico's cultural consciousness. Focusing on four composers whose early careers were shaped by this period—Johanny Navarro, John Rivera Pico, Iván E. Rodríguez, and Christian Quiñones—the study combines close readings of scores and recordings with extensive original interviews to understand how musical identity is constructed in the wake of collective trauma. The analysis reveals that while the composers share a generational bond, their aesthetic practices are strikingly diverse: Navarro preserves Afro-Caribbean rhythmic structures, Rivera …

Regional Geography And Tuning Systems Of Traditional Georgian Folk Music, Alex Kutubidze

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project focuses on the traditional folk music of Georgia, mapping the geographical distribution of singing traditions across the country’s historical regions. Because vocal traditions and stylistic features of Georgian folk music vary significantly across historical regions, the project highlights these differences for the audience, which might be interested in learning Georgian folk music, seeking a basic understanding of its structure, or planning to visit the country for cultural or educational purposes related to folk music.  In addition, this work examines the tonal organization of Georgian traditional music, drawing on recent ethnomusicological research. It engages with ongoing scholarly discussions regarding …

Tradition, Individuality, And Innovation In Western Classical Music Performance: A Quantitative Analysis Of Bach’S Fourth Cello Suite Prelude, Clare Monfredo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Why do we seek out new performances of a commonly performed piece of music? An essential tradition of Western classical music (WCM) is the performance of canonical works by composers, an activity that requires the interpretation and execution of written scores by individual performers. In this practice, performers are not only expected to determine the composer’s “intentions,” but also somehow (paradoxically) share these in a “unique” performance interpretation. In musical education, performers are trained by teachers to create these “unique” interpretations by learning how to intuit composers’ intentions in a system that passes down interpretative traditions through master-apprentice one-on-one lessons. …

The Power Of Music To Empower Health And Wellbeing: In Support Of A Music Therapy Discipline At Lehman College, City University Of New York, Felicity A. Howlett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project seeks to encourage the development of a music therapy curriculum at the City University of New York (CUNY) and specifically at Lehman College. The following paper presents the case and highlights the contents of three data collections that support this goal: 1) The Zotero Digital Music Therapy Reference Collection is a custom-designed index of over 1600 items containing references to published material highlighting significant aspects of the profession. Zotero, a free, open-source reference management software for organizing research, houses the collection and functions as a living library; 2) Music Therapy Degree Programs in New England and the Mid-Atlantic …

Metric Schemas And Projections In Three Colombian Folk Genres, Lina S. Tabak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores how stylistic expertise can affect metric perception, through the analysis of three Colombian folk genres—cantos de boga and currulaos from the Pacific region and joropos from the Eastern plains bordering Venezuela. Specifically, it considers the tension between metric perceptions which arise from bottom-up mechanisms for entrainment (such as projections), and those which are based on top-down mechanisms (such as schemata). This tension is at play when more and less musically enculturated listeners perceive entirely different metric structures when listening to identical music.

Taking bottom-up and top-down metric perception as a thread, this dissertation isolates three additional metric …

Unveiling Iolanta: Blindness In Nineteenth-Century Opera, Nafset Chenib

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the main tropes of representing and narrating blindness in nineteenth-century opera and fictional literature with a particular emphasis on Tchaikovsky’s 1892 one-act opera Iolanta, with its blind protagonist. Examination of the production history of Iolanta reveals that misrepresentations and misconceptions ingrained within Tchaikovsky's libretto and music have governed directorial choices, consequently giving rise to a homogeneous, predominantly unfavorable portrayal of blindness on the stage. I suggest an approach to the opera that is more consonant with the lived experience of blindness.

The Village On The Stage: Dramaturgies Of Modernity In African Concert Dance, Margit N. Edwards

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, The Village on the Stage: Dramaturgies of Modernity in African Concert Dance, analyzes the underlying theatrical logic in African concert dance through a dramaturgical model I call the village on the stage. The village on the stage dramaturgy has had multiple iterations over the 20^th and 21^st centuries both across the African continent and the African diaspora. Commonly presented within the world-dance market as neo-traditional African dance, the village on the stage refers to a set of practices of staging traditional dance and music of Africa and the African diaspora and serves as a …

A Critical Study Of Contemporary Palestinian Musical Culture, Karl H. Hausmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is concerned with the field of musical culture and practice in Palestine, and the connotations of musical expression, whether as music or songs. It addresses the period extending from the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, through the first intifada of 1987 and then the era of the Oslo Accords until today.

This study deals with the artistic meanings and expressions associated with the music and singing that was produced in that period, assuming that it was created within the socio-political context in which it existed, specifically that music that was associated with the …

Changing Homelands: The Election Of Menachem Begin And The Diplomatic Campaign To Bring Ethiopian Jews To Israel, Abraham Silberstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines diplomatic efforts by Israel, the United States, and non-governmental organizations to facilitate the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. While much of the historical literature on this topic has focused on the 1980s and 1990s, when tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel, this thesis largely considers the mid-late 1970s. For the first 25 years of its existence, the State of Israel had not been eager to see Ethiopian Jews enter the country, and the government deemed them non-Jews for the purposes of immigration. This started to change in 1973, when the Sephardi Chief …

Babel, Daniel Horowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is a series of three memoiristic essays around the vortex of identity. The first is an exploration of how childhood overmedication split the continuity of the author’s self-conception. The second traces the slipperiness of Jewish and Queer identifications detailing their synthesis in the klezmer revival in New York City in late 1980s and early 90s. The third is a polyphonic narration of the recovery of a lost klezmer’s life story in the face of the silence of time and slaughter.

Pleasure And Power In A Cover Culture: Audiences, Musicians, And Venues In İZmi̇R’S Popular Music Scene, Yılmaz Onur Sönmez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The live popular music scene in İzmir, Turkey, is dominated by slow-changing cover repertoires that are performed by musicians who have been on stage for a few decades, at places that have been hosting covers shows for a prolonged time. In this dissertation, I question the reasons behind this practice, which I call cover culture, and analyze it from the three different but interrelated perspectives of audiences, musicians, and venues. My analysis relies on the fieldwork data I collected between March 2019 and May 2022, and on my long-term involvement with and observations of the scene since the early 2000s. …

“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 20^th 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 …

Mediated Locality: Assembling The Independent Music Scene In Brooklyn, New York, Frank Meegan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates how independent musicians, concert organizers, and other scene participants in Brooklyn, New York use digital technology and new media in their artistic practice. It is based on three years of participant observation in Brooklyn from 2016 to 2019, where I attended events at small venues like bars and DIY spaces, and interviewed musicians, concert organizers, independent label runners, and other scene participants. I also observed the online activity of musicians and organizers on public Facebook, Instagram, and Bandcamp pages. I argue that Brooklyn independent musicians use digital media, and are themselves mediated, as their activities at physical …

Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack Of Liberal Nostalgia, Max W. Kaplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Following the 2016 American Presidential election, celebrity endorsements proved to be a more narrow gauge of public opinion than ever. The symbolic alignment with popular musicians, which had long abetted the Democratic Party’s standing with youth and particular identity groups, seemed only to reaffirm the party’s establishment status, drawing disavowal in a wave of anti-establishment sentiment on both the left and right. ‘Retromania,’ a term first coined by Simon Reynolds in 2010, can be tracked conceptually from the nostalgic inclinations of twenty-first century popular culture to the ideological sphere, where nostalgic, essentialized constructions of community, identity, and progress have coalesced …

Assembling The African City: Music Streets And Associational Life In Dakar's Médina, Brendan Kibbee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What can you understand about a city through its music? Most days and nights in Dakar’s Médina­­––a crowded quartier populaire adjacent to the city’s central administrative zone–– streetscapes are transformed by musical assemblies, including life cycle ceremonies and events produced by the neighborhood’s robust array of civic and religious associations. This dissertation examines how the confluence of music, public spaces (streets), and associational life shapes the possibilities of urban living in the contemporary African city. The musical assemblies that fill the neighborhood, I argue, spatialize social life in the city, organizing people’s movements, exposing them to a common sense-world, and …

Voice, Arabness, And The Vocal Talent Competition Arab Idol, Insia Malik

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One of the most popular entertainment programs on Arabic television in the 2010s through to its most recent season in 2017, Arab Idol (Mahbub al-‘Arab) was an offshoot of the Idols television franchise that launched globally in the early 2000s. This dissertation is a study of how Arabness was voiced quite literally on Arab Idol, through rhetoric and production—but primarily through the music. A show in which an Arabness is implicit in the nomenclature, Arab Idol catered to an Arab audience and thereby featured music that might speak to this audience. What distinguished the offshoot from its …

Festivali11: The Long Sixties And Women In Communist Albania, Manjola Shehu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Festivali11 is a digital project that aims to highlight the experiences of Albanian women during the communist period by collecting, digitizing and publishing oral histories for an Albanian and international audience. The heart of the project, which is hosted at www.festivali11.com, is a collection of educational materials built from two digitized interviews with an Albanian woman that describe her experiences during this period.

The project aims to showcase the potential of oral history in centralizing the experience of marginalized people in historical narratives and to provide contextualized, multimedia information and resources about this topic to an international public and facilitate …

Analog Matters: Labels, Cassettes, And Alternative Economies In Argentina’S Independent Music Scenes, Maria Agustina Checa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic study of current cassette production and circulation in Argentina. It analyzes the work of independent labels that record music available online onto cassette tapes, incorporating a variety of music styles. I examine practices of production, circulation, and exchange, and the alternative economies performed around cassettes, with particular attention to the materialities constituting these processes. Through cassettes, I conceptualize and trace "relational value," a notion to understand objects with different kinds of social agencies valued for their abilities to generate connections. Relational value is a theoretical construct that emerges from the ground-up approach to studying …

Homage To Eleanora: A Musical Journey Through The Billie Holiday Songbook, Keith A. Dames

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Billie Holiday was a singer, songwriter, vocalist, bandleader and composer in the fields of music, black culture and more specifically the genre of jazz. The primary focus of this study is Billie Holiday’s discography, music, and compositions as treated in relation to the black culture of production. This study will explore a secondary content analysis of Billie Holiday’s music, musicianship, musicality and compositional skills within the American jazz mainstream, broader jazz audience and world at large. This project will take an analytical look at the structure and form of the compositions of Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday is credited with composing …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …