Since the end of the American Folk Revival, in the late 1960s, folk festivals have undergone a dramatic change. Concurrently, folk music was transformed through capital from its origins as national folkloric music to a successful popular music genre. As professional folk music emerged during the late 1950s and 1960s many young people began to get involved. This involvement, often in the promotion of community oriented folk music events, set the stage for the development of independent community folk music clubs and festivals. These two trends (folk music as cultural commodity and folk music as community expression) flowed through one another sweeping away nationalist folk music and leaving an open space. During the 1970s, political and social changes were occurring across North America. The emergence of what Michael Foucault called biopolitics began to change how young people related to the idea of folk music and to the general field of political action. At the same time, organized leftwing political groups, many of which developed out of early 20th century political movements, broke down or splintered into many smaller groups. Some disenchanted political activists turned towards cultural programming as an outlet for their political desire. Along side this, American draft dodgers and Canadian back-to-the-landers moved, from the south and the east, into the Canadian west. Out of this diverse social energy developed urban and rural folk music festivals. Until now folk music festivals in western Canada have not been systematically surveyed nor has their operation been theorized as a mode of creative production. This work develops a historically grounded approach to folk music as a means of social production and challenges the idea that folk music is only a music genre. I conclude, using a theoretical approach developed by Deleuze and Guattari, that contemporary folk music festivals make use of social capital to establish a folk music assemblage. This assemblage provides an alternative, non-centralized, and increasingly global alternative for the flow of music capital. Folk music is no longer a style of music but a mode of doing business in music that is socially oriented and politically and economically potent. / Music

<p>Abstract</p><p>Mexico City's punk scene has a notorious reputation, based on the supposedly angry, rude, and destructive behavior of its integrants. Certainly, participants in the punk scene value intense affects, aesthetics, and interpersonal exchange, but see them as means to amplify their political consciousness, their attempts to create alternative social networks. In this dissertation thesis, based on an extended period of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City's punk scene, I investigate the co-constitution of the aesthetic and political for participants of the punk scene and ask what "the political" might entail for the city's marginalized punk youth. In pursuing a local punk aesthetics that is both righteous and profane, to borrow descriptive terminology from Dick Hebdige, I argue for close formal analysis of musical, artistic, and other social performance. I employ formal analysis to evaluate the flourishing of punk in the context of "el DeFectuoso"--as residents name the hard-scrabble, global South metropolis of Mexico City--decades after punk's initial arrival in Mexico. Deluezian network theory and social movement theory more broadly help me argue for a politically constituted music "scene," created largely through U.S.-Mexico cross-border relations, without fixing its boundaries or stultifying its politics. Additionally, I explore the affective dimensions of punk performance, the role of music in subjectivization, and the importance of the body trained intersubjectively for both listening and performing. It is at the points of convergence of these three approaches that I locate a punk aesthetics as at once a punk ethics, animated by an ideal of "direct action." Within chapters organized through broad themes like networks, violence, labor, and solidarity, I address topics from the harsh, hard-working vocal performances punks employ to the various anarchist currents that shape an always-tenuous, specifically Mexican punk solidarity, constituted through practices like street sing-alongs, the creation of alternative DIY networks of exchange, and fanzine writing and design. Within these routes of investigation, I elucidate the ways in which participants in Mexico City's punk scene use profanity and outrage in the performance of a righteous ethic that informs their struggles to maintain solidarity and make a difference, through an explicitly political social network that is nevertheless grounded in aesthetic experience.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis examines the Riot Grrrl bands of the 1990s, as well as Amanda Palmer today, as examples of feminist punk artists. Rather than focusing on Riot Grrrl as a unique musical episode, this thesis argues that all punk is activist in nature, and that Riot Grrrl was building on this activist tradition while challenging the misogyny implicit in punk culture. Likewise, Amanda Palmer uses similar punk strategies (such as a DIY approach to music production, and direct interaction with fans) to create political music.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 22, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Includes bibliographical references (p. 120-125).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 340-356). Also issued online.

During the first half of the twentieth century, a unique style of guitar playing known as Kentucky thumbpicking was developed by a handful of musicians in the western coal field region of Kentucky. This guitar tradition was elevated to national prominence by country guitar virtuoso Merle Travis. Subsequently, this style became characterized as "Travis Picking." Kentucky thumbpicking incorporates a steady and muted bass line that alternates between the root, fifth or third of a chord. The bass is also accentuated with the use of a thumbpick worn on the right hand. Simultaneously, the index, occasionally middle and ring fingers, play the harmony and melody on the upper strings of the guitar in a syncopated rhythm. Thumbpicking is venerated because of its reverence for individualism and adaptability. One of the primary reasons it has become so prominent is because of its flexibility; it is able to be adapted to various types of music. An historical overview of Kentucky thumbpicking is provided in order to trace its origins and development as well as explaining the style’s technical traits. Arrangements of a select few songs from the advent of this style’s development are transcribed and discussed in order to demonstrate how this repertoire translates to the classical guitar and guitar playing techniques. Insight from the perspective of a classically trained guitarist will illustrate how thumbpicking procedures can be incorporated into the classical guitar repertoire. Thereby introducing Kentucky thumbpicking to a new audience.

The beloved songs of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum exist today not only in collective memory, but as a vital part of the soundscape of contemporary Egyptian life and social discourse. The lyrics of Umm Kulthum's songs represent some of the best-known poetry of the Arab world, written in a range of styles by Egyptian and non-Egyptian poets. In this thesis I examine the intertwined nature of poetry and song through study of the [sung poems] of Umm Kulthum's musical films. Because sung poetry is often inseparable from its sounded performance, I draw on methodologies from musicology, linguistics, and poetics to explore the aesthetics of the [sung poems] through interactions of form, register, music, and meaning. The detailed study of these intersecting features contributes new insight into the role of performance in shaping language register and meaning. / text

Applied ethnomusicology emerged as a sub-discipline within the larger field of ethnomusicology in the late 1980s. The approach has gained considerable attention in recent years, evidenced by the publication of the first book-length treatment of the subject in 2010 and numerous scholarly papers and roundtables devoted to the topic at the 2011 SEM conference. I review of the literature in order to trace general trends and shifts in frame and approach in order to establish a context for critically reflecting on the role of activist scholarship in ethnomusicology today. Drawing from the literature on applied ethnomusicology, cultural rights projects in Brazil, and personal experiences working with black women hip-hop activists in Recife, I suggest that activist approaches allow greater possibilities for progressive social change, facilitating dialogue and critical reflection in ways that applied approaches do not. I propose that we must re-think activist scholarship in ethnomusicology, and in Brazil more specifically, seriously considering the possibilities and limitations of music making for establishing sustained community activism that incorporates dialogic pedagogy. / text

Identifying 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. / text

Lyric Possession: A Dramatization of Italian Tarantism in Song is a one-act creative project informed by research exploring the formation and evolution of Mediterranean musical, religious, and cultural identity through the practice of the tarantella. The tarantella is a musical form woven into the very fabric of the Mediterranean cultural landscape, in song, dance and folkloric history. The transformation of scholarly perspectives into dramatic format, recalling traditional Italian folk drama, illuminates the history and cultural relevance of the tarantella through the lives and songs of its practitioners. In the Salentine peninsula where magic and religion collide, the ritualistic healing practice of the tarantella has served as a musical mechanism for dealing with reactions to socio-cultural issues such as repression of sexual identity, disenfranchisement, poverty and powerlessness experienced by Southern Italian women for centuries. Believed to have been a reaction to the venom of the indigenous Italian tarantula or wolf spider, peasant women in the Salentine peninsula exhibited poisoning-like symptoms and possession by spider spirits cured only through the performance of the tarantella and through the intercession of St. Paul, the patron saint of those who perform the tarantella, the tarantists. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, to examine the musical manifestations of the Tarantella as informed by its folkloric history, particularly in consideration of gender marginalization and female power. Second, to create a musical drama that portrays the music of the tarantella in a dramatic context that will reflect its folkloric history, scholarship by the anthropological, ethnomusicological and psychological communities in the form of the ritual itself. The project proposes that the complex, multifaceted history of the tarantella may best be captured and expressed through practice via a recreation of the ritual in the form of a musical drama.