xxiii, 507 p. / This dissertation contextualizes melodic variation within a cultural, historical, and cognitive framework. This work discusses how traditional musicians learn how to vary melodies by observing norms of social and musical behavior exhibited by senior musicians. The core of this dissertation is the transcription and analysis of fifty source recordings of fifty different Irish musicians playing one tune each dating from between 1904 and 2007. Though the transcriptions of the recordings exhibited a high instance of melodic variation (48.2% of the measures), only a small percentage of variation fell on set accented tones (an average of 7.3%). The considerable invariance of set accented tones suggests that part of what constitutes the concept of a tune in an Irish musician's mind relates to the pitch of these key tones. I introduce the term aesthetic conservatism to designate a philosophical approach to performance practice that seeks to maintain both the dance genre and tune identity. I argue that aesthetic conservatism may be a by-product of archetypes and exemplars created through transcriptions and recording technology. This conservatism may also be a function of famine-induced fear of cultural dissolution or inferiority with respect to more prominent music-making supercultures. I call on the philosophy of aesthetic conservatism to explain why few set accented tones are varied. Of the measures that were varied, 74% of those variations involved the addition, subtraction, or redistribution of ornamentation. To catalogue the variety of variations within this sample, I propose a taxonomy that is designed to account for the number of notes in a measure and to assess intervallic differences over successive repetitions of a tune. Finally, I propose a theory to explain the cognitive processes that allow a musician to vary a melody. I suggest that in the mind of a traditional musician there is both a tune schema and a variation schema. These are flexible models that are distinct and separate but that interact within a short span of time because of the exceptionally efficient anatomy of a musician's brain. / Committee in charge: Anne Dhu McLucas, Chairperson; Lori Kruckenberg, Member; Stephen Rodgers, Member; Glen Waddell, Outside Member

No abstract included. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

This study documents the rise of party political public relations in Northern Ireland and explores its impact on the media and the peace/political process more generally. While this research primarily charts and describes the chronological development of public relations pertaining to Northern Ireland's four main political parties (the SDLP, Sinn Fein, the DUP and the UUP), it also explores the media-source relations or interactions between journalists and public relations personnel. Significantly, political public relations has expanded considerably in Northern Ireland since the mid-90s, and political parties are increasingly utilising PR to enhance their media relations capabilities and improve their image (or `brand') with the public. What was once mainly the remit of the British government and its agencies in Northern Ireland (that is, political public relations) has now become an area in which the four main political parties (to varying degrees of success) have become increasingly more professional and well-resourced. The result of this expansion of party political public relations has seen the regional media in Northern Ireland become increasingly more vulnerable to the promotional efforts of `spin doctors' or media relations personnel from all four parties. This research, while acknowledging that there are undoubtedly multiple factors involved in how people decide to vote, argues that the 71.12% Yes vote in favour of the Good Friday Agreement can be partly explained by the significant impact of public relations strategies and techniques employed by a number of key behind-the-scenes players and conducted publicly by influential, high-profile figures. Essentially, it challenges the argument prevalent in the vast majority of literature on elections that public relations campaigns have very little `effect' on voting behaviour or that those changes of voting behaviour are due either to other factors or to long-term media campaigns and influences. This research also argues, on the one hand, that the electoral success of both Sinn Fein and the DUP in recent years (the two parties `hungry' for political power, who became the leading political parties in nationalism and unionism respectively) can be partly explained by their `courting' of the media and their development of strong and efficient communications structures. On the other hand, the recent electoral failure of both the SDLP and the UUP can be partly explained by their laissez-faire or complacent approach to both public relations and the media, and their weak and inefficient communications structures in comparison to both Sinn Fein and the DUP.

This thesis seeks to delineate what change in divided societies such as Northern Ireland is possible. Two steps are necessary to answer this question: first, to explain the potency of nationalism. I contend that taking the evolutionary history of humans and a human need to belong into account is essential for an understanding of A.D. Smith's ethno-symbolist approach to nationalism. We need to acknowledge that human beings emerged from small-scale settings and are therefore conservative beings who seek those patterns of familiarity that make up the ordinary ‘everyday'. They are also prejudiced beings, as prejudice helps to break down a complex world into digestible pieces. The ethnic state excluding an ethnic ‘other' is an answer to these calls for simplicity. By establishing an apparent terra firma, a habitus, symbols of an ethnic past and national present speak of nationalist narratives that provide a sense of ontological security. In (Northern) Ireland, ethno-national communities based on prejudiced understandings of history have long been established. In this second step I maintain that change that violates the core potent national narratives cannot be achieved. The Provisional IRA's change from insurrection to parliament became feasible because a radical break with republican dogmas was avoided. Sinn Féin, despite a rhetorical move towards ‘reconciliation', still seek to outmanoeuvre the unionist ‘other'. The history of Irish socialism, on the other hand, has been a failure, as it embodied a radical attempt to banish the ‘other' from the national narrative. Regarding ‘post-conflict' Northern Ireland, I argue for a peacebuilding approach that leaves the confinements of hostile identity politics, as these mass guarantors of ontological security possess only limited potential for relationship transformation. We need to appreciate those almost invisible acts of empathy and peace that could be found even in Northern Ireland's darkest hours.

To understand the complexity of life in a city one needs to consider a spectrum of experience. Belfast has a history of conflict and division, particularly in relation to the Troubles, reflected in comprehensive academic studies of how this has affected, and continues to affect, the citizens. But this is a particular mode of representation, a vision of life echoed in fictional literature. People's quotidian lives can and do transcend the grand narratives of the Troubles that have come to dominate these discourses. Anthropology has traditionally accorded less epistemological weight to fleeting and superficial encounters with strangers, but this mode of sociality is a central feature of life in the city. The modern stranger navigates these relationships with relative ease. Communicating with others through narrative – personal stories about our lives – is fundamental to what it is to be human, putting storytelling at the heart of anthropological study. Engagements with strangers may be brief encounters or build into acquaintanceship, but these superficial relationships are not trivial. How we interact with strangers – our public presentation of the self to others through the personal stories we share – can give glimpses into the private lives of individuals. Listening to stories of quotidian life in Belfast demonstrates a range of people's existential dilemmas and joys that challenges Troubled representations of life in the city. The complexity, size and anonymity of the city means the anthropologist needs different ways of reaching people; this thesis is as much about exploring certain anthropological methodologies as it is about people and a place. Through methods of walking, performance, human-animal interactions, my body as a research subject, and using fictional literature as ethnographic data, I interrogate the close relationship between method, data and analysis, and of knowledge-production and knowledge-dissemination. I present quotidian narratives of Belfast's citizens that are Not-the-Troubles.

This thesis argues that Irish can and should be revitalized. Conducted as an observational study, this thesis focuses on interviews with 72 participants during the summer of 2013. All participants live in the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland. This thesis investigates what has caused the Irish language to lose power and prestige over the centuries, and which Irish language revitalization efforts have been successful. Findings show that although, all-Irish schools have had a substantial growth rate since 1972, when the schools were founded, the majority of Irish students still get their education through English-medium schools. This study concludes that Irish will survive and grow in the numbers of fluent Irish speakers; however, the government will need to further support the growth of the all-Irish schools. In conclusion, the Irish communities must take control of the promotion of the Irish language, and intergenerational transmission must take place between parents and their children.

Anglo-Free State relations between the wars still awaits a comprehensive study ... This is in par a reflection of the larger failure of British historians to work on Anglo-Irish history '" the Right has been ill at ease dealing with Britan's greatest failure, whilst the Left has found tropical climes more suited for the cultivation of its moral superiority. When R.F.Holland made this apposite comment, just over a decade ago, he may have been adding to the very problems he identified. Writing within the context of the 'Commonweath Alliance', he was joining a distinguished list of British and Irish historians who have sought to fiter inter-war Anglo-Free State relations through the mesh of Empire-Commonweath development. Beginning with A. Berredale Keith in the 1920s, this usage continued in either direct or indirect form (by way of particular institutions of Commonweath) from the 1930s to the 1970s through the works of W.K. Hancock, Nicholas Mansergh and D.W. Harkness, and was still finding favour with Brendan Sexton's study of the Irish Governor-Generalship system in the late 1980s.2 But herein a contradiction has developed: cumulative study of the unnatural origins and performance of the Free State as a Dominion has moved beyond questions of function to ask whether the Free State was in fact ever a Dominion at alL. 3 As such, there seems ever more need to step back from inter-Commonwealth study and refocus on the precise nature of the Free State's central relationship with Britan in this period. It is of course acknowledged that outwith the established zones of internal Irish and Empire-Imperial study there is no home or forum for one of the most enduring quandares of modern Europea history. Even if it is accepted that 'pure' Anglo-Irish history did not end in 1922, the weight of research based on the ten yeas prior, as against the ten yeas subsequent, suggests an easy acceptance, on both sides of the Irish Sea, and Atlantic, of the absolute value changes in that relationship. Studies covering the transition to independence, such as those of Joseph M. CUITan and Sheila Lawlot, have taen only tentative steps beyond 1922, and may indeed have epitomised an approach that subsequent Irish studies have done little to dispel; in the 1980s, major overviews by RF. Foster and J.J. Le have been notably reluctant to evaluate the quality of that new found freedom with continuing reference to Ireland's giant neighbour. Though Foster, and others, have noted that the main aim of the Free State in the 1920s was 'self-definition against Britan', the point is the extent to which Britan was wiling to allow the same. There has then been little impetus for direct Anglo-Free State inter-war study, and although the tide has begun to turn since the mid-1980's, notably through the achievements of Paul Canning, Deidre McMahon and, shortly before his death, Nicholas Mansergh6, it is probable that we are stil a long way short of being able to produce a comprehensive and coherent review of the period. Apar from the crucial Anglo/Irish-Anglo/Commonwealth dichotomy,there remains the political chasm dividing the Cosgrave years of the 1920s from those of de Valera's 1930s; indeed the overwhelming preoccupation with post-1931 confrontations has often, as in the case of McMahon's fine study, taen as its contrasting staing point the supposedly compliant 'pro-Treaty' years of 1922-31. It is hard to bridge this gulf when the little direct work on these earlier years, mostly concentrating on the two fundamenta issues of Boundar and financial settlement, has tended not to question this divide. Although Irish historians have turned an increasingly sympathetic eye on the internal politics and problems of these early yeas, the apathetic external image, in contrast to the later period, has been persistent. Nowhere has this negativity been more apparent than on the, also vita, topic of defence relations. For a subject that has been given more than adequate attention in terms of the 1921 Treaty negotiations and the Treaty Ports issue of the 1930s, the period in between has had little intensive coverage. In this regard the negative response of W.K.Hancock in 1937, stating that Cosgrave did not bother to question British defence imperatives, was stil being held some fifty yeas later by Paul Canning.7 Thus an enduring and importt image has emerged of defence relations re-enforcing the above divide, an image that has had to stand for the lack of new reseach. This does not mea that the image is necessarly an entirely false one, but it does mean that many of the supposed novelties of the de Valera yeas have been built on largely unknown foundations. The Treaty Ports issue is also vita to this thesis, but then so are other defence related matters which had an impact specific to the 1920s. In other words, the human and political context of how both countries, but the Irish government in paricular, coped with the immediate legacy of centuries of armed occupation, with the recent 1916-21 conflct, and with the smaller scale continuity of British occupation, was bound to cast old shadows over a new relationship. But how big were these shadows? It was on the basis of placing some detaled flesh on the skeleton of known (and unknown) policies and events that this thesis took shape. Frustrations and resentments could tae necessarily quieter forms than those which characterised the 1930s, and in the end be no less significant. If the first objective is then to make solid the continuity of defence affairs, it is appropriate to begin with a brief evaluation of the Treaty defence negotiations before tang a close look at British operations in the South in 1922 - the year when a reluctant Cosgrave was to inherit a situation where British forces were close to the development of civil war. Despite our growing knowledge of Britan's part in the progress of that war, there is stil a general perception that its forces became peripheral to events after the Truce of July 1921, and that its Army was, and had been, the only British Service involved in the struggle against armed republicanism.This is simply not the case, and it is to be wondered whether the proper absorption of Irish historians with the internal dynamics of the period, together with the authoritative quality of Charles Townshend's history of the 1919-21 British campaign, have not produced inhibitions to wider inquiry. 8 In any event, as the Admiralty was to play a central par in later defence relations it seems right to introduce, for the first time, the Royal Navy's importt role in the events of 1922. The point here is to establish that the actions and perceptions of both Services were to have repercussions for later attitudes. After these chapters, the following two aim to look at the cumulative legacy of British involvement and how both countries adjusted to the many unresolved questions thrown up by the Treaty and the unplanned contingencies of 1922. Retaining the theme that neither country could escape the past, nor trust to the future, chapter six returns to the physical and political impact made by the continuing presence of British forces in and around the three Treaty Ports, and along and across the Border. The final two chapters explore how all these factors helped determine the conditions for, and consequences of, one of the most damaging episodes of the later 1920s - the complete failure of the joint coasta defence review scheduled for December 1926.In all, the cumulative emphasis on the politics of defence may ilustrate what it was to be a small aspiring country that had little choice but to accept Britan's version of what was an inevitably close relationship, and to endure what Britan claimed as the benign strategic necessity of continued occupation.

No description available.

In the summer of 1611, Sir George Carew, the Irish Elizabethan military commander and former president of Munster, was commissioned by the king and his royal council in London to conduct an enquiry into all aspects of the Castle administration. Included in that wide mandate was an investigation into the existing practices and procedures of the Irish exchequer and judiciary, the two most important divisions of the Dublin government. This thesis is concerned with these two aspects of the commission of Sir George Carew. Since it is requisite for an understanding of the terms of reference handed to Sir George Carew in 1611, the study includes an analysis of the exchequer and judiciary between 1603 and 1611. In addition, there is an examination of the fiscal and judicial reforms that the king and his councillors commanded Irish officials to implement between 1613 and 1616. As is shown, these reformist measures were a direct outgrowth of recommendations submitted by Sir George Carew to the English privy council following the conclusion of his commission in 1611.