abstract: Geirr Tveitt (1908-1981) was a central figure of the national movement in Norwegian cultural life during the 1930s. He studied composition with masters such as Arthur Honegger, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Nadia Boulanger, achieving international acclaim for many of his works. However, his native Norway was slow to follow this praise, as post-World War II intellectuals disregarded anything that resembled nationalism. Tveitt's music was considered obsolete. He became isolated and withdrawn and died in 1981 after a house fire destroyed the manuscripts of nearly three hundred opuses, leaving only a handful of works, some of which were not yet published. Tveitt was raised in a remote part of Norway where the folk tradition was strong. Because of his close ties with the Hardanger community, he was able to bring to light many undiscovered folk tunes and exceptional practices. Tveitt utilizes this first-hand knowledge in his works for solo piano, and successfully combines them with his roots in both Germanic and Nordic traditions, eventually becoming a well-known and respected composer to the Norwegian people. However, he remains virtually unknown to the rest of the world. All of his music was deeply influenced by folk traditions and instruments. Techniques such as planing, drones, modal scales and passages, ornamentation, and simple melodies are pervasive in each piece, and are often the building blocks of main themes and motives. Because of the ambiguity of the status of many works, this paper examines only his published works for solo piano. Discussions of each piece will focus on folk influences within each work, including basic form, texture, and pianistic concerns. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Performance 2014

This thesis examines references to priests and temples of the Japanese Pure Land Buddhist school claiming Ippen (1239-1289) as founder; the most important of the lineages was the Yugyō-ha, or 'itinerancy school'. Scattered in Noh plays, epics, documents, histories, diaries, et cetera over a four-hundred-year period, these references are the residue of a long-term and successful propaganda campaign advertising doctrines, miracles, and services to the military class. The thesis focuses especially on the themes and formulaic diction borrowed from existing texts and developed by the school as it distinguished itself from other Pure Land schools. The rôle of what became the Jishū (usually translated 'Time Sect') in the guardianship of the identity of the founder of the Tokugawa family is of special interest.

Presented thesis investigates the possibilities of art drama in the form of project teaching at elementary level of primary schools. The theoretical part characterises a child of a younger school age, types of communication in the classroom and the role of a teacher. It deals with methods and means of art and craft and drama lessons which interlace in the process of art drama. It defines the subject of artfiletics as a starting point of an alternative art process. The practical part describes in detailes individual parts of the project using technicques of art drama to understand symbolics and ceremoniality of folk traditions. Authentic experience of drama play or different physical action should motivate children to their own art creations. It sould be benficial to their aesthetic, personality and social development. KEYWORDS: Art drama, project teaching, folk traditions, symbolics, aesthetics perception, social and personality development

<p dir="ltr"><i>Conjure, Care, Calls, and Cauls</i> centers the histories of Black and southern conjuring midwives in life, lore, and literature. I argue that these conjuring midwives are practitioners of wholistic care who employ conjure work as a method to access wholeness. This avenue to access Black wholeness was intentionally disrupted by 20^th century physicians across the United States and the South. These physicians espoused <i>disabling racist rhetoric</i> to attack Black midwives’ bodies and beliefs as dangerous, casting them as unreliable and unsafe caregivers. Widely circulated in US medical journals, physicians articulated a national and regional “midwife problem” that led to the overwhelming removal of Black midwives from US medical care. This successful displacement of Black midwives by Western medicine and its physicians created and perpetuated what I name the <i>crazy conjure lady trope</i>, the disabling stereotype that considers the Black folk health practitioner or believer as crazy, insane, or otherwise unwell in Black women’s literature and lives. Using Black feminist literary criticism and a Black feminist disability framework, I consider Toni Cade Bambara’s <i>The Salt Eaters </i>(1981), Gloria Naylor’s <i>Mama Day </i>(1988), and Jesmyn Ward’s <i>Sing, Unburied, Sing </i>(2017) alongside Black midwives’ ethnographies and autobiographies to center and consider the Black southern conjuring midwife in Black women’s literature and US history.</p>