Ethnomusicology Commons^™

Thompson, Elois (Fa 1258), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Folklife Archives Project 1258. Student paper titled “Uncle Henry and the Kentucky Mountaineers” in which Elois Thompson details the life and career of “farmer, soldier, boxer, dairy-farm employee, comedian, aircraft factory employee, and hillbilly musician” Henry Green Warren. Thompson describes Warren’s childhood in Green County, his beginnings as a host on a popular radio program, and his time as a musician in several country music bands. Collection contains a draft of the original paper with the editor’s notes and the final copy of Thompson’s paper.

Gender, Politics, Market Segmentation, And Taste: Adult Contemporary Radio At The End Of The Twentieth Century, Saesha Senger

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This dissertation explores issues of gender politics, market segmentation, and taste through an examination of the contributions of several artists who have achieved Adult Contemporary (AC) chart success. The scope of the project is limited to a period when many artists who figured prominently in both the broader mainstream of American popular music and the more specific Adult Contemporary category were most commercially viable: from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. My contention is that, as gender politics and gendered social norms continued to change in the United States at this time, Adult Contemporary – the chart, the format, and the …

Bastin, Glen (Fa 1241), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 1241. Collection of 38 cassette tapes featuring Glen Bastin's regional public affairs syndicated radio program, "Pondering Kentucky: The Magazine." A contents list was prepared and appears at the end of this finding aid.

Schulman, Steven A. (Fa 1227), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 1227. Student paper titled “The Preacher’s Just Like a Grasshopper: A Study of a Kentucky Song Maker” in which Steven Schulman details the life of Howess Dewey Winfrey, a song-maker from Cumberland County. Schulman collected folk songs and performances from Winfrey over the course of two months. His fieldwork revealed that Winfrey was a creator of satirical tunes, which were influenced by his childhood, his experiences with the Church of the Nazarene, his time spent as a logger, his relationships with family and friends, politics, and land ownership. The paper includes excerpts from …

"Sounding The Nile" In Nubian Musical Expression, Regan L. Homeyer

Shared Knowledge Conference

Nubians are indigenous peoples of the Nile River Valley whose ancient civilization parallels that of ancient Egypt. In 1964, 50,000 Egyptian Nubians were removed from their homeland along the Nile because of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s initiative, the Aswan High Dam Project. With fertile lands and sacred temples doomed to inundation by the waters of what is now Lake Nassar, Nubians were resettled in government built villages that promised both preservation of culture and modern conveniences. What these riverine people received, in fact, were poorly constructed, unfinished dwellings located in the desert, more than five miles from the Nile. A …

Syriac Chant And The Limits Of Modality, Sarah Bakker Kellogg

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Sense and Sadness: Syriac Chant in Aleppo, by Tala Jarjour. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 250 pp. ISBN: 978-0-190-63525-1.

Mda As A Research Method Of Generic Musical Analysis For The Social Sciences: Sifting Through Grime (Music) As An Sft Case Study, Monique Charles

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

Using Grime as a case study, I employ the analytical framework I created, that is, Musicological Discourse Analysis (MDA) as a holistic mode of analysis to contextualize Grime sociologically and musicologically. This method retheorizes genre, providing a more specific, useful, and detailed musical classification system; the sonic footprint timestamp (SFT). The MDA framework provides a generic mode of musical analysis for research projects in sociology, cultural studies, and the social sciences fields. This article evaluates key musical influences in the evolution of Grime as both (i) a musical form and (ii) an analysis of influences in relation to its social …

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 …

The Doyen Of Dixie: A Survey Of The Banjo Stylings Of Uncle Dave Macon, Corbin F. Hayslett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

David Harrison Macon (1870-1952) is often memorialized for his showmanship rather than his banjo playing. To compartmentalize such a significant American musician yields a wide gap within scholarship about Macon, country music history and the banjo. Macon’s banjo playing, documented through over two-hundred and fifty recordings made between the 1920s and 1950s, represents an array of cultures, eras, ethnicities, and styles all preserved in the repertoire of one of the most prolific country musicians of the 20^th century. This study reveals Macon’s playing by considering such factors as influences that preceded his professional tenure, identifying elements within his playing …

Building Brand Kurdistan: Helly Luv, The Gender Of Nationhood, And The War On Terror, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Publications and Research

In the early 2000s, the Kurdistan Regional Government hired a US-based firm to begin a public relations campaign called “The Other Iraq.” Since that time, it has worked with a number of PR and lobbying firms to build a cultural, political, and financial apparatus that I refer to as Brand Kurdistan. This apparatus aims to prove to Western audiencesthat the Kurds are a liberal exception in an illiberal Middle East, and to build prospects of KRG’s eventual national independence. This article explores the connections between Brand Kurdistan and the gendering of Kurdish nationalism, focusing particularly on Kurdish pop diva Helly …

Hear We Are: Investigating Sonic Inequality Within Bowling Green, Ohio, Declan Wicks

Honors Projects

Using the framework of Steven Feld’s “acoustemology,” Hear We Are examines the sonic structures of Bowling Green and their effects on, and representation of, diverse communities within Bowling Green. Through modeling the sonic landscape of Bowling Green, Ohio in relation to aggregated census data, Hear We Are explores how the city of Bowling Green has been spatially and sonically organized – whether along lines of class, race, or education. Ultimately, Hear We Are offers a narrative of sound within Bowling Green while reflecting on the consequences of living within different soundscapes, i.e., sonic inequality

Using the theoretical framework of placemaking …

Hip-Hop In Africa : Prophets Of The City And Dustyfoot Philosophers, Msia Kibona Clark

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Throughout Africa, artists use hip-hop both to describe their lives and to create shared spaces for uncensored social commentary, feminist challenges to patriarchy, and resistance against state institutions, while at the same time engaging with the global hip-hop community. In Hip-Hop in Africa, Msia Kibona Clark examines some of Africa’s biggest hip-hop scenes and shows how hip-hop helps us understand specifically African narratives of social, political, and economic realities.

Clark looks at the use of hip-hop in protest, both as a means of articulating social problems and as a tool for mobilizing listeners around those problems. She also details the …

Mediating Gospel Singing: Audiovisual Recording And The Transformation Of Voice Among The Christian Lisu In Post-2000 Nujiang, China, Ying Diao

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The contemporary gospel singing of the Nujiang Lisu in China’s southwestern Yunnan province seems to have been predominated by new media technologies and recorded popular mutgguat ssat music. The prevalence of Christian audiovisual recordings reflects more than a shift in the materiality of Lisu religious practices. Moreover, it speaks to the transformative ways that the Christian Lisu have engaged with technologies for their gospel singing as a practice of religious mediation. New musical styles and expressive forms have been disseminated through recordings and further institutionalized in the worship service and other religious settings. Drawing on a material approach from the …

Paralinguistic Ramification Of Language Performance In Islamic Ritual, Michael Frishkopf

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Across time and space, Islamic ritual practices maintain certain fixed features while adapting to local environments, thereby developing a branching or ramified structure—though political, economic, ideological, or technological factors may cause certain local forms to globalize as well. Such ramification offers a means of interpreting the past as well as a window into religious meaning and the ritual process itself. How does such adaptation take place, what drives it, what is its social-spiritual meaning and impact, what can such a ramified variety across history and place tell us, and where does the essence of such ritual lie? In this paper …

Cervelli, Luanne Beth (Fa 376), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 376. Interview with John Buell Edmonds conducted by LuAnne Beth Cervelli on 18 September 1988. Edmonds, a notable gospel singer from Bowling Green, Kentucky discusses his experiences performing gospel music, his involvement in recording and promoting gospel groups, his relationship with the local choir, and the current state of gospel music.

Music In The Northern Woods: An Archaeological Exploration Of Musical Instrument Remains, Matthew Durocher

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Archaeological and historical literature neglects music and sound. The quantity and distribution of musical remains found during archaeological excavations at Coalwood, a Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company (CCI) logging camp active from 1901-1912 in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, addresses the importance of music to the people that lived there. Musical reed plates from harmonicas, concertinas, and accordions were recovered and examined. These musical remains have traditionally been ignored as a diagnostic artifact, but here, I use them as primary evidence to access the daily lives of people in the northern woods. To do this, I will present how CCI developed Coalwood …

Immigration Et Clips Musicaux : Vers La Construction D’Espaces Sans Frontières, Souleymane Ganou

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Immigration is a reality which touches primarily the young in most country. This phenomenon must be undressed of its blaming considerations, in view of its incommensurable contribution in the development of many countries. If the United States of America arrived at the legalization of immigration, by instituting a lottery called “lottery visa”, it is that they are conscious of the benefit that this phenomenon can bring to their nation. Moreover, the United States is a nation built on the bases of the immigration to which they owe their power today. They are numerous these young people who set off to …

The Acoustics Of Justice: Music And Myth In Afro-Brazilian Congado, Genevieve E. Dempsey

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

For the Afro-Brazilian musicians of popular Catholicism, or Congadeiros, who live precariously on the urban and rural margins of Brazil, ritual undergirds their struggles for subsistence, spiritual fulfillment, and racial equality. When Congadeiros create ritual, they enter into a tradition begun in the seventeenth century in Brazil by their enslaved African and Afro-descendant ancestors who intoned songs of redemption. In keeping with their ancestors’ evocations of dignity during slavery, worshipers in the present day embed multiple kinds of vested interests within ritual festivity to achieve racial equality. This article explores Congado, the ceremonies of these disenfranchised musicians, to …

From Protest Song To Social Song: Music And Politics In Colombia, 1966-2016, Joshua Katz-Rosene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on archival and ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Bogotá and Medellín, this dissertation documents the development of canción protesta (protest song) in Colombia in the 1960s, and tracks its evolution in subsequent decades. At the turn of the 1970s, songwriters affiliated with a grassroots canción protesta movement in Bogotá used music as a vehicle for disseminating leftist political ideology and extolling the revolutionary guerrilla groups that had formed in the Colombian countryside in the preceding years. However, canción protesta was an urban phenomenon that emerged in tandem with other countercultural currents, and their confluence in the late 1960s …

Conference Conversations: Monique Charles On Corbyn And Grime, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Monique Charles

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

Yesterday Renewal co-hosted an event with The Corbyn Effect at Momentum’s conference, The World Transformed, in Brighton. One of the speakers, Monique Charles, recently completed a PhD on grime music. In The Corbyn Effect she looks at the phenomenon of Grime for Corbyn, and we had coffee with her to talk about her work, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Labour Party.

Nau, Kathy (Fa 1061), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 1061. Paper titled “Iowa Fiddle Tunes” by Kathy Nau in which she writes about her project documenting fiddle tunes collected by Bill Hamilton of Winfield, Iowa. Includes annotated music for approximately 23 tunes.

Spectacular Politics And Everyday Performance: Tracing Music From Ceauşescu’S Romania To Multicultural America, Benjamin Dumbauld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing from fieldwork conducted throughout the United States and Canada, this dissertation examines the continued performance of socialist-era music within the Romanian-American community. It addresses why a community largely made up of people who sought to leave the country during the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu continue to perform music tied to that period by tracing the historical performance and reception of multiple genres, ranging from traditional peasant music to folk rock. The dissertation begins by examining the nationalization of Romania’s music industry under the early socialist regime (1944-1965), and locates the difficulties Communist Party members confronted in delineating a …

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 …

Inculturation Of Liturgical Music In The Roman Catholic Church Of Igbo Land: A Compositional Study, Benedict Nwabugwu Agbo

Journal of Global Catholicism

A study of inculturation, composition and music among Catholics in Igboland, Nigeria. The article insects with contemporary discussions of inculturation/enculturation after Vatican II and the recommendation of St. John Paul II in his Ecclesia in Africa.

Grime Launches A Revolution In Youth Politics, Monique Charles

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

"The relationship between grime and politics has been an interesting and evolving one. Grime is a genre of music that emerged at the turn of the 21st century in London’s inner boroughs. Early on, its sound was most closely likened to US hip hop and rap. But those in the know appreciate grime’s deep connections to its UK predecessors, which include music from the British underground scene such as garage and jungle, in addition to Jamaican dancehall, electronic/experimental music, and British punk. The grime 'sound' developed as it grew, eventually being acknowledged as its own genre at the MOBOs in …

We Are One: Singing, Sisterhood, And Solidarity In Appleton-Area Women's Choirs, Lauren Vanderlinden

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Despite its relatively small population, the city of Appleton has a large and thriving women’s choir community. Between the Lawrence Academy of Music Girl Choir, which serves hundreds of girls every year, and Cantala, the women’s choir at Lawrence University, opportunities for involvement in nationally-recognized female-voice ensembles range from second grade all the way through to college graduation. Using the theories of Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler, Green, and Bentham, this project explores the women’s choir culture of Appleton in an attempt to discover the core values of these two influential programs. I accomplished this by conducting ethnographic research in the form …

How Native American Rappers Communicate And Create A Modern Identity, Hannah J. Berge

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Current research concerning identity and Native Americans is sparse outside the realm of expressly Native American scholarship. While most conversations about identity and Native Americans focuses on historical and political aspects, many sources do not explore alternative avenues of contemporary identity creation. This thesis uses Kenneth Burke’s pentad to analyze the lyrics for “AbOriginal” by Frank Waln. The pentad is used to analyze each line of the rap. A new term, alter-agent, is used to identify agents who the agent either associates with or who the agent views as hindering his progress. There is then a count of the number …

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.

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 …

Transmission Of Araquio Music, Songs, And Movement Conventions: Learning, Experience, And Meaning In Devotional Theatre, Florante P. Ibarra

The Qualitative Report

Araquio, a verse play on the search of the holy cross, is an indigenous folk theatre in the town of Peñaranda, province of Nueva Ecija, Philippines that has survived for over a hundred years. This ethnographic-phenomenological study explores the holistic nature of the transmission and learning processes of araquio music and songs as a theatre-ritual. Its transmission as a social phenomenon is an avenue for music learning that may in fact overshadow its being a diminishing tradition. Using the framework of three modes of enculturation (Merriam, 1964) and interpretation of culture (Geertz, 1973), I investigate the music transmission and learning …