Digital Commons Network^™

A Comparison Of Bluegrass Bands: 2013 Bands Versus The 1940s-1960s Bands, Elizabeth Rosanne Butler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The present study investigated the bluegrass music genre of 2013 and compared it with bluegrass found in the 1940s and 1960s. To date, only one similar study has been identified. In 1963, L.M. Smith completed a study entitled, Bluegrass Music and Musicians: An Introductory Study of a Musical Style in Its Cultural Context. In the conclusion to his study, Smith listed five major characteristics found in the bluegrass genre: 1. "Bluegrass is hillbilly music, played by white Southern musicians for a Southern audience." 2. "Bluegrass is not dance music and is seldom used for this purpose." 3. "Bands are made …

Creating Light Music At The Festival Of Song: Politics, Personhood, And Cultural Production In Tirana, Albania (1944-Present), Nicholas Tochka

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Though different orders organize subjects in audibly distinguishable ways, only rarely have ethnomusicologists theorized how musical practice articulates to practices of government. Through a diachronic case study of Tirana, Albania, this dissertation interrogates how the production of popular music has supported the production of popular consent to illiberal regimes both socialist (1944-1992) and capitalist (1992-present). While previous ethnomusicological and musicological studies of eastern bloc musical practice have focused (respectively) on professionalized folk music and concert music, my research examines the composition, performance, and reception of the popular genre "light music" (Alb. muzik?_ e leht?_) at an annual song competition the …

Zumba® Fitness As A Cultural Mediator, Cole E. Durain

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This ethnography describes local experience as it pertains to aspects of music, dance, and fitness which are compiled into Zumba® Fitness classes of the Rio Grande Valley. While Zumba is not unique to this region, it is locally interpreted based on geo-cultural factors of the Texas-Mexico border region. A large part of Zumba’s success in the Valley can be attributed to the way music is used to identify with regional popular culture and becomes a catalyst for changing the way locals think about health. Research gathered through participant-observation shows that Zumba has become a cultural expression where participants perform both …

An Undergraduate Seminar On Irish Musical Culture In Ireland And The Irish Diaspora In America, Including The Influence Of Irish Music On Appalachian Folk Music Culture, Frieda Eakins

Masters Theses

The following project establishes a concise, yet multifaceted design for a seminar on Irish musical culture. While it was initially developed as a course for its author to teach in the undergraduate, on-ground classroom, this project provides a framework adaptable enough for use by other instructors and/or for additional music seminars. This project is unique in its two-fold purpose in that the design and resources are directed to assist the instructor with streamlining course curriculum preparation, while the course content specific to the project when utilized offers students in the undergraduate college classroom a better understanding of Irish musical culture …

World Percussion Approaches In Collegiate Percussion Programs: A Mixed-Methods Study, Patrick Michael Hernly

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As world percussion has grown in popularity in American colleges and universities, two main problems have emerged. The first problem is that no known source exists detailing how percussion instructors have incorporated world percussion into their collegiate teaching. A review of the literature has highlighted four main approaches to incorporating world percussion in collegiate percussion programs: applied study, group performance, travel experiences, and guest expert visits. The second problem is that systematic research on world percussion traditions has been carried out much more often by music education researchers, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists than by percussionist-performers, so the relationship between theory and …

Theories Of Culture, Identity, And Ethnomusicology: A Synthesis Of Popular Music, Cultural, And Communication Studies, Alyssa Santos

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

The Social Life Of Musical Instruments, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Accordion Crimes, a novel by E. Annie Proulx, traces the life of and routes travelled by a green diatonic button accordion: its birth in Sicily in the workshop of “The Accordion Maker,” its numerous changes of ownership in the Americas during encounters between various immigrant communities, and its death when it finally falls into disrepair in the town of Old Glory, Minnesota. There are other accordions in the book, and many temporary human owners, but it is one particular green accordion that is the book’s protagonist. We meet and experience other characters largely through their interactions with the green accordion, …

Analysis Of The Dutar Playing Technique Of Abdurehim Heyt, Michael Alan Kee

Masters Theses

Uyghur dutar player Abdurehim Heyt is hailed by many Uyghurs as the Dutar King, referring to his mastery of the instrument. This thesis examines several of Heyt's songs and compares them with songs from three other Uyghur dutar players in an attempt to isolate and define the unique characteristic of Heyt's dutar playing technique that sets him apart from other Uyghur dutar players.

This study presents a brief examination of the concept of music ornamentation as it has developed in the West. The Uyghur concept of music ornamentation - purakh - is then explained and compared with the Western concept …

Nomadic Amdo Tibetan Glu Folk Songs, Wendolyn Craun

Masters Theses

Tibetan glu folk songs are a literary and musical expression historically passed down from generation to generation. This regional study purposes to define the origins, influences, categories, qualities, and significance of nomadic Amdo Tibetan glu folk songs. These topics are explored within the settings of Tibetan culture, history, theory, and current usage. Recordings of twenty-seven glu folk songs accompanied by transcribed text and music offer contemporary examples of this song genre that is quickly disappearing. The ultimate goal of this study is to answer the question: What are the defining characteristics of nomadic Amdo Tibetan glu folk songs?

Ethnomusicology [And Aesthetics], Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

My Bad Romance: Exploring The Queer Sublimity Of Diva Reception, Blake Paxton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the historic relationship between pop music divas and gay male fandom. It charts fan experiences from the early 60s with Judy Garland to contemporary times with pop diva Lady Gaga. This project also gives a description of the embodied experience of Brett Farmer’s “queer sublimity of diva reception.” Farmer (2005) argues that diva worship among gay men has become a queer sublimity, “the transcendence of a limiting heteronormative materiality and the sublime reconstruction, at least in fantasy, of a more capacious, kinder, queerer world” (p. 170). Using the methods of participant observation in drag performance and karaoke …

Response To Rice, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Timothy Rice is concerned that ethnomusicology—field, discipline, area of study, constellation of diverse musico-intellectual pursuits—has some “serious problems.” It seems that we have either not been reading each other’s work, or not engaging with it sufficiently. Opportunities to develop some “theoretical muscle” have been missed. Specifically, some seventeen articles broaching the favorite theme of music and identity published in this journal between 1982 and 2005 failed to proceed in cumulative fashion. Rice wants to see ethnomusicology “grow in intellectual and explanatory power,” but this will not happen if subsequent writers refuse to engage their predecessors at a theoretical level. A …

Hip Hip 101: A University Level Course Curriculum For Examining Hip Hop In The Modern World, David Ma

Master's Theses

Hip Hop 101 is a university level course curriculum intended for use by college level educators. It serves as a primer on hip-hop history and includes daily lesson plans that use multi-media tools to scaffold student learning. It was produced under the belief that hip-hop (its music and culture) deserve the time and examination as other longstanding disciplines.

Worlds Of Music Apart: An Alternative Narrative Of The Fez Festival Of World Sacred Music, Adrian Stover

Music Department Honors Papers

The intention of this thesis is to describe how the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music generates a narrative of globalization that is largely outside the Western academic perspective. Even as the festival structures a hegemonic relationship between local elites who can afford concert tickets and those with less economic means who attend events on the periphery of the festival, local resistance to the festival is limited; it is controlled through a narrative that resonates with local, spiritual, and aesthetic values. My project is based on my experience as a participant observer during my internship at La Fondation Ésprit de …

Tour Of The University Of Washington Ethnomusicology Archives, Lowell H. Lybarger, Laurel Sercombe

Faculty Scholarly Works - Library

Interview with Dr. Laurel Sercombe, PhD, MLIS at the University of Washington's Ethnomusicology Archives in Seattle, Washington.

Tracks :

Who, What, Where When

1. Introduction Log Sheets

2. Reference Shelf

3. Collection Media

4. Additional Storage Room

5. Original Film Footage

6. Musical Instruments

7. DATs

8. More Instruments

9. Grooved Media

10. Oven for baking tapes

11. Environmental Conditions

12. Dubbing Room

13. Electronic Equipment

14. CD Duplication Towers

15. Misc. Gadgets & Supplies

16. Digitization Process – Reel Recording

17. DATs, Problems with

18. Using the Otari Open Reel Machine

19. Mixer to Computer

20. CD Documentation

21. …

Folk Wiki: The Shared Traditions Of Folk Music And The Wiki Way, Phillip Mark Chamberlin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Wiki is often perceived as representing a revolutionary break from conventional notions of authorship, writing, and textual history. Dialogues concerning Wiki tend to ignore the characteristics that Wiki shares with earlier forms of collaboration, particularly folk music. In both Wiki and folk music, content is often collectively shared and authored, even if specific individuals create and change the content. Many collaborators are anonymous, quasi-anonymous, or pseudo-anonymous, but the perception of this anonymity is, in both genres, problematic. Second, both Wiki documents and folk songs exist in the "Eternal Now," a seemingly perpetual state that makes these texts available for addition, …

More Than Meets The Ear: The Culture Behind The Music, Anita Sant

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

More than Meets the Ear: The Culture behind the Music is a traveling exhibit that was designed and created over more than a year's time at Utah State University's museum of anthropology. As one member of a team of interns, I helped decide on an exhibit focus, its audience, content, and design. We started from the ground up as inexperienced undergraduates under the tutelage of the museum's curator, Lara Petersen, and the museum's director, Dr. Bonnie Pitblado.

As the project gradually progressed and was honed to the subject of ethnomusicology, I took on the responsibility of the educational aspect of …

"You Better Work": Underground Dance Music In New York City By Kai Fikentscher, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

You Better Work!: Underground Dance Music in New York City is arguably the first ethnography of electronic dance music culture; it is also one of the first ethnomusicologically-influenced monographs on mediated dance music. Kai Fikentscher deftly avoids the wealth of music industry genre tags (such as "deep house" or "two step garage") that plague many writings on electronic dance music, instead focusing on a specific dance community in New York City which began its social dance practice in the days of disco and continued the practice well into the 1990s. His study took place over the course of thirteen years, …

The Organ Works Of Fela Sowande: A Nigerian Organist-Composer, Godwin Simeon Sadoh

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Fela Sowande (1905-1987) has a huge compositional output including orchestral and vocal works. However, his organ music outnumbered the totality of his compositions. His organ pieces represent a truly intercultural music in which distinct tripartite cultural idioms are evident—Nigerian, African American and European. Works of this nature serve as creative source materials for aspiring composers, performers, scholars, music educators, and students in Africa and the world. This composer, folklorist, and music educator was born into a well-known music family in Nigeria. He was active in radio broadcasting, Yoruba folklore and mythology, indigenous music research, Nigerian art music, performance, orchestral conducting, …

Painting The Canvas Of Silence: Vision Enriched Through Voice, Karie Willyerd

Student Scholarship

“Leaders are like conductors.” Peruse a half dozen management journals, and it is likely that the analogy “leaders are like conductors” will show up at least once, frequently citing the same Peter Drucker quote. Correspondingly, music journals are as likely to proclaim “conductors are like great leaders” (Armstrong, 1996). As intuitively true as this may seem, little research has been done to study the leadership characteristics of conductors. Instead, the study of conductors has focused primarily on their artistic abilities. This study was aimed at filling that gap. Most conductors perform globally, and thus the analogy of conductor to leader …

Postmodern Musicology, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

The discipline of musicology is a rather specificially 20th century institution growing out of a disparate range of 19th century studies of music theory, history, composition, etc. The OED edition extant at the time of the writing of this article dates the term musicology itself to 1909 or later. Although there are indeed practitioners throughout the world, most theorists are Anglo-American, with echoes in the French tradition of musicologie and German Musikwissenschaft. As a still-modern project, postmodern musicology derives from a predominantly Austro-German generation of scholars who translated an originally European tradition of analysis (Heinrich Schenker and -- in …

Melanesian Music On Compact Disc: Some Significant Issues, Peter Russell Crowe

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Modeling Music With Grammars: Some Examples From Balinese Kotekan, Janet Tom Cowal

Dissertations and Theses

What is the relationship of music and language? Analogies and comparisons of music and language are plentiful in various types of literature. For researchers in the cognitive sciences, the importance of organization, patterning, and structuring of sounds is a common theme in analyzing both language and music. With the success of generative grammars for languages, a number of researchers have used similar kinds of grammars to describe or model particular aspects of music. In addition, researchers are interested in possible universals in musical grammars. However, while grammars of non-Western musics have been written, most of the work has been based …

Elizabeth Tatar's Review Of Richard Moyle's Traditional Samoan Music, Elizabeth Tatar

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Larry V. Shumway's Review Of Richard Moyle's Tongan Music, Larry V. Shumway

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Richard Moyle's Review Of Even Hovdhaugen's From The Land Of Nafanua: Samoan Oral Texts In Transcription With Translation, Notes And Vocabulary, Richard Moyle

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

The Rhythmic Structure Of West African Music, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

The music of Africa has long intrigued many Westerners. From scattered comments in the accounts of explorers of the so-called Afrique Noire to the full-fledged ethnomusicological studies of the last fifty years, the constant theme has been the fundamental role of music-making in African life and society. And of all the elements of that music, rhythm has received the most attention.

There is something to be gained from looking closely at the early writings on African music, for although they represent the work of non-specialists, and for all their ethnocentricism and anthropocentricism, these accounts touch on the fundamental questions regarding …

Vol. 7 No. 1 (1983): Pacific Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US$40.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, and …

Vol. 7 No. 1 (1983): Pacific Studies Full Issue, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US$40.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, and …

Richard M. Moyle's Review Of Steven Feld's Sound And Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, And Song In Kaluli Expression, Richard M. Moyle

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.