Previous research has explored children’s musical participation in relation to motivation, instrumental lessons, extracurricular activities and the historically low uptake of GCSE and A Level music. This ethnographic study set out to investigate pupils’ musical participation in different school settings, the musical culture within these schools and the place of music in children’s everyday lives, including the wider contexts of home and school. Observations, questionnaires, aural and photo elicitation and focus group interviews were conducted with pupils, parents and teachers and revealed more differences than similarities in four main areas. The results are explored through the themes of teaching and learning, attitudes towards music, continuation of music education and the ‘triad’ of home, school and child. Schools attracting pupils from more middle-class backgrounds had more established musical cultures compared to those with an intake from economically deprived areas. This was apparent through the resources available to the music departments, the range of instrumental lessons on offer, the number of pupils learning an instrument, the amount of extracurricular provision present and the attitudes of pupils, parents and teachers. The findings from this study also showed that the views children experienced at home, whether positive or negative, were strongly influential. The results of this study showed the imbalance in provision between school type and socio-economic background and the importance of positive school-parent relationships in pupil engagement and have wider implications for schools and their pupils.

Though the castrato has been absent from the operatic stage since the nineteenth century, this voice is often described as the mysterious link in understanding the vocal techniques attributed to bel canto. The mystery lies in the fact that the voice of the operatic castrato cannot be heard by modern ears; and yet its legacy can be seen in the vocal tuition of several successful opera singers at the turn of the nineteenth century. What is unusual about this period is that some of the most successful singers of the day, including Nancy Storace, John Braham and Elizabeth Billington were British and shared the same vocal teacher. The castrato Venanzio Rauzzini (1746-1810) began his career as a primo uomo on the continent and while he established himself in various areas of musical activity, his main contribution and legacy was as a vocal teacher. During his residency in Britain from 1774 until his death, he trained several leading British professional singers who were the stars of opera in London and on the continent. They each demonstrated a use of techniques associated with the castrato vocal aesthetic and popularised a new vocal style, which can be traced to Rauzzini. Through this thesis, I will draw attention to the importance of Rauzzini’s impact on vocal teaching practice in Britain and his wider influence on the development of vocal style. I will demonstrate that Rauzzini should be considered part of the vocal teaching canon to which Pier Francesco Tosi (c.1653-1732), Nicola Porpora (1686-1768) and Manual García II (1805-1906), three other foreign vocal teachers, who were resident in Britain, already belong. By examining exactly what the expected vocal aesthetics were for all singers, castrato, non-castrated male and female during the period in which Rauzzini was active, I will demystify the castrato technique and provide a more tangible understanding of what this encompassed, demonstrating that many of these techniques were learned, performed and popularised by other voice types such as the female soprano and the male tenor.

All history of the flute in Scotland begins with William Tytler’s 1792 assertion that the flute was unknown in Scotland prior to 1725. Other generally accepted beliefs about the flute in Scotland are that it was only played by wealthy male amateurs and had no role in traditional music. Upon examination, all of these beliefs are false. This thesis explores the role of the flute in eighteenth-century Scottish musical life, including players, repertoire, manuscripts, and instruments. Evidence for ladies having played flute is also examined, as are possible connections between flute playing and bagpipe playing. What emerges is a more complete picture of the flute’s role in eighteenth-century Scottish musical life.

Drawing Sound in Time reflects on how I have attempted, in the music written over the period of my doctoral studies (2004-2010) to use time as a basis for the mapping of sonic activity and how this aesthetical concern has helped me develop a teleological approach to form and structure. The shaping of time in my work often has its origins in the visual, either from my own drawings or from other visual stimuli. As well as considering the visual appearance of my music, I will draw on the correlation of music and art by abstract painters (most notably Paul Klee) alongside composers Iannis Xenakis and John Cage whose philosophy represent for me a way forward, not only aesthetically but also on a technical level. Additionally, the discussion will refer to astronomy as certain aspects of the subject relate to the development of techniques in my compositional language, and furthermore will often draw on the titles of the pieces (stars and constellations) as a basis for generating materials. I will address in particular the use of coding in my music that is an integral part of the way I work. My commentary will examine the main aspects of my musical language using examples from selected works in the accompanying portfolio.

The thesis investigates Max Reger's Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme Op. 73, demonstrates the refinement of Reger's composition, and underlines his connection to the great performer Karl Straube. His musical language, dynamic markings and technical problems regarding the tempo, registration and acoustics will be examined by an actual performance in Canterbury Cathedral. Several issues such as cathedral acoustics, mechanical or pneumatic actions and choice of tempi have underpinned this study. Within each variation, the characteristics and techniques of Reger's compositions express his exceptional connection with the art of fugue and, of course, the use of variation technique in the rest of his organ works. The long Introduction falls into five clear sections and is, followed by the wistful mood and resignation of the Original Theme, where the great role of the third bar is often quoted in the course of the variations. Due to the all-pervading chromaticism Op. 73 gives the impression of being completely pantonal. Canterbury Cathedral organ's electro-pneumatic action and acoustics are close to the Leipzig Sauer instrument, and it seems well capable of meeting the challenges of control, polyphonic harmony, mystery and chromatic moods of Op. 73. Approaching the interpretation of Reger's highly demanding Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme Op. 73 through formal analysis and the complicated background of early twentieth century performance practice will be the final goal of the live performance.

In the 23 years since the first undergraduate popular music degree programme opened in the United Kingdom, the academic discipline of popular music has burgeoned to encompass over 160 programmes delivered across the higher education sector, by private institutions, Royal-chartered conservatoires, post-92 universities and Russell Group universities. This doctoral research project seeks to understand the values underpinning and informing educational practice in this growing academic discipline. It proceeds from an understanding of higher education and popular music as two highly complex domains in their own right, and from the proposition that values inhering at their nexus- Higher Popular Music Education- derive from and are borne by multiple human, institutional and disciplinary sources, and bear the trace of socio-cultural, economic and historical contexts related to each domain. It takes an inductive approach to a multiple-case study of four popular music degree programmes at different higher education institutions across the United Kingdom. Acknowledging from the outset the impossibility of identifying a conclusive ‘roster’ of itemisable values, this study draws on a combination of institutional literature, semi-structured interview and field observation data to explore the interplay of musical, educational and other values within the educational message systems of pedagogy, curriculum, institution, assessment, lifestyle and market. Analysis of the data suggested that seemingly unrelated values such as, for example, those relating to musical aesthetics and social justice, could in fact be oppositional in practice, resulting in surprising tensions and impacting on such areas as curricula and student lifestyles. Moreover, values enshrined in policy, or perceived by interviewees to be dominant within the higher education sector, appeared often to be at odds with individuals’ personal opinions regarding the value of knowledge and education, or with what they saw to be the core values of popular music as an art form. This interdisciplinary study sits across the research fields of music education, the sociology of higher education and popular music studies, and makes original contributions to knowledge in each of these fields.

This thesis examines Chinese metal of the mainland China as a contemporary cultural phenomenon, which consists of seven chapters. It begins with three premise chapters providing the necessary definitions and terminology about Chinese metal, reviewing the relevant literature, and explaining the multiple methodologies applied, respectively. Based on that, the following chapters explore Chinese metal from four perspectives, including the history, identity, industry, and social meaning. More specifically, Chapter 4 defines the history of Chinese metal as two waves, the heavy rock era (1990-1996) and extreme metal era (2000-2013). This overall trajectory had been moving forward with the country’s economic growth, technological progress, and cultural liberalism, showing a unique U-shape curve: starting in the mainstream field in the early 1990s, declining in the late 1990s, booming underground in the early 2000s, and rising again in the 2010s. Chapter 5 illustrates that the development of Chinese metal underwent a tension between globalisation and localisation, which were reflected in the texts of the music, MV, cover art, and folk metal subgenre. Particularly, this tension resulted in an identity struggle of the current Chinese metal musicians, which was realised by a mechanism of original identity suspension, textual deconstruction, and identity reconstruction. Chapter 6 proposes that the Chinese metal industries made great progress driven by the country’s rapid economic growth and cultural diversity, and a relatively maturely industrial system with different capitals and fields had been established by the 2000s, including the sections of labels, recordings, lives, media, merchandise, and a few peripheral activities. Chapter 7 argues that because of its essence of symbolic transgression, Chinese metal provided the musicians and audiences with a quasi-ritual catharsis to temporarily escape from the pressures of the reality. Meanwhile, Chinese metal presented a unique attribute of “pseudo-evil” as an intentional reaction against the general hypocrisy which is the most severe social pathology in the contemporary Chinese society.

This thesis addresses a gap in research on collaborative creativity. Prior research has investigated how groups of professionals, young people and children work together to co-create work, but the distinctive contribution of this thesis is a socioculturally framed understanding of undergraduates’ interdisciplinary practices over an extended period. Guided by a socioculturally framed theory of creativity, this thesis observed 4 students creating a 10 minute performance piece, and presents a longitudinal analysis of the co-creation process which occurred through a total of 28 meetings recorded over the course of a twelve-week term (24 hours of recordings in total). Specific episodes were selected from the full set of recordings, constituting 2 hours of recordings for in-depth analysis. Sociocultural discourse analysis was used to examine how social and cultural contexts constituted an ecology of undergraduate practice in interdisciplinary creative collaboration. Offering a new methodology, this discursive approach for studying context (Arvaja, 2008) was combined with interaction analysis (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002; Scott, Mortimer & Aguiar, 2006) to analyse how moment-by-moment creative developments and contexts were resourced and constituted through dialogue, artifacts and physical settings. With implications for theory and practice, the analysis showed how the students’ collaborative contexts were constituted through dialogue, and how their emerging co- creative practice was mediated through multiple social and physical settings. It further evidenced how common knowledge was constructed through the process of collaboration, the value of peer feedback for fostering confidence, and students’ need for ‘silent witnessing’; for space to reflect and contribute to a long-term cumulative conversation. The thesis also discusses how resourceful the students were, in terms of negotiating unfamiliar and unpredictable co-creating activities. Evidence is provided for the collaborative value of creating and appropriating new tools to develop common knowledge, and for the significance of imagination as a psychological resource for building common knowledge about hypothetical future activities, showing how technology-mediated co-creating can be seen as a complex interactional accomplishment.

The aim of this thesis was to examine changing representations of men and masculinities in a particular historical period (“The Sixties”) and to explore the impact that this had in a period of rapid social change in the UK and the legacy of that impact. In order to do this, a multi-method study was developed, combining documentary research with a set of eleven semi-structured interviews. The documentary research took the form of a case study of The Beatles, arguing that their position as a group of men who became a global cultural phenomenon, in the period under study, made theme a suitable vehicle through which to read changing representations of masculinities in this period and to reflect on what this meant for men in UK society. The Beatles’ live action films were chosen as a sample of Beatle “texts” which allowed for the Beatles to be looked at at different points in the “The Sixties” and for possible changes over that time period to be tracked. Textual analysis within discourse analysis (based on a framework suggested by van Dijk [1993], Fairclough [1995] and McKee [2003]) was used to analyse the texts. Ideas advanced by the Popular Memory Group (1982) about the interaction of public representations of the past and private memory of that past were influential in the decision to combine this piece of documentary research with interviews with a sample of men, in an age range of 18 to 74. The interview stage was designed to elicit data on the perception of the participants of the role of representation (with particular reference to the Beatles) of masculinities on them as individuals and their ideas about how this may have had an impact in terms of longer term social change. Ehrenreich’s (1983) notion of a male revolt in the late 1950s, an emergence of a challenge to established ideas about men and masculinity, was also influential, particularly as it is an idea at odds with the “crisis in masculinity” discourse (Tolson, 1977; Kimmel, 1987; Whitehead, 2002) at work in a number of texts on men and masculinity. Examining further Inglis’ (2000b : 1) concept of The Beatles as “men of ideas” with a global reach, the chosen Beatle texts were examined for discourses of masculinity which appeared to be resistant to the dominant. What emerged were a number of findings around resistance, non-conformity, feminised appearance, pre-metrosexuality, the male star as object of desire and The Beatles as a global male phenomenon open to the radical diversity of the world in a period of rapid social change. The role of popular culture within this process was central to the thesis, given its focus on The Beatles as a case study. However, broader ideas about the role of the arts also emerged with a resultant conclusion that “the sixties” is where a recognition of the importance of representation begins as well as a period where representations of gender (as well as class and race) became more accessible due to the rise in popularity of TV in the UK and a resurgence in British cinema. The thesis offers a number of ideas for further research, building on the outcomes of this particular study. These include further work on the competing crisis/ revolt discourse at work in the field of critical men’s studies, ascertaining female perspectives on representations of masculinities and their impact, further work on the Beatles through fans and an application of some of the ideas at work in the thesis to other periods of British history.