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Music, Politics, And Sociality: Ethnic Tensions And The Performance Of Gikuyu Nationalism, Peter Njagi Mwangi

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines how some selected Gikuyu popular music propagates ethnic tensions in Kenya by promoting Gikuyu nationalism at the expense of Kenyan nationalism. This music derives its themes from the historical period of the Mau Mau armed struggle against British colonists and connects this struggle with everyday experiences of the Gikuyu people. Memory and the performance of everyday life in this music solidifies the Gikuyu community as tied to a common destiny and distances other Kenyan communities from this destiny. The music consolidates Gikuyu ethnic nationalism and authenticates the position of the community as superior and a dominant force …

The Music And Politics Of Willy Chirino, Nancy N. Balcziunas

Honors College Theses

Cuban musician and singer Willy Chirino, the self-proclaimed inventor of the “Miami Sound,” was sent to the United States as a teenager in the 1960s under Operation Pedro Pan to escape the influence of Fidel Castro's communist regime. Throughout his career, he has used his music to spread a personal and political agenda; his rejection of communism and the Castro regime can be seen through his song lyrics, humanitarian efforts, and direct engagement in the world of politics.

Love Sick The Musical - A Reflection Of My Undergraduate Studies, William Kelly

Senior Theses

No abstract available

The Female Percussionist: Social And Cultural Perspectives, Ksenija Komljenović

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore the presence of and perceptions about professional female percussionists. The history of female participation in music in Western society reveals patterns of bias and segregation, in addition to progress made by those who fought for equality. Although a significant body of research has focused on gender instrument bias, the topic of female percussionists has been largely untended. Previous literature reveals several themes underlying this topic, including sex stereotyping of roles in music, instrument choice, childhood gender roles and their social context, role modeling in higher educational institutions, work-life balance, and reported issues …

The Suzuki Method: Influences Of Shinichi Suzuki On Japanese Music Education, Moriah L. Richards

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis will study the history of Japanese music education philosophies and pedagogy techniques. Specific focus has been given to the music education methods and philosophies of renowned Japanese music educator, Shinichi Suzuki. Suzuki’s views on the learning processes of children have greatly impacted the field of music education. Suzuki held the belief that the language acquisition process and the learning processes of children were intricately connected. He spent years applying his research to the field of music education. His resulting pedagogy techniques are now known as the Suzuki Method. The Suzuki Method, which has been adapted in various ways …

Relational Power, Music, And Identity: The Emotional Efficacy Of Congregational Song, Nathan Myrick

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Relational Power, Music, and Identity: The Emotional Efficacy of Congregational Song

The power of congregational song to unify (or divide) people along various lines is well documented. Yet, how this process of uniting or dividing is accomplished has proven necessarily difficult to document. This paper examines the complex and polyvalent factors that contribute to the meaningfulness of congregational music making, seeking to offer a synthetic, conceptual framework with which to engage this often murky milieu.

Employing interdisciplinary research techniques drawn from sociology, ritual studies, and ethnomusicology, I construct a conceptual framework with which to understand the profoundly formative power of …

Kendrick Lamar And Hip-Hop As A Medium For Social Change, Diego A. Rocha

Student Publications

This paper provides a context and then analysis of Kendrick Lamar's albums as they relate to advocating and affecting social change. The purpose is to show through example how hip-hop (and music in general) can act as an avenue towards creating positive change for oppressed peoples.

A Taste Of Vietnamese Music: Building Bridges Through Cultural Understanding, Veronica Linh Ngọc Nguyen

Undergraduate Honors College Theses 2016-

The country of Vietnam has an incredibly rich and diverse culture that is deeply rooted in its long-standing history. The heart of its peoples can be seen through all facets of society such as rituals, religion, cultural mores, cuisine, art and dance, but especially through their music. Music plays a vital role in almost all the different parts of Vietnamese life. It can be found everywhere throughout history, from highly trained professionals in aristocratic courts to farmers in rice paddies to mega pop stars on television. Vietnam has had a long and rough history but throughout all the country’s changes, …

New Bad Girls Of Sudan: Women Singers In The Sudanese Diaspora, Anita H. Fábos

Faculty Works

Explores the new ‘bad girls’ of Sudanese music as they defy national boundaries to bring women’s perspectives and critiques to a global audience. Performers such as Alsarah and Rasha have access to a world music stage to comment upon gender and racial hierarchies, chide Sudanese power brokers about their transgressions, and encourage a more inclusive and just society. Pushback against new voices have included charges in the public domain (e.g. YouTube comments) that these performances are haram and sullied by foreign influence. Emerging out of a larger ethnographic investigation of the Sudanese acoustics of diaspora, my feminist analysis of ‘bad …

Remixing Overwatch: A Case Study In Fan Interactions With Video Game Sound, Etelle Shur

Scripps Senior Theses

In the past, video game communities have been studied after they have already been well-established. Studying the Overwatch fandom now, less than a year after the game’s release, while its community is still growing, allows me to observe the way gamers bring prior fandom experiences to a new game and the way a new fan community establishes its own practices. Moreover, the Overwatch fandom is growing at a time when technology is rapidly changing the way fans share transformative works and the way media companies interact with fans. Studying Overwatch fan communities now can give a sense of what is …

Local Embeddedness Matters: A Study Of Hip-Hop Artists' Interaction With Their Local Community, Castel Vette Sweet

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation study is an exploration of hip hop and rap artists’ embeddedness in local communities, and their interpretation of the connectedness between their work and their communities. I explore the influence of place and space in the identity development of artists, and how artist use those identities to guide their interactions with their local community. I also investigate the significance of artists’ interactions and relationship in the cultivation of social and cultural capital. In contrast to previous scholarship emphasising the negative influence rap and hip-hop artists have on their communities, I utilize in-depth interviews with artists to examine the …

Autonomania: Music And Music Education From Mars, Thomas A. Regelski

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Traditional aesthetic theory has posited an account of music, and the other arts, as autonomous of social meanings, relevance, and conditions. In the case of music, “absolute music” is sequestered from social and other roots that bring music into being in the first place. The typical claim, thus, is that classical music is music for its own sake, divorced from the many and highly evident social dimensions that it serves. It ignores all other genres of music, most of which are more appreciated than can be accounted for by the theory of autonomania. This aesthetic theory of music, one of …

Socio-Musical Performing Artistry, Aron Edidin

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Philosophical discussion of artistry in performance has focused on the relation of performers to musical works and to their instruments. But an important domain of musical artistry is social, relating musicians to their fellows in performing groups. This “socio-musical” artistry contributes to the artistic accomplishments of performing groups as a whole. I identify two distinct kinds of socio-musical artistry, and discuss some of the ways in which different forms of group organization articulate different possibilities for their exercise. Finally, I discuss at some length the extreme case of a performing role that is purely socio-musical, that of the orchestral conductor. …

Some Notes On The "Pantun" Storytelling Of The Baduy Minority Group Its Written And Audiovisual Documentation, Wim Van Zanten

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

Baduy pantun stories are part of the larger Sundanese oral tradition of pantun storytelling in west Java. The stories recount the deeds of the nobility of such old Sundanese kingdoms as Pajajaran and Galuh. Although the Baduy still recite the pantun stories in their rituals, in the larger cities to the east of the Baduy village Kan k s pantun recitation almost disappeared. On the basis of short periods of fieldwork in and around Kan k s village between 1976 and 2014, in this essay I shall discuss Baduy pantun storytelling. I shall summarize earlier major publications and analyse some …

Elmore, Harold W. (Fa 975), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 975. Project titled: “Transcriptions of stories, song lyrics and calls.” Project includes survey sheets with brief descriptions of stories, song lyrics, doodle bug charms, and calls from Edmonson County and Warren County, Kentucky. Sheets include a brief description, informant’s name, and some with motif index number.

Flash Study Analysis And The Music Learning Profiles Project, Radio Cremata, Bryan Powell, Joseph Michael Pignato, Gareth Dylan Smith

John J. Cali School of Music Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper introduces the Music Learning Profiles Project, and its methodological approach, flash study analysis. Flash study analysis is a method that draws heavily on extant qualitative approaches to education research, to develop broad understandings of music learning in diverse contexts. The Music Learning Profiles Project (MLPP) is an international collaboration to collect and curate a large number of flash studies exploring musicking and music learning in a variety of contexts that fall outside traditional school music education. In this paper the authors present context, rationale, and methods for the project, along with indicative preliminary findings. The project aims to …

Pilgrimage And Audience On The Maharashtrian Vārī, Jaime Jones

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Abstract.

Each year during the monsoon season, devotees of the Hindu Vārkarī sect take to the streets of the cities and towns of Maharashtra, to go on the vārī, a massive annual pilgrimage lasting twenty-one days. The procession of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims is not only seen but heard, as the songs written by the singer-saints of the tradition occupy nearly every moment of the journey. In this article, I examine the relationship between music and pilgrimage procession by focusing on the idea of audience - defined as both the listening public and the act of hearing itself. Rather …

(Mis)Representation Of Burmese Metal Music In The Western Media, Heather Maclachlan

Department of Music Faculty Publications

Heavy metal music is performed in Burma (also known as Myanmar) by two distinct groups of musicians: generalists, who are part of the mainstream music industry, and underground bands, who differentiate themselves from the mainstream industry in a number of ways. Importantly, the underground performers insist on presenting nothing but their own original songs. Western-educated journalists have recently published a number of articles about these underground bands, equating their original creations with resistance against the military junta that controlled Burma for the past half-century. The author argues that the metanarrative revealed in such media reports does not accord with the …

Review Of Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm And Noise, Jonathan L. Friedmann

Between the Species

Review of Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise, by David Rothenberg. This book proposes that the human sense of rhythm derived in part from insect sounds.

A Study Of Selected Taiwanese Pedagogical Solo Piano Music Of The Twentieth Century, Hsun-Yin Chang

Dissertations

Sonatinas and folk music are often used for pedagogical purposes because of their short structure and simpler technique. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the Sonatina became one of the prevailing genres in piano music written by a variety classical composers that included Clementi, Kuhlau, and Diabelli. Other classical composers such as Bartók and Kodály developed a strong interest in collecting folk music, which they incorporated into their compositions. Taiwanese composers did likewise; they used the Chinese pentatonic and heptatonic scales and other native Taiwanese and Chinese folk elements, and combined these ideas with western compositional materials to create a unique …

“Windows” Of Time: Memory, Metaphor, And Storytelling As Documents, Lynnsey K. Weissenberger

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper describes how alternative documents – memory, metaphor, and storytelling – negotiate musicians’ ongoing process of knowledge building. Examples are drawn from five music practitioners of different traditions around the world. In the contexts of teaching and learning, these documents provide evidence of changing epistemic perspectives in these music practitioners, and can be used to examine the complex relationships between time, knowledge building, and experience. Recent work in oral information and oral documents by Turner (2007; 2010), in addition to conceptual views of documents and documentation as early as Otlet (1934) and Briet (1951) and revisited by Buckland (1991; …

Studio Magic: The Process, Value, And Ethics Of Remastering, Julian D. Anderson

Honors Projects

ABSTRACT

Due to the growth of recording technology, recorded music has become the most common form of music listening. Having high-fidelity audio is as important on audience perception of the music as the composition and the musical interpretation. As the process of recording and the final medium of the recording have advanced, the fidelity of the audio has increased, thus decreasing the listener’s awareness of the recording itself and bringing their attention to the music. However, older media is reparable to the extent that it can be remastered to decrease scrutiny on the product. What is worth remastering? What is …

A Pattern Mining Approach To Study A Collection Of Dutch Folk-Songs, Peter Van Kranenburg, Darrell Conklin

Papers

No abstract provided.

Proceedings Of The 6th International Workshop On Folk Music Analysis, 15-17 June, 2016, Pierre Beauguitte, Bryan Duggan, John D. Kelleher

Papers

The Folk Music Analysis Workshop brings together computational music analysis and ethnomusicology. Both symbolic and audio representations of music are considered, with a broad range of scientific approaches being applied (signal processing, graph theory, deep learning). The workshop features a range of interesting talks from international researchers in areas such as Indian classical music, Iranian singing, Ottoman-Turkish Makam music scores, Flamenco singing, Irish traditional music, Georgian traditional music and Dutch folk songs. Invited guest speakers were Anja Volk, Utrecht University and Peter Browne, Technological University Dublin.

A Comparative History And The Importance Of Chamber Music, Aaron M. Sacks

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This capstone presentation focuses on the role of chamber music in both social and academic contexts. Using examples from the past five centuries and including local examples, parallels and divergences are drawn to points of most import. The spotlight is upon three areas: a) what the role of chamber music was in the past, compared to today; b) why it is an important genre, to both musicians, as well as non-musicians, and c) in what ways more exposure to the form can be built. Much of the focus is on composers and their influence, but the impact of and upon …

Developing A Rhythmic Vocabulary: Exercises Derived From The West African Influence On Jazz, Brian Anthony Rodesch

Dissertations

Rhythm is largely noted as a defining characteristic of jazz, yet as jazz education has gained a more prominent role in higher education, course time and materials dedicated to rhythmic training remain scarce. As previous research has demonstrated, there is an abundance of resources and methods that emphasize harmonic elements, focusing largely on chord/scale relationships; this prevalence of materials dedicated to harmony only serves to highlight the paucity of resources related to rhythm. This study seeks to develop exercises that can supplement harmonic exercises and concepts to aid educators and performers in gaining a broader understanding of rhythm, while bolstering …

Music-Play And Communication In Children With Autism And Their Families: An Ethnographic Study, Melanie Makovsky

Masters Theses

This is an ethnographic research study regarding the nature of commun-, ication, musical behavior, emotional expression, and social relationships in children with autism. Four children completed the study by participating in at least three private music-play sessions attended by the child, his or her mother, and the researcher. All music-play sessions were person-centered and child-led. A local public elementary school hosted the music-play sessions in the music classroom after school hours. In addition, the school supplied all the musical instruments used in the study. The researcher utilized the SCERTS Model assessment tool to examine each child’s abilities in socio-musical communication …

Pancho Vladigerov's Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 31 In B Flat Minor: A Representative Work Of The Golden Period In Bulgarian Art Music, Lora Geteva Gubanov

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The purpose of this document is to provide a better understanding of Pancho Vladigerov's influence on Bulgarian art music, as well as to contribute to the growing interest in his music and in Bulgarian art music in general. The focus of discussion is the years 1932-1939, referred to as the Golden period of Bulgarian art music. Pancho Vladigerov's Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 31 serves as a representative work of the achievements during this period. Chapter One provides a brif summary of the historic significance of the Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 31. Chapter Two focuses of the socio-cultural, economic, …

2nd Place Contest Entry: From A Chat In The Parlor To Viral Music Videos: An Analysis Of Music As A Social Occasion, Emma F. Plotnik

Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize

This is Emma Plotnik's submission for the 2016 Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize, which won second place. She wrote about the impact of salons on the musical world in past centuries, and created a modern virtual salon of her own.

Emma is a senior at Chapman University, majoring in Music with a minor in Law, Justice, and Social Control. Her faculty mentor is Dr. Jessica Sternfeld.

Development Of A Rubric For Collegiate Jazz Improvisation Performance Assessment, Kendall Ryan Moore

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to develop a jazz improvisation rubric for the evaluation of collegiate jazz improvisation. To create this measure, research objectives were devised to investigate the aurally- observed performer-controlled components of improvisation, which aurally-observed components should be evaluated in an improvisatory performance, and whether a comprehensive measure could be developed to evaluate such a performance. Published methods on general music performance, jazz improvisation performance methods, jazz pedagogy texts, and statements from jazz educators and performers were content analyzed and cross referenced to determine overarching similarities and create criteria for evaluation. After conducting research, it was determined …