Browsing by Subject "Popular music"
Now showing 1 - 13 of 13
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Another kind of truth : a study of self-mythology in popular music(2013-05) Moench, Michael Creighton; Slawek, Stephen; Carson, Charles D.The connection between music and the formation of identity has been extensively explored in Ethnomusicology, as has the connection between music and the articulation of personal truth and knowledge. One peculiar artifact in the history of American popular music that raises many questions about both identity and truth is the interaction between musical performance and personal mythology. Many musicians have actively cultivated a mythic self--‐conception, while still others have gone to the lengths of creating an entire new name and history for themselves in their performances and recordings. My interest in this essay is to explore the production, transmission and modification of mythemes and mythology in conjunction with the production of musical sounds and other aspects of performative artistry. In particular I am examining the careers of Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, Sly & The Family Stone, Parliament--‐ Funkadelic and Prince in order to explore how and why these musicians created a coherent mythology in their art, or contributed to mythic, archetypal conceptions of themselves in the press and popular culture. Rather than analyzing the musical and visual productions of these artists as expressions contingent on the narrative or ideological intentions of their respective “myths”, or taking the reverse course of treating alter--‐egos and personal myths as superficial trappings of show business that coexists with the true essence of their art (e.g. the music itself) I am examining the recursive interaction between sound, image, and storytelling. Drawing on concepts from scholars of myth like Claude Levi--‐Strauss, Joseph Campbell and Bruce Lincoln, as well as scholars of Black Music history such as Paul Gilroy and Guthrie Ramsey, I intend to demonstrate that in art as in life, mythology is a vital part of how we perceive our world and ourselves. Furthermore, these examples illustrate that art is often a holistic experience where elements of sound, vision, and story are interdependent and can seldom if ever be truly separated.Item A class piano course of study for music industry majors based on popular music and jazz(2014-08) Stoltzman, Peter John; Duke, Robert A.; Hellmer, Jeffrey L.Tens of thousands of music students enroll in group piano classes each year in colleges and conservatories in the United States. Degree programs related to Music Industry are attracting increasingly diverse student populations and in turn are requiring curricular and instructional modifications that better accommodate the needs of these students. The basis of this dissertation is the development of a series of contemporary class piano workbooks that focus on contemporary popular music and jazz in ways that optimize student learning, combining wide-ranging repertoire with assignments that encourage independent application of knowledge and skills. The workbooks illuminate how the piano is used in professional performance and recording; develop skills that can translate directly into professional music settings; and afford students opportunities to understand, learn, and play music that friends, family, and students themselves know and enjoy.Item Disciplining the popular : new institutions for Argentine music education as cultural systems(2010-05) O'Brien, Michael Seamus, 1978-; Moore, Robin D.; Erlmann, Veit; Slawek, Stephen; Keeler, Ward; Costa-Giomi, EugeniaThis dissertation focuses on a recent but growing movement in Argentina, state-sponsored formal institutions of popular music education. The musics taught in these schools – tango, jazz, and Argentine folk idioms – have historically been excluded from the country’s formal music education systems. Recent moves to standardize and legitimize these musics in this new institutional context raise questions of canon formation, pedagogical praxis, aesthetics and musical meaning that have implications far beyond the classrooms where they are implemented. I examine two of these schools based in and around the capital city of Buenos Aires: the Escuela de Música Popular de Avellaneda, and the Tango and Folklore department of the Conservatorio Superior de Música “Manuel de Falla.” I adopt an ethnographic approach that considers broad structural and policy issues of power distribution, state intervention, and cultural nationalism. I also examine how these structures play out in discourse and practice within and beyond the classroom, shaped by and in turn shaping students’ and teachers’ aesthetics, politics, and subject positions. I then analyze the output of several musical groups composed of current students and recent graduates of these programs, exploring the notion of an emerging institutional aesthetic and the extent to which these institutions act as homogenizing influences or engender creative divergence. Finally, applying Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a field of cultural production, I question the extent to which this new “música popular” is truly popular, ultimately arguing that it occupies a sort of third space between mass culture and high culture, replicating some avant-garde assumptions about the role of art as anti-commercial, yet simultaneously embracing a symbolic economy that valorizes populist and subaltern identities and ideologies.Item Doctoral thesis recital (tuba) chamber(2017-03-20) Avila, Alex; Not availableHashtags. #Satinsheets -- #Ginandoctatonic -- #Itsnotgood -- #Secretchord -- #Ittakestwo -- #Halftime -- #Thegreatestthing -- #Dialup -- #Bowlcut -- #Tag -- #Hashtags. (FivE: Alex Avila, Drew Bonner, Luke Gall, Mitch Mest, euphoniums)Item Mashups : history, legality, and aesthetics(2011-05) Boone, Christine Emily; Buhler, James, 1964-; Alm�n, Byron; Drott, Eric; Dell'Antonio, Andrew; Weinstock, JohnAs the popularity of mashups attests, individual songs and their increasingly irrelevant prepackaged albums no longer seem to constitute a finished product to many who listen to them. Instead individual songs often serve as raw ingredients for use in another recipe – the playlist, the mix, the mashup – which those who buy the songs make and exchange. The strict division between producers and consumers, which the music industry exploited very productively throughout the twentieth century, seems to be breaking down, and I conclude that the mashup models a different, more fluid relationship between musical consumption and production. In this dissertation, I examine mashups from a music theoretical point of view. I argue that the mashup represents an important musical genre with distinguishing characteristics and its own historical development. Chapter 1 defines the mashup and devises a typology that classifies the genre based on two characteristics: number of songs combined and the mode of their combination (vertical or horizontal). This typology leads to the division of the mashup into four distinct subtypes. Chapter 2 discusses significant legal challenges raised by the mashup, especially with respect to copyright. Mashups – at least in recorded form – began as an underground, largely non-commercial phenomenon, due to the cost and difficulty of obtaining permission to use another artist’s recording. I also examine various pertinent musical lawsuits and discuss their influence on the way mashup artists make and distribute their works. Chapter 3 probes the historical factors that led to the development of mashups, including sampling in hip hop music (both recorded and live), collage techniques in art music, and looping and mixing by club DJs. Chapter 4 investigates the aesthetics of the mashup. Critics in the popular press and on the internet judge mashups without specifying the musical characteristics that make a particular mashup successful. This chapter seeks to locate the aesthetic principles that govern mashup production. Using commentary by mashup artists as well as transcription and analysis of several mashups, I divide these aesthetic principles into two categories: construction and meaning. I then develop a list of characteristics that mashup artists aim for when creating their tracks.Item Music and patent medicine : constructing and performing ideal bodies in the American medicine show(2015-08) Binder, Laura Jean; Carson, Charles, Ph. D.; Dell'Antonio, AndrewFrom its peak in the 1890s through its gradual decline in the first half of the twentieth century, the American medicine show occupied a significant place in American medical, advertising, and entertainment culture. With close ties to vaudeville, circuses, and Wild West shows, the American medicine show packaged its advertising messages among various performative and participatory entertainment forms. This study examines the role played by music in these medicine shows, highlighting the ways in which musical repertories intersect with nostrum advertising by constructing and marketing ideal health and ideal bodies. In particular, this study draws on disability theory as articulated by Rosemarie Garland Thomson and echoed by a host of new, emerging scholarship in music and dis/ability. While patent medicine companies of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century marketed their products through songbooks -- pamphlets which integrated brief advertising messages with popular song texts -- the dominant American medicine show of the mid-twentieth century shifted to marketing its products through recorded music. Though their media forms differ, the constructed ideal body of the early medicine show and mid-century medicine show remain consistent: young, male, and sexually potent. Similar insights into historically constructed ideal bodies comes from considering musical repertories produced in response to patent medicine consumption, in which individuals narrate their own experiences with socially charged health, illness, dis/ability, and embodiment.Item The musical mode : rock and Hollywood cinema(2008-12) Bozelka, Kevin John; Staiger, JanetThis project seeks to determine the extent to which rock music brought an end to the Hollywood film genre of the musical. It stresses the importance of rock and post-1960s popular music scholarship to film studies and vice-versa. Both objects of popular music inquiry remain relatively unexamined within film studies. But while the value of film studies to popular music scholarship has been much more widely acknowledged, much more work remains in these areas. Therefore, this project will look at the workings of rock ideology and how it impacted the development of the Hollywood musical. It will also examine recording technology and the ways in which it transformed both the film and music industries. The second half of this project is an extended analysis of how Hollywood films of the post-rock era (1970 onward) have reflected these changes. It theorizes that it was not so much the musical that “died” in this era as it was a particular kind of musical number – the Spontaneous Outburst of Song. The later chapters use the concept of mode as opposed to genre to examine how the pleasures offered by the musical of the classical Hollywood era remain available albeit in different guises and genres. Furthermore, these pleasures are capable of fostering the kinds of communities, if not utopias, that some scholars claim have died along with the classical Hollywood era.Item No end in sight : a critique of poptimism's counter-hegemonic aesthetics(2010-12) Broyles, Susan Elizabeth; Staiger, Janet; Nehring, NeilPoptimism is a school of contemporary popular music criticism characterized by its rejection of the notion of the “guilty pleasure” and traditions within rock journalism called “rockism.” Through an examination of poptimist writing, particularly Carl Wilson’s “Céline project” (which resulted in a book, Céline Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste) and material on musician Stephin Merritt’s comments at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference in 2006, trends emerge: efforts at combating elitism and promoting populism are belied by practices associated with high levels of cultural capital. These tendencies are examined from three angles. First, following Johan Fornäs, poptimist attitudes toward authenticity and reflexivity are considered. In their treatment of musical texts, poptimists reject rockist notions of authenticity while failing to account for consumers’ need for genuineness. Their grasp of reflexivity is greater when it comes to reception; Wilson’s project, an exercise in self-scrutiny for elitist bias via an attempt to appreciate the music of Céline Dion, shows the significance of reflexivity for poptimism. Second, poptimists’ approach to identity and difference is considered. Commentary on Merritt, who was accused of racism due to his admitted dislike of certain African-American artists and genres, is typical: oversimplified models of hegemony undermine deep concern about identity politics. Poptimists’ advocacy of omnivorous consumption as an anti-elitist strategy is flawed: using intellectual approaches and spurning the middlebrow are practices associated with high cultural capital. This strategy seems to lead to co-optation rather than real change. Third, poptimism’s relationship to value and emotion is analyzed. Poptimists have doubts about value judgments given traditional aesthetics’ hierarchical baggage, yet value judgments are critics’ raison d’être. Poptimism’s rejection of guilty pleasure and Wilson’s “guilty displeasure” concept link aesthetics to affect. Poptimists approach emotion inconsistently, embracing it when convenient but subjecting it to doubt and intellectualization when it seems to support elitism. Like many poptimist strategies, populist ideas motivate this approach, but it emulates hegemonic traditions.Item Permanent underground : radical sounds and social formations in 20th century American musicking(2012-05) Cline, John F.; Smith, Mark C.; Hagstrom Miller, Karl; Thompson, Shirley; Hoelscher, Steven; Lewis, RandolphMusical labor entered a new phase of alienation following the advent of recording technology in the late 19th century. Whereas prior to recording musicians had a relatively direct relationship with their audience—the sum of the two groups constituting “musicking”—sound reproduction created a spatial and temporal dislocation between them. Most narratives of American popular music trace out a particular genre formation, and relate it to the culture from whence it emerged. By contrast, this dissertation begins from the point where musicking began to disengage from commodification, both at the level of social formation and of the creation of sound itself. Drawing on anthropologist Pierre Clastres’ notion of “Anti-State” modes of organization and cultural critic Ivan Illich’s concept of “conviviality,” or a human-centered rather than mass production-oriented use of tools—in this case musical instruments both handmade and modified—each chapter of this project tackles a different dimension of the quest for autonomous musicking, or a “permanent underground.” Chapter 1 examines the organizational principles that have run in parallel to the bureaucratic, capitalist manifestation of a “music industry” in the 20th century. Beginning with a critique of either/or fallacy of the opposition posited between “modernism” and “nostalgia,” the reminder of the chapter demonstrates the reconciliation between these two aesthetic and political positions; topics include the seizure of public space by itinerant blues musicians in the rural-industrial prewar South, the self-released recordings of gospel artists after WWII, the formation of experimental jazz collectives in the 1960s, and the relationship between psychedelic music and cults/communes in the 1960s. Chapter 2 critiques the function of genre in musicking as means to a reproducible sonic commodity, and argues for “noise” as an aesthetic intervention that disrupts the saleable nature of music—a political act in itself. Chapter 3 suggests several strategies for achieving “noise.” These include the re-purposing of industrial machines as musical instruments, the incorporation of foreign musical traditions, and the use of collage as a formal principle. The final chapter profiles six collectives that have emerged since the late 1960s that adhere to the aesthetic and political values established throughout this dissertation.Item Profiles in Courage: Practicing and Performing at Musical Open Mics and Scenes(2010-10-12) Aldredge, Marcus DavidThis dissertation explores the social patterns and cultural layers of musical "open mics" in New York City. The study uses a qualitative approach which includes methods such as ethnography, in-depth interviewing, historical and discourse analyses focusing on open mics and the popular musicians who attend and perform them. Open mics, short for "open microphones," are public events that allow musicians to perform songs without a pre-planned, formal booking with a club or venue. Owing a historical and discursive connection to the folk hootenannies and jazz jam sessions of the past, these events have proliferated and spread considerably across the United States since the 1990s since their development, by name, in the late 1970s. Open mics not only reflect a do-it-yourself and participatory cultural ethos manifested with other recent expressive cultural activities, but also demonstrate a growing interstitial "musical third place" residing between private practicing and public performance. Musical open mics as musical third places provide musicians and singer/songwriters to network with other musicians, practice new musical compositions and play when other performance opportunities are not readily available. It provides a means for musicians to "hone their craft" in terms of performance methods and also construct musical identities in the almost exclusive company of other working singer/songwriters. This "backstage region" is thus framed and keyed by the musicians onto a continuum between two theoretical poles: performance practicing and practicing performance. Performance practicing as defined in this study frames a more performance-oriented display for musicians in locations called "closed open mics" or COMs. These settings, also residing on a theoretical continuum are socially more exclusive in terms of performance types, the aesthetic careers of the performers, the genres represented and the sociological makeup of the setting participants in general. OOMs or "open open mics," on the other hand, usually have a more fluid, diverse sociological composition of musical performers, performance types, and musical genres played and represented in these mainly weekly events. Closed open mics align into more homogeneous, isomorphic settings comprising "local open mic scenes" and open open mics remain more heterogeneous, socially inclusive, and unsettled as "pre-scenes."Item Psychobilly : imagining and realizing a "culture of survival" through mutant rockabilly(2011-05) Kattari, Kimberly Adele; Moore, Robin D.; Erlmann, Veit; Menchaca, Martha; Miller, Karl; Seeman, SoniaIdentifying simultaneously with the cool 1950s greaser, the punk rebel, and the zombies, murderers, and monsters of horror lore, psychobillies (“psychos”) cobble together an identity that expresses their subcultural subjectivity. They construct and cultivate an alternative present, a participatory culture that offers multiple strategies for relieving the pressures of working-class life, for experiencing pleasure despite hardship. As one research participant put it, “psychobilly is a culture of survival.” This dissertation explores the interwoven, multiple reasons why musicians and fans identify with this alternative, underground culture, tracing the integral role it plays in their lives and the ways in which psychobillies creatively reconstitute aspects of the cultural past in the present. I focus on the advantages that a tight-knit social community confers and on the ways in which various fantasies and lived practices provide transcendental escape as well as feelings of control and power. My research draws both from a long line of cultural studies and from more recent trends in popular music scholarship that focus on musical meaning in everyday life. Accordingly, I employ an ethnographic writing style that privileges the multiple voices and identities of my research associates.Item Selling the beat, visualizing the rhythm : MTV, propaganda films, and convergent media in the 1980s(2015-05) Montes, Christopher Daniel; Schatz, Thomas, 1948-; Scott, SuzanneIn the early 1980s, American media industries were changing at a rapid pace. New technologies and corporate structures influenced a new crop of media content indicative of an ever-diversifying mediascape. Influenced by this continuing evolution, the Warner-Amex corporation developed a platform to showcase a new kind of content form, music videos, that sought to mix the flow of radio broadcast with filmed popular music entertainment: MTV, music television. MTV stood as the go-to source for music videos in the United States and became a cultural touchstone in itself. The cable, recording, and advertising industries all had a hand in the channel's development and had to overcome the industrial tensions such an initiative would bring. How would profits be earned? Who produces what? And where will the money come from? Despite its successful premiere on August 1 1981, MTV still underwent a number of transformations, both industrially and culturally, to become the media giant it still is today. One result of this platform's rise in prominence was a need to produce content that would fit well on this new-look channel. Seeing this opportunity, a group of filmmakers formed Propaganda Films in 1986 in order to produce music videos and television advertisements for MTV and other broadcast platforms. These filmmakers, including Hollywood auteurs Steve Golin, Nigel Dick, Dominic Sena, and David Fincher, would have a profound influence on music videos and television advertisements, bringing a distinctive style and authorial vision to non-feature film Hollywood productions. My research details the formation of MTV, the founding of Propaganda Films, and the formal components of Propaganda’s music videos and television advertisements as a means to engage the convergent trends of American media industries during this period. Propaganda Films, a prolific and repeatedly well-regarded organization in the entertainment industry, has yet to have a comprehensive scholarly analysis of its involvement in American media history. My aim is to simultaneously detail a previously underrepresented historical case while providing an interdisciplinary means in which to engage various content forms that are an important component of our media-making cultures and traditions.Item Sound-politics in São Paulo, Brazil(2013-12) Cardoso, Leonardo de; Erlmann, VeitThe way a city sounds has something to do with how its residents move around and interact. It also has to do with the decisions made by the local government, as it tries to eliminate “harmful” and “unnecessary” sounds. This dissertation discusses how residents of São Paulo deal with noise conflicts and the sound-politics these mediations entail. The concept of sound-politics, which I develop throughout the dissertation, intersects with other concepts such as body politics and space politics and as such it denotes controversial sounds as instantiations of individual or collective differences. Here I focus on how state agents mediate controversial sounds. The narrative draws heavily on actor-network theory, which investigates social interaction as an open-ended and localized network made of humans and non-humans. The first part of the narrative discusses São Paulo’s spatial organization, noise legislation, and the enforcement of this legislation. Drawing from ethnography at meetings designed to review noise measurement standards, and at São Paulo’s anti-noise agency, I show the series of negotiations that accompany the identification and prosecution of noisemakers in the city. The second part of the dissertation looks closely at street parties that take place in the suburbs of São Paulo. Known as pancadões (“big thumps,” in reference to the loudness), these parties feature funk carioca and funk ostentação, two styles of popular music, among lower class teenagers in São Paulo’s suburbs. Based on fieldwork among youth, community meetings, and on interviews with police officers, I show how these parties have gone through noisification processes since they first emerged around 2008.