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Magister Artium - MA / This thesis explores the production of music with musicians, singers and music producers who adhere to and promote Pentecostalist Christianity. The music they produce is a recently emerged genre, which I call 'Pentecospel'. I have coined this term to refer to a contemporary form of religiously inspired popular music, which is performed by young musicians belonging to various Pentecostal churches in Cape Town. I argue that 'Pentecospel' music is an emergent social form of self-representation, which is framed around Pentecostalism and the sound of Cape Town, as identified by Martin (2013). Young musicians and singers in Cape Town are absorbing and appropriating global styles of music, concepts and beliefs and music making techniques within their own musical compositions and transform their music performances in a way that enhances their local popularity. Thus, I elaborate on the processes of production through technical and social interpretations. This thesis will explore how performance, engaging audiences, the social interaction between people and technology, and the creation of their own unique sound on their musical instruments are linked to visual approaches located in the anthropology. This thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork which took place mostly between December 2014 and February 2015. During this period, I worked with music producers and young people who have recorded at the 'Sounds of the Nations Africa: Cape Town' recording studio in Bellville, Cape Town, sharing their experiences of everyday life in and outside the studio. My three month long fieldwork included in-depth interviews, conversations and discussions, photographic and video material, and activity field notes. I made use of these methods in order to record my observations in the recording studio, during rehearsals and in public performances focusing on the social and musical interaction with the performing artists I got to know, through participant observation. I include my own participation as a musician and audience member with the use of these methods, in recording music in the 'Sounds of the Nations' recording studio for their upcoming album "Sound of Africa" and in public performances.

Review of Vibrant, Playful, Beautiful, and Emotionally Charged: Two Box Sets of African-American Gospel Music [Fire in My Bones: Raw + Rare + Other-worldly African-American Gospel, 1944-2007 and This May Be My Last Time Singing: Raw African-American Gospel on 45 RPM, 1957-1982]

Book Summary: The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church near Stanley, Virginia, was a group of fundamental Christian believers broadly representative of southern Appalachian belief and practice. Jeff Todd Titon worked with this Baptist community for more than ten years in his attempt to determine the nature of language in the practice of their religion. He traces specialized vocabulary and its applications through the acts of being saved, praying, preaching, teaching, and in particular singing. Titon argues that religious language is performed and the context of its occurrence is crucial to our understanding and to a holistic view of not only religious practice but of folklife and ethnomusicology. Titon’s monumental study of The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church produced not only the first edition book but also an album and documentary film. In this second edition of Powerhouse for God, Titon revisits The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church nearly four decades later. Brother John Sherfey, the charismatic preacher steeped in Appalachian tradition has passed away and left his congregation to his son, Donnie, to lead. While Appalachian Virginia has changed markedly over the decades, the town of Stanley and the Fellowship Church have not. Titon relates this rarity in his new Afterword: a church founded on Biblical literalism and untouched by modern progressivism in an area of Appalachia that has seen an evolution in population, industry, and immigration. Titon’s unforgettable study of folklife, musicology, and Appalachian religion is available for a new generation of scholars to build upon.

Gospel singing is a musically sophisticated and culturally influential vocal performance style. Yet, its pedagogy is often expressed through the lens of formal/classical training or a Contemporary Commercial Music (CCM) umbrella for all non-classical styles. This is problematic because classical training does not produce gospel singing, and most CCM styles are derivatives of the black vernacular singing practices that are foundational to gospel music. It follows that Gospel singing should be foundational to the study of CCM styles. However, in the absence of formal vocal training, little is known about how gospel singers actually develop and maintain healthy gospel singing voices. The purpose of this study is to explore with 12 professional gospel singers, their perceptions of how they have developed and maintain a vibrant and successful gospel singing voice and what role, if any, formal voice training played in that development. The exploration revealed that professional gospel singers are often not only formally trained, but gospel is a key part of their formal training. Their gospel upbringing taught them key cultural practices that both align with and expand the conversation around traditional, CCM, and the growing Gospel voice pedagogy. Their stories offer a different perspective about how gospel singers learn and how they should be taught.

No scholarship yet exists on Erin Gee’s extensive Mouthpieces catalogue, aside from her own program notes and non-academic reviews of her work. My dissertation endeavors to remedy this gap through analyses of two formative works by Gee, Mouthpiece I (1999/2000) for solo voice and SLEEP (2008), an opera in 12 scenes for two voices, choir, and mixed ensemble. This dissertation is the offspring of two seemingly disparate theoretical influences: Pierre Schaeffer’s Traité des objets musicaux and Marion A. Guck’s definition of analysis as interpretation. In Chapter 1, I introduce Schaeffer’s reduction to the objet sonore as an analytical methodology, then interrogate the pros and cons of this method through the lens of feminist and post-humanist scholarship as well as sound studies focusing on vocal physiology. Chapter 2 considers the historical legacy of experimental non-semantic vocality in the United States, and considers how Afrodiasporic vocal techniques in jazz and gospel weave their way into Eurodiasporic experimentalism generally and Gee’s music in particular. I also ask why these hugely prevalent genres in both commercial and academic music circles fail to be included in standard scholarly narratives of non-semantic vocality in the United States. In Chapter 3, I propose an idiosyncratic typology and typomorphology for Mouthpiece I as an analytical framework for understanding the building blocks of Gee’s music more generally. I than take a broader look at the relationship between form and materials in SLEEP to consider how Gee intertwines semantic and non-semantic vocality to replace the operatic norms of high drama and individual virtuosity with an intimate, collective sonic ecology that presents both human and non-human on stage at the same time.

The three papers in this dissertation are conceptualized around the topic of urban music education. At the foundation of each paper lies an aim to analyze music teachers’ engagement with students in urban settings. What connects these three projects is the exploration of voices and perspectives that can strengthen our understanding of music teacher education to meet the unique needs of students in urban settings and address complexities within urban contexts. First, I examine my own journey leaving a predominantly White institution (PWI) twenty years ago to enter urban settings and teach music where I found myself unequipped in musical and nonmusical ways. I describe my journey toward musical and cultural competency over many years as I worked to learn to teach and engage with music that I had not been prepared to teach, in classrooms of students with whom I did not share a cultural background. As an impetus from that journey of both musical and cultural understanding, the second paper represents a deep exploration of Black Gospel music teaching as defined by three experts. Once again, while the study’s findings may offer musical insights in Black Gospel music, the greater lessons are the cultural components that inform Black music. In the last project, I study two urban school music programs that engaged community arts partners and music educators who learned musical and nonmusical lessons about the liberatory praxis of Black music. Emerging themes across these three projects reflect a need for rigorous and vibrant music teacher education reform that resonantly and responsively meet the needs of students in urban settings. In all three projects, participants (a) cited a need for music teacher education to move beyond content and include the intersection of race and teaching music; (b) discussed the centering of Western Art Musics (WAMs) in the academy; (c) encountered adolescent, high school age beginners in their music classes requiring a need for approachable, accessible, relevant tools to make music outside of traditional Choir, Orchestra, Band models; (d) found liberatory Black musical forms including Hip Hop, song-writing, Drumline, loop-based composition through digital audio workstations (DAWs), and Black Gospel music served beginners successfully; and (e) engaged or participated as culture bearers and/or experts on teaching unfamiliar Black musical forms and culturally competent communication across diverse groups. Given the themes across these three papers, I argue that critical reflection on the academy and music teacher preparation is necessary to enact reform that works against stagnancy and exclusion and moves toward inclusive musics and teaching for liberation available in Black music. I interrogate the three papers through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a theoretical framework through which I view, interpret, reflect, and find greater meaning to inform the preparation to teach music teaching and learning in urban settings. Visible across findings in all papers are examples of foundational tenets of CRT, whiteness as property and the permanence of racism, as participants felt unprepared to teach music outside of Eurocentric musical practices and cited the need for music teacher education to include the intersection of race and teaching. To make conclusions and suggest possibilities for reform in music education, I frame findings through the connection of two additional CRT tenets: interest convergence and counterstorytelling. Given the realities suggested in the first CRT tenets, I relied on the CRT theory of interest convergence to make recommendations for reform to music education. Theorizing that meaningful change is impossible without including interests of the dominant group, I propose “All God's Children Got a Song” as a call for interest convergence wherein systems and actors in music education work harder to include the 80% of students who currently do not participate in music. In naming areas for change, I suggest the use of counterstorytelling as a way to frame possibility for changing the narrative in music education in four areas that were common findings across papers: (a) to promote music education as approachable, age appropriate, and accessible for adolescent beginners, possible through curricula including but not limited to open, participatory, liberatory, and “family”-oriented forms of Black music including Hip Hop, song-writing, Drumline and loop-based composition using music technology, Black Gospel music, and choir; (b) to reimagine the concept of music literacy wherein students experience viewing music without navigating a written page; (c) to foster community capital whereby partnerships emerge with culture bearers who model and provide musical and cultural models of unfamiliar ways of making music alongside cultural and musical competence in communicating across diverse groups; and (d) to develop and implement comprehensive preservice education for future urban music educators that builds racial literacy skills to support content and pedagogy. Keywords: Urban Music Education, Gospel Music, Community / Music Education

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Albert E. Brumley (1905-1977) was the most influential American gospel song composer of the twentieth century, penning such “classics” within the genre as “Jesus, Hold My Hand,” “I’ll Meet You in the Morning,” “If We Never Meet Again,” “Turn Your Radio On,” and “Rank Strangers to Me.” His “I’ll Fly Away” has become the most recorded gospel song in American history with over one thousand recordings to date, and several of his works transcend cultural boundaries of style, genre, race, denomination, and doctrine. However, the racialized historiography of American gospel music has left Brumley—from America’s lesser-known white gospel traditions of convention singing and southern gospel music—largely untouched by scholarly scrutiny. Comprising nearly four hundred works, most of which appeared in annual shapenote gospel songbooks published during the 1930s and 1940s, Brumley’s music is central to many Americans’ religious identity. This thesis represents the first thorough, academic assessment of his music, career, and his work’s cultural impact. Deeper examinations of the composer’s personal life and his work as a songwriter, as well as a fresh look at his publishing business’s growth and development, contribute a more complete biography. A broad analysis of his output—including a complete thematic catalogue of his published works—provides a framework for interpreting Brumley’s general compositional style and offers a context for understanding his music’s enduring legacy within popular music history, especially southern gospel, black gospel, and country music. Research into the cultural history of one particular Brumley work—“I’ll Fly Away”—and its various incarnations in music, television, film, and other outlets acts as a lens through which to view his impact on American music and society. This thesis ultimately argues that Brumley’s compositions have influenced the development of religious and popular music in America much more significantly than indicated by current scholarship, and that his music has become an important medium for American cultural expression that stretches well beyond the confines of the convention-singing and southern gospel traditions. As a result, it recognizes him as an emblematic figure of American music deserving inclusion within the ranks of its greatest contributors.