Musicology Commons^™

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 …

Enduring Music: Migrant Appalachian Communities And The Shenandoah National Park, Madeline Marsh

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This paper is an archival study of the displaced children of families formerly living in the Shenandoah National Park which spans from Strasburg to Waynesboro, Virginia. The study looks at interviews, from the JMU Special Collections archives, of these children in the 1970-80s, nearly fifty years after their forced migration from the 197,438 acres that comprised the park. Change and pressure during the 1930s-40s combined with national policy began the nostalgic preservation and veneration of the culture of these people of the Blue Ridge Mountains; through the archives, a clear and diverse picture of the perspectives and lifestyles of people …

Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work Of Charlotte Moorman, Saisha Grayson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When classically trained cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) moved to New York City in 1957, she swiftly positioned herself at the intersection of experimental music, performance, video, and the visual arts. She interpreted works by composers like John Cage, collaborated with artists such as Nam June Paik, and founded and organized the New York Avant Garde Festival from 1963 to 1980. This dissertation argues that Moorman’s career sheds new light on what it meant to be an artist in this post-medium-specific moment and proposes that Moorman’s deterritorialization of authorship exerts pressure on traditional art histories. The generative dynamics of her collaborations …

Unmasking Hybridity In Popular Performance, Hannah M. Harder

Student Publications

This paper explores cultural hybridization in popular music and the eroticization of the exotic eastern aesthetic. Using musicology and anthropology as tools, the paper examines varying perspectives of the artists, audience and marginalized groups. Although cultural appropriation has been used recently as a blanket buzzword in mainstream dialogue, it does provide a platform to discuss complex issues on gender, race and sexuality that has been muddled by colonial mentalities.

Women In Music: Letting A Long Story Be Long Contemplating Women’S Sonic, Musical, And Spiritual Experiences In Prehistory, Deborah J. Saidel

Theses and Dissertations

Situated within deep history, this study explores the auditory and spiritual lives of Paleolithic women. It considers their personal agency in mediating the spiritual power of sound and how doing so contributes to a multifaceted musicality. The theoretical framework involves a wide spectrum of topics, from ways of rethinking the writing of history and reckoning with time, to sound studies and the study of acoustics in ancient sites, to a critical examination through a feminist lens of normative disciplinary scholarship in anthropology and archaeology, religious studies, and musicology. I explore potential audio-visual-lithic relationships for their implications for deepening an understanding …

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 …

Eighteenth Century Women And The Business Of Making Glass Music, Kate M. Hepworth

History

During the relatively short period from the mid-to-late eighteenth century when glass musical instruments were manufactured and gained popularity, several women made names for themselves in the realm of avant-garde musical performance. The lives of three female glass instrument players: Anne Ford, Marianne Davies, and Marianne Kirchgassner, show how these successful performer-entrepreneurs operated in an age of emerging feminine public identity. Their journeys reveal much about the gender dimensions of the age, the role of music in the modern era, the consumption of it, and their approach to business. The financial opportunities presented to women looking to challenge the limitations …

Virtuoso Violinist Maud Powell: Enduring Champion For American Women In Professional Music, Sarah Joy Pizzichemi

Glenn Korff School of Music: Dissertations, Theses, Student Creative Work, and Performances

Maud Powell, the first great American virtuoso violinist, sparked a change in the spirit of the advancement of classical music throughout North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This document addresses gender inequality present in the classical music profession during Powell’s lifetime. It also explores the roles women occupied in the public and private spheres in Western art music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More specifically, it investigates the life of virtuoso violinist Maud Powell through her activism and interest in American women in professional music.

The document is divided into three parts. After a …

Hildegard Of Bingen: Visionary Woman Who Encouraged The Role Of Feminism, Melissa K. Treharn

Undergraduate Distinction Papers

This paper will discuss the life of Hildegard of Bingen and how her musical and lifestyle choices can be defined as that of a feminist. Hildegard was a nun during the mid 1100's who was given the gift of visions. These visions, sent from God, told her about how she should be living her life and the lessons she should be teaching her followers. However, as a woman during this time, Hildegard had no power or any opportunities to share these ideas with others without being shunned as stepping outside of her "gender role." It was not until she gained …

A Document In Death And Madness: A Cultural And Interdisciplinary Study Of Nineteenth-Century Art Song Settings On The Death Of Opelia, Jennifer Leigh Tipton

Dissertations

In the nineteenth century the character of Ophelia transformed from a minor role in Hamlet into one of the great muses of the Romantic period. Ophelia’s rise to an archetype of feminine madness was not a result of Shakespeare’s pen alone, but of the accumulation of interpretations of her character from actresses, artists, critics, writers, musicians, and social attitudes toward women. This paper focuses on nineteenth-century interpretations of her death, specifically art song.

A brief survey of the nineteenth-century European cultural and social climate pertaining to Ophelia is included in the paper:

*Shakespeare in France and Germany

*Nineteenth-Century Actresses in …

La Vida Sexual De Chopin, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

El protagonista de La nàusea, Antoine Roquentin, té una existència grisa i soporífica a la provinciana i asfixiant ciutat de Bouville. Afortunadament té temps per redactar un diari en el qual anota les poques vicissituds de la seva vida. La falta d'activitats externes es compensa amb temps per reflexionar, rumiar i escriure. Antoine realment no riu sinó que únicament sobre in. Tot i que no li manquen conforts materials, la seva vida no té sentit. Així, anhela una vida amb una existència més plena, una vida que vagi més enllà de l'existència biològica quotidiana.

Schubert's Sexuality: A Prescription For Analysis?, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

What can Schubert's sexuality have to do with the analysis of his music? Four years ago, Maynard Solomon told a compelling story about a leading Austro-Germanic composer, one whose works are unlikely to be excluded from the narrowest definitions of the canon of European music since 1700: he was probably homosexual. Since then, Solomon's tentative argument has hardened into "fact" in the popular musicological imagination, not because additional evidence has become available, but because, in a field starved of headlines and scandal, such a revelation promised a much needed change of critical perspective.

Mary Cassatt/Edgar Degas And Clara Wieck/Robert Schumann: The Comparative Status Of Female And Male Artists And Composers In The Nineteenth Century, Carol Ann Munchel O.S.F.

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The nineteenth century bequeathed few women artists and composers to art and music history as currently recorded. Those women, noted by biographers and historians, seem to be inferior to their male contemporaries in status and significance. This paper has attempted to trace the development of two women in the arts, Mary Cassatt and Clara Wieck, and in comparing their talent, growth, and contributions, uncover possible reasons for the inequality of repute they have been given. The problem, then, was to discover any significant differences in the education, criticism, and acceptance of nineteenth-century artists and composers on the basis of sex. …