No description available.

No description available.

This thesis contributes an empirically informed understanding of postcolonial experience and musical expression in West Africa through an ethnographic study of amateur brass bands (fanfares) in the Republic of Benin. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Western hegemonic cultural tradition of the brass band was exported across the globe through imperialist institutions such as the military and the church. Music in colonial Dahomey was an integral part of the French civilizing mission, and the brass band took center stage. Brass bands remain pervasive in present-day Benin and perform in a multitude of political, social, and religious contexts. Previous scholarship subsumes postcolonial musical performance into social scripts of resistance, framing brass bands in particular within cultural modes of mimesis, indigenization, or appropriation. Pushing against these canonical narratives, this thesis illustrates apolitical, affective, and embodied modes of experiencing colonialism's material and musical debris. Broadly, the ethnography presented here speaks to four themes. The first of these is material. Evident in musicians' accounts are materials' sonic inclinations: how instrument design and disrepair constrain musical ideals, and how different metals encourage particular pitches and timbres. Present, too, is the social and affective capacity of material: how ideas about brass instruments shape histories, erect styles, construct tastes, move bodies, induce anxieties, and proffer futures. The second theme is precarity. Fanfare musicians “get by” in an exploitative (musical) economy, are made anxious by ambiguous understandings of brass instruments, and manage an undercurrent of uncertainty in a social milieu rife with rumor and distrust. A third theme arising is that of the body, broadly conceived. This thesis illustrates the corporeal demands of fanfare performance, the embodied experience of blowing brass instruments, and the social value of bodily strength and exertion. The fourth theme is entanglement. Beninese musicians' experience of fanfare is entangled within (at times contradictory) ideas of the past, imaginings of the outside, emotions in the present, and expectations for the future. Entanglement likewise extends to musical instruments: the multiple valences of materials collide in brass instruments, as do histories, traditions, and feelings.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Craig Timberlake. Dissertation Committee: Charles Walton. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Northwestern University, 1966. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 192-201).

Thesis (M.M.)--Bowling Green State University, 2006. / Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 114 p. : col. ill., music, 1 map. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

No other place in the world has a romance with American bluegrass like the Czech Republic. Banjo Romantika introduces the musicians who play this unique bluegrass hybrid. Czechs first heard bluegrass during World War II when the Armed Forces Network broadcast American music for soldiers. The music represented freedom to dissatisfied Czechs living in a communist state. Czechs’ love for the music was solidified when Pete Seeger visited and performed in 1964. Inspired by classic American bluegrass sounds, an assortment of musicians from across the formerly communist Czech Republic have melded the past, the political and the present into a lively musical tradition entirely its own.