Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Advisor : Marc Perlman. The CD's listed as accompanying this dissertation did not accompany the dissertation. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 307-322).

This dissertation provides the first detailed account of the mass musical culture of the Philippines that originated in the 1990s and continues to be the most popular style of musical entertainment in the country - a scene I dub the New Manila Sound. Through a combination of archival research, musical analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork, my examination focuses on its two major pioneers: the musical television programme Eat Bulaga! (Lunchtime Surprise) and the pop-rock band Aegis. I document the scene's rise and development as it attracted mostly consumers from the lower classes and influenced other programmes and musicians to adapt its content and aesthetics. The scene's trademark kitsch qualities of parody, humour, and exaggeration served as forms of diversion to au- diences recovering from the turbulent dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos from 1965 to 1986, when musical works primarily comprised of state-commissioned nationalist anthems, Western art music, and protest songs. In the second part of the study, I trace the New Manila Sound's contemporary revival in popularity through the aid of digital technology, resulting in an expansion of the modes of content-creation, dissemination, and audience participation in the country's entertainment industry. Eat Bulaga! and Aegis hold a significant place in Philippine culture: not only have they influenced the tastes and identities of their audience, their brand of entertainment has also trickled down to the musicality of everyday social contexts in the country. As the first study of contemporary Philippine musical traditions that combines historical documentation and the ethnographic study of performers and audiences, my research expands our understanding of the country's popular music industry as an influential force that has bestowed on its mass audience assurances of cultural and social authority.

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.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-214).

Thesis (M.Mus.)--New Zealand School of Music, 2010. / Title on disc: Irish music in Wellington : Field recordings. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation explores the changing apprenticeship environment within the Dāphā Khalaḥ from Kirtipur Newar communities. The Dāphā music tradition comes from Nepal and is one of the oldest music traditions in South Asia.  This tradition has been practiced for centuries by the Newars, the indigenous people of Kathmandu. The purpose of this study is to assess how the Dāphā music tradition presumably is changing through apprenticeships, which are increasingly separated from their traditional contexts in various ways or degrees, a process that I characterize as a shift from apprenticeship to performance. In addition, the study explores the relationship between traditional apprenticeship and modern styles that incorporate the Newar music tradition. Reviewing socio-political influences and motivations behind musical changes, I argue that the Dāphā music tradition presumably is changing due to changed apprenticeships. Through the statistical analysis, a survey in Kirtipur revealed that Dāphā music was significantly affected by modernization and globalization. Furthermore, the study contributes to the ethnographic literature on musical tradition and change with a particular focus on modernity, as well as to discourses on ethnic and indigenous identity. This study was conducted in TDK (Tahnani Dāphā Khalaḥ, Kirtipur), where the Dāphā group adapted to new types of apprenticeship in order to preserve their culture, thereby fostering a revival of their once endangered music tradition. Today interested member of the community is allowed to participate in Dāphā music apprenticeship regardless of caste or gender.

This study investigates the use of Indonesian gamelan with participants who have special needs or with special populations, and considers what the playing of gamelan music has to offer music therapy practice. The gamelan is an ensemble of instruments on which the traditional music of Indonesia is played, consisting of mainly tuned and un-tuned percussion instruments tuned to four, five or seven tone scales. Gamelan are being increasingly used for music activities with participants who have special needs, such as learning disabilities, mental health problems or sensory impairments, and with special populations, such as prisoners. Whilst aims are broadly educational, therapeutic benefits are also being noted. There is little research into the effectiveness of this use of gamelan; the therapeutic benefits have not been researched within the context of music therapy. As an experienced music therapist and gamelan musician, I considered that investigating the potential for using gamelan within music therapy would produce new knowledge that could extend the practice of music therapy. Various qualitative methods within a naturalistic paradigm were used to investigate current and past practice of gamelan playing with special needs groups and to identify the therapeutic benefits. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with gamelan tutors working in this area and a music therapy project using gamelan with a group of children who had learning difficulties was undertaken by the author. Using a thematic approach to the analysis of data, the key features of gamelan playing which have relevance for music therapy practice were identified. Gamelan playing was found to have a range of therapeutic benefits which can be used intentionally by a music therapist to address therapeutic aims. It was found firstly that the playing of traditional gamelan music can be used for specific therapeutic purposes and secondly, that the music and instruments can be adapted and used within various music therapy approaches and for participants with a range of disabilities. A set of guiding principles are also proposed for the use of this new music therapy practice.

This thesis is a study of attitudes to regional and national identity in Kabylia, a Berber-speaking region in northeast Algeria, and among Kabyle migrants in Paris. I illustrate how Kabyles nurture a fragile balance of nationalism and regional particularism through a primarily moral notion of local community, and extend it to an alternative vision for an Algerian nation which they believe has been debased by a corrupt state regime and Arabo-Islamic ideology since national independence. The thesis is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork divided between two places – Paris and a large village in Kabylia – and reflects my interest in how people ‘imagine’ national community through their experience as members of smaller social groups. Many Kabyle activists today formulate an alternative vision of Algerian national politics as a federation of several regionally based affective communities, each maintaining internal solidarity. This echoes a tendency in French colonial writings on Kabylia, discussed in the opening chapter, to conceive of the region as an island, intensively connected yet defensive of its autonomy. As citizens of the existing Algerian state, many Kabyles contest assimilation by claiming to represent Algeria’s ‘true past’, and investing contemporary governance initiatives with its values. They represent the radical difference that this implies with metaphors of the Kabyle community as a family within ‘public’ national life, and accuse the state regime of reversing this relationship by adopting a language of coercive authority appropriate only within the family. The transmission of Kabyle values today relies heavily on music, and especially political song, which I demonstrate – beyond its role in disseminating dissident ideas – acts as a vehicle for a type of secular revealed knowledge widely seen as the purest embodiment of Kabyle morality. Beyond the hollow rhetoric of Western liberalism that some see in Kabyle activism, I set out to demonstrate that the particular narrative of identity that I examine, in stressing regional uniqueness at the expense of recognition from a centralized state, also reflects anomalies inherent in the concept of ‘nationalism’ itself as a compromise between the requirements of external co-operation and internal allegiance.