Folklore Commons^™

Representasi Identitas Dan Gastronomi Budaya Kuliner Jawa Dalam Lima Lagu Karya Ki Narto Sabdo, Aditya Pratama, Darmoko -, Ari Prasetiyo, Dwi Woro Retno Mastuti

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Culinary is not just food and drink, but has transformed into a study of culinary gastronomy which focuses on aspects of history, values, philosophy, taste and components. The study of the problems discussed in this research is related to the cultural identity of Javanese culinary gastronomy in the five songs by Ki Narto Sabdo. Descriptive qualitative research methods with an objective approach were applied in this research. This research uses Santich's culinary gastronomy theory and Stuart Hall's theory of cultural identity representation with a constructionist approach. As a result, the representation of Javanese culinary gastronomic cultural identity is built on …

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 …

Living Heritage, Resilience And Ethically Informed Infrastructures In Malawi, Martha B. Lerski, Frank Puluputu Mwale

Publications and Research

Rooted in a rural community’s needs, this paper explores how historically, and ethically informed infrastructures can support community engagement towards identification, documentation, and dissemination of local, traditional, and indigenous knowledge relating to climate change. The paper examines climate adaptation and sustainability issues through the lenses of community organizing and Library & Information Science best practices. It draws on a growing body of literature identifying a role for expanded epistemological and subject discipline perspectives. While the impacts of climate on material culture are increasingly recognized, intangible, and biocultural heritage have not received as much attention. Living heritage traditions and knowledge systems …

Arts-Based Sustainability: From New York To Malawi, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Recognizing that libraries serve multiple constituencies and subject areas, this chapter documents and advocates for development of transdisciplinary arts-based research (ABR) and culture-related projects linked to environmental challenges. Libraries contribute collections and spaces, as well as the research of library and information scientists. Libraries are currently among invisible contributors to sustainability planning and services. The chapter will link this invisibility to the value of what visual arts refer to as negative space elements in subjects ranging from traditional ecological knowledge to environmental science. Library collections, projects, and research contribute to education for sustainable development (ESD) as required to achieve the …

Tuning Out The Dark: Music As A Defense And Folk Solution, Melanie Kimball

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

Music across cultures and throughout history is a tool for engaging with the supernatural. It shares similarities with apotropaic magic. Through research and ethnographic fieldwork, I argued that even in modern times, individuals use music as an apotropaic remedy for fear and negative emotions. These remedies reflect strategies identified by Jeannie Thomas, including companionship, magical substance, neutralization, and displacement. Modern apotropaic music regulates emotions, re-establishes personal relationships, creates safe environments, and provides a means of control.

Contributors used music to combat various negative feelings, selecting genres that matched their emotional needs. In the absence of family and friends, music reaffirmed …

“Forget The Rest ...”: Notes On Magnetic Tape And Other Antiquated Media As Archives Of Afro-Atlantic Liturgy, David Font-Navarrete

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The virtuosic complexity of Afro-Cuban orisha music has led scholars and artists to enshrine it as a “classical” tradition, and it has become one of most iconic and closely-studied sacred music traditions of the historical Afro-Atlantic. This essay traces the legacies of several analog-era multimedia technologies in orisha music traditions: reel-to-reel and cassette tapes; limited edition and out-of-print books and phonograph discs; ephemeral texts such as album liner notes; and photographic negatives, prints, and slides. The tapes and photos — along with a vast body of informal, unpublished, and out-of-print documents of Afro-Cuban orisha liturgy — are seldom archived by …

"If The Gyil Has Died, Dagara Itself Has Died": On The Relationship Of Dagara Music, Food, And Costume, Gordon Cortney

Honors College Undergraduate Theses

The Dagara people, located primarily in the Upper West region of Ghana, take pride in their careful preservation of traditional customs, amidst years of brutal colonization and ethnocide. Previous ethnomusicological research has recognized the gyil, a Ghanaian xylophone, as the focal point of Dagara society, noting how it interacts with and is inherent in all aspects of their culture. Recent developments to the gyil’s design, practice, and performance have created concern for a lost or dying culture among the Dagara. If the gyil is experiencing change, then so too is the rest of Dagara culture. In June and July 2022, …

Bringing Recess Music Indoors: How Attention To Musical Play In The Classroom Impacts A School Community, Angelina B. Scolari

Theses and Dissertations

Why should elementary music teachers learn about the games their students play at recess? This paper discusses the process of recovering children’s folklore at a Bronx elementary school, what findings can teach us about the children in our lives, and how music teachers can use “kid culture” in the classroom.

“800 Years We Have Been Down”: Rebel Songs And The Retrospective Reach Of The Irish Republican Narrative, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

From the glamorous, cross-dressing “Rebel, Rebel” of David Bowie, to the righteous Trenchtown “Soul Rebel” of Bob Marley and The Wailers, both varied and various musical articulations of cultural and socio-political rebellion have long enjoyed a ubiquitous presence across multiple soundscapes. As a musicological delineator in Ireland, however, ‘rebel’ conveys a specifically political dynamic due to its consistent deployment as an all-encompassing descriptor for songs detailing events and personalities from the Irish national struggle. This paper sets out to examine the specific musical delineator of “rebel song” from both musicological and politico-ideological perspectives with a view to interrogating its appropriateness …

2022 Iggad Conference Program, Charles Joyner Institute For Gullah And African Diaspora Studies

IGGAD Conference Programs

Program of the 2022 IGGAD Conference: Who Owns This? Communities, Heritage, and Preservation.

All Roads Lead To Darrington: Building A Bluegrass Community In Western Washington, James W. Edgar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through the mid-twentieth century, a significant pattern of migration occurred between Appalachia and the Pacific Northwest, with Washington’s thriving timber industry offering compelling economic opportunities. Many workers and families from western North Carolina settled in the small mountain town of Darrington, Washington, frequently accompanied by their banjos and guitars. As a group of young bluegrass enthusiasts from Seattle established relationships with Darrington’s “Tar Heel” musicians, a collaborative music community formed, laying the foundation for the region’s contemporary bluegrass scene.

Drawn from a series of ethnographic interviews, this project illuminates the development of a bluegrass community in western Washington, while identifying …

Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …

Marine Melodies: Traditional Scottish And Irish Mermaid And Selkie Songs As Performed By Top Female Vocalists In Contemporary Celtic Music, Olivia H. Phillips

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Mermaids and human-seal hybrids, called selkies, are a vibrant part of Celtic folklore, including ballad and song traditions. Though some of these songs have been studied in-depth, there is a lack of research comparing them to each other or to their contemporary renditions. This research compares traditional melodies and texts of the songs “The Mermaid,” “The Grey Selchie of Sule Skerry,” and “Hó i Hó i” to contemporary recordings by top female vocalists in Scottish and Irish music.

The texts and melodies I have identified as “source” material are those most thoroughly examined by early ballad and folklore scholars. The …

Williams, Michael Ann (Fa 459), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and interview transcriptions for Folklife Archives Project 459. Interviews related to Sarah Gertrude Knott and the National Folk Festival conducted by Michael Ann Williams and Hillary Glatt as part of a joint project for the Kentucky Oral History Commission and Western Kentucky University. The audio interviews did not come with this collection. Interview transcriptions may be accessed by clicking on the "Download" button to the right and then clicking on the hyperlinks in the finding aid.

Ridington, Amber Flower, B. 1969 (Fa 599), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 599. Folk studies project titled: “At the Crossroads: Commercial Music and Community Experience The Quonset Auditorium – A Roadhouse on the Dixie Highway” which includes interviews with performers about their time at the Quonset Auditorium in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Interviews may include a brief description of their performances and memories of the Quonset. Ridington used this material for her WKU master's thesis of the same title.

2020 Iggad Conference Program, Charles Joyner Institute For Gullah And African Diaspora Studies

IGGAD Conference Programs

Program of the 2020 IGGAD Conference: Without Borders: Tracing the Cultural, Archival, and Political African Diaspora.

Ecojustice, Religious Folklife And A Sound Ecology, Jeff Todd Titon

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Folk, traditional, and indigenous ecological knowledges have a significant role to play in ecojustice. A case study in the traditional ecological knowledge among one of the religious communities with whom I have spent several decades illustrates how they embody the main principle and three fields of an ecological rationality: the community of inter-related beings; the ways the beings participate in that community or place; and the relations of nature and the nonhuman world to humans and human nature. Ecological rationality stands in contrast to economic rationality, a branch of instrumental reason exemplified by what economists call rational choice theory. An …

The Strategies And Risks Of Performing Citizenship And Rights Through Music, Carolin Mueller

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

My work explores the capacity of cultural producers to perform “insurgent citizenship,” a term theorized by James Holsten (2008) to describe how the peripheries of social organization can propel alternative modes of civic participation, through music. I utilize Engin Isin’s performative dimension of citizenship (2017) to investigate such forms of insurgent citizenship as they evolve in social and cultural peripheries of the contemporary arts and culture industry in the city of Dresden, Germany to identify the pathways they open to socio-political participation and autonomy for refugees.

While Germany understands itself as a nation of culture, cultural policy unevenly addresses the …

Crawford, Margaret (Fa 1332), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archive Project 1332. Collection of folk songs amassed by Margaret Crawford for a folk studies class at Western Kentucky University. Includes both published songs and songs collected from informants from south central Kentucky. Crawford includes song, name of informant, date of birth, city of residence, and date collected. Also includes a brief essay titled “The Spiritual: An American Folksong.”

Afro-Cuba Transnational: Recordings And The Mediation Of Afro-Cuban Traditional Music, Johnny Frias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the way audio and video recordings and the internet have impacted, shaped, and helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene. My focus will be on the most popular and widely-recorded genres of Afro-Cuban music—rumba and the religious repertoire of Santería, particularly batá drumming—both of which I also perform regularly with other Cuban musicians in Miami. Incorporating interviews, online ethnographic research, and participant-observation as a musician, my research has three main arguments.

First, recordings of Afro-Cuban music helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene by increasing the popularity of these traditions outside of Cuba, including their amateur performance …

Feintuch, Burt, 1949-2018 (Fa 1315), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 1315. Collection of folklife and folk arts by Burt Feintuch, ethnographer of traditional music and professor of folk studies at Western Kentucky University (WKU) from 1975 to 1988. Includes the session materials from the Folklife and the Public Sector: Assessment and Prognosis Conference at WKU, 1985, along with the manuscript and proof pages from his book Kentucky Folkmusic. Recordings of musicians and singers and interviews with the same in Barren, LaRue, Logan, Marshall, Metcalfe, Monroe, Muhlenburg, Todd, and Warren counties in Kentucky and Warren County, Tennessee.

Christmas, Author Unknown

Broadside Ballads: England

The Carol God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

Hymn 3, Author Unknown

Broadside Ballads: England

A song on the Birth of Christ

Hymn 2, Author Unknown

Broadside Ballads: England

A song on the Birth of Christ

Hymn 1, Author Unknown

Broadside Ballads: England

A song on the Birth of Christ

The Alarm, Author Unknown

Broadside Ballads: England

Hymns on Jesus Christ and Redemption

The Weary Travellers, Author Unknown

Broadside Ballads: England

Hymns on Jesus Christ and Redemption

A New Christmas Carol, Author Unknown

Broadside Ballads: England

A Christmas Carol

Our Saviour's Golden Rule, From Matt, Vii. 12., Author Unknown

Broadside Ballads: England

Verses from the Book of Matthew

From Matt, Xxii 17., Author Unknown

Broadside Ballads: England

Verses from the Book of Matthew