This dissertation explores the intangible cultural heritage of the collection of musical instruments from the Mandé region of West Africa (present-day Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and the Gambia) currently held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It uses the geographical shadow of the Mandé empire—once the locus of economic power globally—to circumscribe a collection of twenty-three instruments at the museum that share historical and socio-cultural characteristics, although the ruptures between them are also illustrated through individual analysis of each. It then considers their significance over time at the museum, in current debates concerning African cultural heritage and in terms of community access. The culmination of eleven years of musical study and practice in and out of Senegal, the U.K. and the U.S., this dissertation argues for a practice-oriented rather than object-oriented analysis of cultural heritage.

This PhD thesis is a multi-sited ethnographical study (Marcus 1995) of globalized world through focusing on the social life (Appadurai 1986) of one of the well-known Vedic mantras (the Gayatri Mantra) as a globalized phenomenon and a commodity. Chanting of mantras (Hindu sacred chants in Vedic Sanskrit; pronunciation, intonation and rhythm of which is prohibited to change in the Brahmanic discourse) which had been a local cultural practice, has become a globally known phenomenon. During the globalizing process of their cultural transmission from India to the West and later to the Czech Republic, the mantras have gained new sound forms, new social and cultural contexts, new functions and new meanings. Contemporary cultural productions of mantras are a thick example how the present inter-continental connectedness works in everyday life, music and in the relationship to the Sacred. Selected places on this trajectory will be sites of the fieldwork. The project will research, how the transmission process happens, what music forms it takes, and what meanings are attached to them by their agents.

This Ph.D. thesis deals with the musical phenomenon Balkan music in Prague. The so- called Balkan music (in the sense of Shelemay's 2006 soundscape) is considered to be the result of social negotiating (counterpoint) between the agents, i.e., the Czech musicians and audience, and also those (musicians and audience) who originally come from the Balkan countries. Using the tools of ethnographic research, the thesis explores the nature of this relationship. Specifically, I focus on the very creation of the concept Balkan music in the Czech scene and the role the Balkan migration plays in its formation. It turns out that the very imagination of the 'Balkans' plays a key role in defining the phenomenon, and the form of music itself is the result of the imaginations of (an imaginary) milieu (i.e., stereotypes) that is perceived as culturally distant (Todorova 2009).

No description available.

Perhaps no country at the present time has a richer unexplored fount of folk music than has Mexico. In fact. her rich store of musical culture, like a vast mine scarcely worked entitles her to a position among those peoples whose folk music has long been firmly established. Finding the source material on the music of Mexico for the most part, fragmentary and scattered, the writer decided to do serious research in translating from the early Spanish writers, and in reading the chronicles of the travelers of that early period, as well as the historical writings and the legendary lore of the Indian inhabitants. The summer of 1934 was spent in delightful study in Mexico in The Seminar of The Committee on Cultural Relations with Latin America, of which Dr. Hubert Herring is the leader. The result of this activity is this compilation of facts on The Development of Mexican Music, which is by no means an exhaustive history, but represents, however, a careful investigation and selection of that material which is most valuable for the student of music in particular, as well as for the general reader interested in factual material. In this volume on The Development of Mexican Music it has been the endeavor of the author to assemble the chronological references to the music of Mexico from the earliest available records of the indigenous music of the semi-savage tribes to the information that is furnished us by the contemporary writers on the music existent at the present moment. Beginning with the culture of the earliest peoples, who were noted for their unusual rhythmic sense in music, the process has been one of tracing the gradual development of a rounded musical art - of presenting the indigenous background, the profound influence of the Spanish Conquest and subsequent changes wrought upon that artistic amalgamation by social, economic and political developments. In short, our path has led us from the musical achievements of the Aztecs to the present worthy achievements of Mexico's great artists and composers. It is the earnest hope of the author that this research on The Development of Mexican Music will be useful reference material and may stimulate the readers to further interest and research, thus leading to a better understanding and more friendly appreciation of this phase of Mexican culture. Our efforts are dedicated to those friends of Mexico everywhere who are appreciative of the fine rhythmical culture that is Mexican.

In a brief survey of this history of the oboe, it is necessary to return to primitive instruments. It is impossible to give a definite date at which the oboe may have originated, but Schwartz, in this Story of Musical Instruments, accepts the periond of the Fourth Dynasty in Egypt, or about 3700 B.C., as the date of the oldest specimens of the early forms.1 We also know of their existence in the Mesopotamian culture of 2800 B.C. A shrill, double-reed instructment with some finger-holes is known to have exited in Greece about 1500 B.C., when that civilization was undergoing many changes, but frequently we omit the example of the oboe (called flute) (see footnote4), in the orchestra of King Nebuchadnezzar, in the early part of the sixth century. This Biblical reference is found in the third chapter of the Book of Daniel.2

Examining the rise and fall of a socially democratic Gotham between 1945 and 1985, my dissertation presents a multiracial history of American popular culture. "Syncopating Segregation" links two previously disparate domains of scholarship: studies of postwar urban segregation and cross-cultural mediation. I argue that African American, Latinx, queer, and ethnically white New York musicians served as mediators who sought to rethink and remap the spatial contours of a divided city. In doing so, my work presents a somewhat unfamiliar picture postwar urban life: it moves beyond narratives of cultural appropriation and differs from many historians who posit that rigid patterns of segregation turned cities into racial and ethnic battlegrounds. While acknowledging that cities created new forms of de jure segregation, I show how African American and Latinx New Yorkers spurred musical cross-pollination during an era of mounting racial and ethnic division. Over the course of five chapters, I explore how musicians facilitated cross-cultural exchange in mambo, doo-wop, psychedelic rock, disco, and hip-hop. Each chapter revolves around mediators who used music to bridge racialized boundaries; by creating and popularizing integrated performance spaces premised on racial interaction rather than isolation, artists disrupted—but did not destroy—patterns of segregation in New York. I maintain that they changed the rhythm of the city just as they syncopated their music with off-beat cadences. Dancing at mixed-race clubs allowed New Yorkers to momentarily escape their segregated day-to-day lives. The existence of these venues in a divided landscape speaks to mediators’ successes in syncopating segregation. Although my dissertation serves as one of the first historical studies of musical forms that have traditionally been the purview of record collectors and fans, it is more than a series of genre studies. Instead, I reconstruct a social history of interracial musical scenes in post-World War II New York. Unlike most urban historians, I draw on oral histories, bootleg concert recordings, and fan magazines, in addition to an array of municipal and scholarly archives.

My dissertation focuses on various intellectual currents that shaped poet, composer, and amateur ethnomusicologist Amelia Rosselli’s work from 1950 to 1964, before she gained mild fame as a poet on the Italian literary scene. Rosselli had a trilingual background in Italian, English, and French, due to her Italian father and English mother and her family’s forced absence from Italy from Rosselli’s birth in 1930 until 1946, as a result of her father’s political activities. Rosselli is sometimes considered an outsider to Italian poetic movements, but in this dissertation I trace how she fits into various transnational intellectual networks. In doing so, I examine Rosselli through different lenses than what is typical in analyses of her work: I center her understandings of cultural difference according to her studies in various strains of anthropology and ethnomusicology. In doing so, Rosselli’s association of cultural difference with new conceptions of technology comes to the fore: namely, audiovisual recording technology used in ethnographic and ethnomusicological research; tools of electronic music that were bound up with this research in the 1950s; and new points of view on the body’s use as a technology, through a diffusion of the concept of techniques of the body. What emerges from my investigation is Rosselli’s political investments in establishing the universality of humans’ physiological and psychological capacities, beyond race (Chapter 1); valorizing previously marginalized cultural techniques, particularly techniques of the body (Chapter 2); seeking new mediatic modes of expression beyond the West (Chapter 3); and remapping relationships between self and other in her poetic output (Chapter 4). Although these political goals did not always result in building networks of solidarity, I argue that taking them seriously as important elements in Rosselli’s thought allows for a fuller consideration of how ideas of power dynamics, universality, and relationality play out in relation to cultural difference in her work. In doing so, I reveal how Rosselli inscribed herself into various political and intellectual networks that shaped Italian cultural life in the 1950s and 1960s.

No description available.

American flat-picking guitarist, singer and songwriter Norman Blake holds legendary status among guitar players, bluegrass, and folk musicians. The aim of this research is to analyze the interaction of sense of place in Norman Blake’s songwriting. This research will explore the techniques Blake uses to create that acute sense of place. Elements of literary criticism, cultural geography, ethnomusicology, and sense of place studies, as well as historical background information on Northern Alabama and North Georgia will be employed to show how this particular region of Southeastern Appalachia has informed Blake’s songwriting. The research questions that I aim to answer are how a sense of place has influenced Norman Blake’s songwriting, how his writing has influenced other songwriters in the field of 20th century folk music, bluegrass, Americana, and country music, and what songwriting techniques Blake has employed to create an acute sense of place.