published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

Abstract not available

This dissertation investigates the socio-cultural and musical transfigurations of a rural-identified musical genre known as música típica as it engages with the dynamics of Panama's rural-urban divide and the country's nascent engagement with the global political economy. Though regarded as emblematic of Panama's national folklore, música típica is also the basis for the country's principal and most commercially successful popular music style known by the same name. The primary concern of this project is to examine how and why this particular genre continues to undergo simultaneous processes of folklorization and commercialization. As an unresolved genre of music, I argue that música típica can offer rich insight into the politics of working out individual and national Panamanian identities. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Panama City and several rural communities in the country's interior, I examine the social struggles that subtend the emergence of música típica's genre variations within local, national, and transnational contexts. Through close ethnographic analysis of particular case studies, this work explores how musicians, fans, and the country's political and economic structures constitute divisions in regards to generic labeling and how differing fields of musical circulation and meaning are imagined. This study will first present an examination of late nineteenth and twentieth century Panamanian nationalist discourses in order to contextualize música típica's stylistic and ideological development as a commercial genre of popular music. The following chapter will construct a social history of música típica that takes into account the multiple historical trajectories that today's consumers and producers engage, negotiate, and contest in an attempt to ascribe social and cultural meaning to the role the genre assumes in contemporary discourses of national identity. Processes of folkloric canonization and reconstruction will then be examined in order to understand how the marketing efforts of the Panamanian government draw on a discourse of nationality. The role of corporate sponsorship in today's música típica scene will also be investigated, specifically addressing how the marketing of this genre by beer companies, national cultural festivals, and the Panamanian television industry builds on a foundation of commercial music practices. Subsequent chapters will focus on the local and transnational dynamics of genre formation and dissolution as revealed in the ideological discourses and socio-musical practices of música típica's practitioners, especially in accordion and vocal performance practices. An analysis of música típica's field of cultural production, with its particular mappings of identity, place, and sound, will provide insight into Panamanian modernity and the social experiences of Panamanians, especially within Latin American and global contexts.

This dissertation investigates the socio-cultural and musical transfigurations of a rural-identified musical genre known as música típica as it engages with the dynamics of Panama's rural-urban divide and the country's nascent engagement with the global political economy. Though regarded as emblematic of Panama's national folklore, música típica is also the basis for the country's principal and most commercially successful popular music style known by the same name. The primary concern of this project is to examine how and why this particular genre continues to undergo simultaneous processes of folklorization and commercialization. As an unresolved genre of music, I argue that música típica can offer rich insight into the politics of working out individual and national Panamanian identities. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Panama City and several rural communities in the country's interior, I examine the social struggles that subtend the emergence of música típica's genre variations within local, national, and transnational contexts. Through close ethnographic analysis of particular case studies, this work explores how musicians, fans, and the country's political and economic structures constitute divisions in regards to generic labeling and how differing fields of musical circulation and meaning are imagined. This study will first present an examination of late nineteenth and twentieth century Panamanian nationalist discourses in order to contextualize música típica's stylistic and ideological development as a commercial genre of popular music. The following chapter will construct a social history of música típca that takes into account the multiple historical trajectories that today's consumers and producers engage, negotiate, and contest in an attempt to ascribe social and cultural meaning to the role the genre assumes in contemporary discourses of national identity. Processes of folkloric canonization and reconstruction will then be examined in order to understand how the marketing efforts of the Panamanian government draw on a discourse of nationality. The role of corporate sponsorship in today's música típica scene will also be investigated, specifically addressing how the marketing of this genre by beer companies, national cultural festivals, and the Panamanian television industry builds on a foundation of commercial music practices. Subsequent chapters will focus on the local and transnational dynamics of genre formation and dissolution as revealed in the ideological discourses and socio-musical practices of música típica's practitioners, especially in accordion and vocal performance practices. An analysis of música típica's field of cultural production, with its particular mappings of identity, place, and sound, will provide insight into Panamanian modernity and the social experiences of Panamanians, especially within Latin American and global contexts.

This dissertation is a study of popular music and state-controlled radio broadcasting in the Arabic-speaking world, focusing on Syria and the Syrian radioscape, and a set of American stations named Radio Sawa. I examine American and Syrian politically directed broadcasts as multi-faceted objects around which broadcasters and listeners often differ not only in goals, operating assumptions, and political beliefs, but also in how they fundamentally conceptualize the practice of listening to the radio. Beginning with the history of international broadcasting in the Middle East, I analyze the institutional theories under which music is employed as a tool of American and Syrian policy, the imagined youths to whom the musical messages are addressed, and the actual sonic content tasked with political persuasion. At the reception side of the broadcaster-listener interaction, this dissertation addresses the auditory practices, histories of radio, and theories of music through which listeners in the sonic environment of Damascus, Syria create locally relevant meaning out of music and radio. Drawing on theories of listening and communication developed in historical musicology and ethnomusicology, science and technology studies, and recent transnational ethnographic and media studies, as well as on theories of listening developed in the Arabic public discourse about popular music, my dissertation outlines the intersection of the hypothetical listeners defined by the US and Syrian governments in their efforts to use music for political ends, and the actual people who turn on the radio to hear the music.

Yeung, Hiu Yan Dorcas. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-173). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgements --- p.iv / Table of Contents --- p.v / Tables and Figures --- p.vii / Chapter Chapter 1. --- Introduction / Chapter 1.1. --- Background --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2. --- Objectives and research questions --- p.8 / Chapter 1.3. --- Significance --- p.11 / Chapter 1.4. --- Chapters overview --- p.12 / Chapter Chapter 2. --- The Scene of Classical Music and Cultural Policy in Hong Kong / Chapter 2.1. --- Defining classical music and beyond --- p.16 / Chapter 2.2. --- Development of orchestras and classical music in Hong Kong --- p.17 / Chapter 2.3. --- Models of cultural policy and policy in Hong Kong --- p.21 / Chapter 2.4. --- Supporting arts groups --- p.29 / Chapter 2.5. --- Current funding policy --- p.31 / Chapter Chapter 3. --- Literature Review / Chapter 3.1. --- Introduction --- p.38 / Chapter 3.2. --- Theorizing state and arts - the field of cultural production --- p.38 / Chapter 3.3. --- Arts administration --- p.47 / Chapter 3.4. --- Amateur --- p.51 / Chapter 3.5. --- "Chapter summary: Amateur arts group, administration and the field" --- p.58 / Chapter Chapter 4. --- Methodology / Chapter 4.1. --- In-depth interviews --- p.60 / Chapter 4.2. --- Documentation --- p.63 / Chapter 4.3. --- Limitations --- p.63 / Chapter Chapter 5. --- Being (and Surviving as) an Amateur: Case Studies of Music Groups / Chapter 5.1. --- Introduction --- p.65 / Chapter 5.2. --- Estimating number of amateur music groups --- p.65 / Chapter 5.3. --- The spectrum from professional to hobbyist --- p.67 / Chapter 5.4. --- The need for resources --- p.76 / Chapter 5.5. --- From beliefs to action --- p.89 / Chapter 5.6. --- Models of operation --- p.96 / Chapter 5.7. --- Chapter summary --- p.105 / Chapter Chapter 6. --- Between What We Want and How They Do: Matching with the Administrative Habitus / Chapter 6.1. --- Introduction --- p.107 / Chapter 6.2. --- The significance of arts administration --- p.107 / Chapter 6.3. --- The mechanism --- p.110 / Chapter 6.4. --- Getting around the system --- p.124 / Chapter 6.5. --- Arts administration as a field --- p.131 / Chapter 6.6. --- Negotiating with the administration --- p.140 / Chapter 6.7. --- Chapter summary: Mapping the field --- p.144 / Chapter Chapter 7. --- Conclusion / Chapter 7.1. --- Conclusion --- p.149 / Chapter 7.2. --- Implications on cultural policy --- p.154 / Chapter 7.3. --- Implications on amateur and amateur activities --- p.158 / Chapter 7.4. --- Limitations and future direction --- p.159 / Appendixes --- p.163 / References --- p.166

楊偉傑. / "2008年12月". / "2008 nian 12 yue". / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-103). / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Yang Weijie. / 論文評審委員會 --- p.ii / 論文摘要 --- p.iii / 論文摘要（英文） --- p.iv / 鳴謝 --- p.vi / 圖表目錄 --- p.x / Chapter 第一章： --- 論文概述 / Chapter 第一節： --- 歷史背景與研究動機 --- p.1 / Chapter 第二節： --- 研究目標 --- p.7 / Chapter 第三節： --- 與研究題目相關的研究和理論 --- p.8 / Chapter 第四節： --- 論文題目界定 --- p.13 / Chapter 第五節： --- 研究理論 --- p.13 / Chapter 第六節： --- 研究方法和局限 --- p.16 / Chapter 第七節： --- 論文章節概覽 --- p.19 / Chapter 第二章： --- 香港的「愛國學校教育」 / Chapter 第一節： --- 「愛國學校」釋義 --- p.21 / Chapter 第二節： --- 歷史背景 --- p.22 / Chapter 第三節： --- 香港的「愛國學校」 --- p.24 / Chapter 第四節： --- 「愛國學校」裏的「愛國教育」 --- p.25 / Chapter 第五節： --- 「愛國學校」裏的中國音樂 --- p.27 / Chapter 第六節： --- 香島中學簡史 --- p.33 / Chapter 第七節： --- 小結 --- p.35 / Chapter 第三章： --- 一九五零年代至七零年代香港的中國音樂概況 / Chapter 第一節： --- 香港的「主流」與「非主流」音樂文化 --- p.37 / Chapter 第二節： --- 從「國樂」到「民樂」：五十至七十年代香港現代中國器樂合奏之演變 --- p.38 / Chapter 第三節： --- 五十至七十年代香港的現代中國器樂合奏團 --- p.41 / Chapter 第四節： --- 「文革」前香港的現代中國器樂合奏團（一九五七至六五） --- p.43 / Chapter 第五節： --- 「文革」期間香港的現代中國器樂合奏團（一九六六至七六） --- p.45 / Chapter 第六節： --- 「文革」後香港的現代中國器樂合奏團（一九七七至七九） --- p.48 / Chapter 第七節： --- 小結 --- p.50 / Chapter 第四章： --- 香島中學與中國音樂 / Chapter 第一節： --- 香島中學的中國器樂活動 --- p.52 / Chapter 第二節： --- 香島中學的中國器樂人物 --- p.56 / Chapter 第三節： --- 香島中學校友的中國器樂活動與組織能力：以陳敏莊、邱岩生、黎漢明為例 --- p.65 / Chapter 第四節： --- 香島中學的中國器樂活動與香港中國器樂發展的關係 --- p.69 / Chapter 第五章： --- 結論 --- p.75 / 附錄一：香港中國器樂界的香島校友介紹 --- p.83 / 附錄二 ：〈大寨紅花遍地開〉總譜（節錄） --- p.90 / 參考資料 --- p.94

Apart from politics and market, ideology was a significant factor in the realm of rock music. Upholding an ideology that focused on individuality and autonomy, and epousing a set of aesthetic value that placed emphases on live performance: how to maintain a balance between autonomy from politics and adaptation to market tastes became a question for both rock artists and the culture industry, a topic of which will be examined in the dissertation. / At the same time, this paper examined the struggle of rock artists against the official constraints and prohibitive coding via rock lyrics, the visual, the music, the body as well as the theatrical performance. / Finally, this paper explores how rock artists and the rock industry turned to alternative spaces for projecting their causes: the Internet, the underground music network and the realm of piracy, spaces where interferences from both the state and the market were minimum. / It also took as its study why rock music was a noise in the market and how rock labels contested for a space in the market which had been plagued by piracy and lack of protection for intellectual property rights. It at the same time explored the ways rock companies attempted to make the books balanced in operating the rock music business in a market where rock fans only constituted a marginal audience. / It looked at how the government imposed control and prohibition on the publishing, performance and dissemination of rock music which it perceived as an alien noise. For this, interviews had been held with personnel from the official apparatuses, the culture industry, the mass media as well as the rock artists and musicians, in a way to understand why rock was rarely heard on the radio or performed on television; why rock music became a term rarely appeared in the official press; and why rock was not allowed to mingle with official discourse like party songs or national anthem; and in what ways the contents of songs as well as the visuals on album covers were censored; and how the government controlled the speech, acts and dress of rock artists on stage. / This paper concludes with the view that despite the many constraints encountered by rock music in the realm of both the state and the market, rock music as a cultural space did not totally lose its freedom, autonomy or integrity. It adopted a mode of communication which is hinged on the non-verbal, the second-order signification, the hidden and the symbolic. It utilised a strategy which avoids direct antagonism with the political regime, and sought outlets for its own messages and meanings. / This paper started by examining how rock music had been transformed into a genre distinguished with its ideology and aesthetics in a socialist country where politics and economy weighed equally significant. / This study took rock music as a cultural space that reflected a larger political and economic environment in China, where it had been marginalized and segregated as a noise by both the state and the market. / Wong Yan Chau Christina. / "September 2006." / Adviser: Joseph Man Chan. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-03, Section: A, page: 0783. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

This dissertation examines how a contested musical practice makes the problems of modernity in India audible. In particular, I look at the relationship between South Indian "fusion" musicians and India's recent economic and cultural growth attributed to the economic reforms of 1991. Fusion is the local name for a musical practice that combines South Indian classical music with elements from rock, jazz, and world music. During thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the South Indian city of Chennai between 2006-8, I attended countless concerts, interviewed dozens of people involved with musical production, and performed with musicians. I observed how musicians and audiences perpetuated the idea that fusion was contested and I documented the local debates that often expressed a deep uncertainty and ambiguity about the legitimacy of fusion. What can a contested musical practice reveal about the recent economic and cultural changes in contemporary urban India? Fusion is contested because its multiple and contradicting histories, definitions, and opinions make it a unique musical problem in Chennai. This problem is further complicated when the explicit intension of fusion as musical mixing is also understood as an example of persistent debates of cultural mixing that are so crucial to India's colonial history and postcolonial present. In this dissertation, I show how fusion triggers debates that provide a unique constellation of irresolvable tensions that help situate contemporary, urban, South Indian musicians within the changing relations between India and the West. The contestation about fusion has led to a lacuna of critical scholarship that this dissertation remedies. I argue that rather than being a reason to overlook fusion, fusion's contestation loads it with meaning and makes it a rich, unexamined site of expressive culture. It provides a unique domain to understand how musicians in Chennai represent the always-changing relations of India and the West through their discourse about music and musical sound.

This is an ethnographic study of the fraught and complex cultural politics of music making in Palestine-Israel in the context of the post-Oslo era. I examine the politics of sound and the ways in which music making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, and also, contextualize political action. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape contemporary artistic production in Israel-Palestine are informed by profound imbalances of power between the State (Israel), the stateless (Palestinians of the occupied Palestinian territories), the complex positioning of Israel's Palestinian minority, and contingent exposure to ongoing political violence. Cultural production in this period is also profoundly informed by highly polarized sentiments and retreat from the expressive modes of relationality that accompanied the 1990s peace process, strategic shifts in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, which is increasingly taking place on the world stage through diplomatic and cultural work, and the conceptual life and currency Palestine has gained as an entity deserving of statehood around the world. The ethnography attends to how the conflict is lived and expressed, musically and discursively, in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) of the West Bank, encompassing different sites, institutions and individuals. I examine the ways in which music making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, with the understanding that musical culture is a sphere in which power and hegemony are asserted, negotiated and resisted through shifting relations between and within different groups. In all the different contexts presented, the dissertation is thematically and theoretically underpinned by the ways in which music is used to culturally assert or reterritorialize social and spatial boundaries in a situation of conflict. Beginning with cultural policy promoted by music institutions located in Israel and in the West Bank, the ethnography focuses on two opposing approaches to cultural interventions in the conflict: music as a site of resistance and nation building amongst Palestinian music conservatories located in the oPt, and music is a site of fostering coexistence and shared models of citizenship amongst Jewish and Arab citizens in mixed Palestinian-Jewish environments in Israel. This follows with the ways in which music making is used to re-write the spatial and temporal boundaries imposed on individuals and communities by the repressive regime of the occupation. The ethnography also attends to the ways in which the cultural construction of place and nation is lived and sounded outside of institutional frameworks, in the blurry boundaries and `boderzones' where fixed ethno-national divisions do not align with physical spaces and individual identities. This opens up spaces for alternative imaginings of national and post-national identities, of resistance and coexistence, of the universal and the particular, that musically highlight the daily struggles of individuals and communities negotiating multiplex modalities of difference.