Browsing by Subject "Tango"
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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 Search for selection pressures associated with aggregation propensity following whole genome duplication in S.cerevisiae.(2011-12) Wittig, Michael David; Press, William H.; Marcotte, Edward M.It has been theorized that most proteins are under selection pressure to be soluble in crowded cellular spaces. To maintain solubility a proteins’ aggregation propensity should be inversely proportional to their maximum likely concentration. This theory was examined by comparing the proteome of the model organism S. cerevisiae, which has previously undergone a Whole Genome Duplication (WGD) event to the proteome of the closely related yeast K. waltii, which has not undergone WGD. This comparison revealed the following: 1) Predicted aggregation propensities are higher in S. cerevisiae than K. waltii. 2) Aggregation propensity does not predict which genes reverted to a single copy after WGD. 3) In genes which were retained as duplicates in S. cerevisiae after WGD, aggregation propensities rose from the inferred common ancestral protein. 4) Genes retained as duplicates showed less of an increase relative to their homologues in K. waltii than genes which were not retained as duplicates. 5) The relationship between the log predicted aggregation propensity and log mRNA expression level or log protein abundance was not linear as previously predicted. These results suggest that while there is broad selection pressure for reduced aggregation pressure for genes which have been duplicated, the precise relationship between aggregation propensity and gene expression is more complicated than previously predicted. These results also allow speculation that the whole genome duplication in S.cerevisiae may have been made possible by a general relaxation of aggregation-related selection pressure.Item Tango Vesre [Inverted Tango](2012-05) Rangel-Alvarado, Alvin Joel; Williams, Holly A.; Rossen, Rebecca; Wiltshire, Lyn C.; Rodriguez-Ruvalcaba, HectorThe Argentine tango, a beautiful and sexually-charged partnered dance form, is most often characterized as a passionate drama between a man and a woman, where the masculinity of the male dancer as the leader contrasts with the femininity of the female follower. Its origins are deeply rooted in earliest twentieth-century Argentine life, particularly in the barrios of Buenos Aires, where tensions of culture, race, class, sexuality and privilege clashed head on. Because tango is historically and popularly accepted as a heterosexual dance, little attention has focused on its very earliest development and practices, when men often partnered with other men to learn it. This practice was so common that in 1903 the Argentine magazine Caras y Caretas [Faces and Masks] published a series of photographs portraying two men dancing tango to illustrate its basic steps and maneuvers. Inside this early practice lie uninterrogated questions on issues of sexual preference, identity and homosexuality. As a professional dancer and dance scholar, I have explored this aspect of tango’s history from two perspectives: through traditional historiography that investigates the documentation of its iv early practice, and through choreography and performance of an original dance work that affirms that continued practice today. Tango Vesre is a dance performance, that through live performance and video projection, spotlights a 100-year evolution of male tango dance in the Buenos Aires of 1910 and 2010. This work analyzes male/male tango partnerships from historic, performative and choreographic perspectives, examining issues of homosexual bonding and sexual identity through tango dance practice. The choreographic creative process for the dance performance intertwines deep archival research in Argentina and the United States, ethnographic research in Buenos Aires, and studio/movement explorations. In 2009, tango was designated an “Intangible Cultural Heritage” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organizations (UNESCO); Tango Vesre investigates this art form's unacknowledged history and brings forward a new perspective.