Studiens syfte är att undersöka hur orgelundervisande kyrkomusiker i Svenska kyrkan motiverar, bedriver och reflekterar kring sin orgelundervisningspraktik, med särskilt avseende på den institutionella kontext de verkar inom. För att söka svar på dessa frågor har fem kyrkomusiker som undervisar i orgel intervjuats kring sin praktik. Studien har det sociokulturella perspektivet på lärande som teoretisk utgångspunkt och resultatet belyses också utifrån institutionsbegreppet. Några av studiens slutsatser är att om Svenska kyrkan ska kunna behålla sin omfattande orgelspelartradition så måste den ägna sig åt orgelundervisning, att repertoar för orgelundervisning och tillgång till övningsinstrument är av stor vikt för att undervisningen ska vara framgångsrik och att orgelundervisning kan ske som ett kontextualiserat lärande där undervisningen blir del av en större institutionell kontext.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka vad fyra musiklärare har för inställning och åsikter kring genusmedvetenhet i undervisningen. Samtliga lärare arbetar på gymnasiet med inriktning mot musik. Jag har med hjälp av kvalitativa forskningsintervjuer kunnat samla ihop den data jag behövde för att uppnå ett resultat. Resultatet visar att majoriteten av lärarna är eniga om att genusmedvetenhet är viktigt i lärandesammanhang men tycker att man pratar för lite om problematiken som uppstår vid lärares uteblivna självrannsakan i ämnet. De flesta menar att man omedvetet och ofrivilligt bidrar till stereotypa könsroller.

This thesis undertakes an examination of the branding and sponsorship practices of the Vic Firth Drumstick Company, and explores some of the ways that percussion music broadly, and percussionists specifically, may be impacted by the Vic Firth Company’s strategic marketing and sponsorship efforts. The thesis investigates some of the specific methods Vic Firth uses to interact with percussionists and consumers, presenting the methods and the motivations behind them as compatible with neoliberal economic ideas and policies. Vic Firth’s branding strategies reflect myriad economic factors facing individual percussionists; emphasis on personal branding and artistic authenticity, the necessity of entrepreneurial skills to create economic viability, and the desire for personal connection, networking, and alliance with other percussionists are all part of the zeitgeist the company is attempting to tap into. By examining some of the specific ways Vic Firth crafts and curates their brand, including the creation of signature sticks and mallets, a tiered sponsorship program, aggressive media production, and direct marketing to percussionists through social media, I bring into focus the scope of Vic Firth’s brand and its potential effects on the larger percussive and musical landscape.

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This thesis is an analysis and exploration of the feminist themes present in select chamber music theater works by William Osborne for trombonist Abbie Conant. Before analyzing Osborne's compositions, the author provides crucial background information about the lives and experiences of husband and wife and artistic collaborators William Osborne and Abbie Conant. Specifically, the author addresses the sexism that Conant experienced as a trombonist in the Munich Philharmonic. Osborne composed a new genre of works for Conant to perform as an artistic response to the pain both he and Conant experienced during the thirteen year legal battle with the state of Munich and their desire to create fully integrated musical theater works. The author traces the evolution of Osborne and Conant's collaboration by examining three works within the genre of chamber music theater: Winnie--Osborne's adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days; Miriam: The Chair--Osborne's first completely original work; and Street Scene for the Last Mad Soprano. Through personal interviews with Osborne and Conant, the author became aware of Osborne and Conant's influences from Samuel Beckett as well as the formal structure that Osborne uses in his works, and she traces this structure in each work as a method for understanding and organizing the musical and dramatic events. Since Osborne's chamber music theater works require the performer to play a musical instrument, act, and sing, the author employs balanced musicological, dramaturgical, and theoretical analytical approaches when studying each piece. After addressing the formal and compositional devices that Osborne utilizes in each piece, the author focuses her analysis on the feminist themes that are found in the latter two works: Miriam: The Chair and Street Scene for the Last Mad Soprano, for these two works were written as a direct response to the discrimination that Conant experienced in the Munich Philharmonic. The author provides the transcript from her interview with Osborne and Conant as an appendix to the document.

The aim of this research is to show how the “new” musicology differs from the “old” with regards to the creation of knowledge about music, which I refer to as “musicological epistemology”. If epistemology is described in the contemporary era as “justified, true belief” (Huemer 2002: 435), this dissertation discusses how McClary, acting as a “new” musicologist, has justified her “true beliefs” in order to create postmodern knowledge about music in the contemporary era, and how these “true beliefs” differ from “old”/modernist musicological opinions concerning the meaning of music. In this dissertation I have included short descriptions of how I believe the various categories of “old” musicology functioned epistemologically. In order to demonstrate how musicological epistemology has changed in the contemporary era, I have undertaken an epistemological analysis of four of McClary's core articles/musicological narratives included in Reading Music: Selected Essays (2007). I have chosen one article from each of McClary’s main subjects of discourse from 1983 to 2007, namely “interpretation and polemics”, “gender and sexuality”, “popular music” and “early music”, in order to ascertain the “nature, scope and limits” of the knowledge she creates through the writing of these narratives. I have found that McClary has incorporated a variety of postmodern debates into her musicological writing, which separates her, epistemologically, from the “old” musicology. This “old”/“new” musicological split is particularly established in my epistemological analysis of “The blasphemy of talking politics during Bach Year” (1987) in which McClary vehemently criticizes key aspects of the “old” musicology, as well as enunciates how she believes the “new” musicology should function epistemologically. The epistemological analysis of “The cultural work of the madrigal” (2007) shows McClary’s epistemology in its mature form. With regards to McClary’s epistemology, I have discovered that the knowledge she is creating is subject to the reader’s acceptance of the postmodern debates that inform her postmodern intellectual context (relativism, identity and deconstruction for example), which establish the conditions under which her work can be considered as knowledge. I have referred to this type of knowledge as “conditional knowledge”, specifically in the epistemological analysis of “Living to tell: Madonna’s resurrection of the fleshly” (1990). McClary’s knowledge is also subject to the contexts in which she situates these essays (a feminist context, for example), which I have referred to as “context-based knowledge” in my epistemological analysis of “Construction of subjectivity in Schubert’s music” (1994). These forms of knowledge admit a subjective viewpoint and are generally of a socially responsible nature. These elements clearly articulate McClary’s acknowledgement of her postmodern intellectual context with regards to Lyotard’s call for greater toleration and sensitivity in his seminal work La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (1979) (The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge), the essential aspects of which are also discussed in this dissertation. The micronarrative format of her knowledge also relates to Lyotard’s theories, as well as McClary’s open avoidance of grand narratives in her writing. Through my analyses I have affirmed that McClary has produced these postmodern forms of knowledge whilst adhering to the accepted principles of epistemic rigour. Postmodern theory has revealed a relativistic and subjective view of human language and knowledge. McClary, acknowledging this postmodern realization, has taken control of the production of musical meaning and is creating musical knowledge that is meaningful and useful to marginalized groups in the social and musical world. / Dissertation (MMus)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Music / unrestricted

In this master thesis I look at the revivals of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in London (1770 and 1785), Florence (1771), and Naples (1774). After the premiere of Orfeo ed Euridice in Vienna in 1762, Gluck himself reworked the opera for new productions in Parma (1769) and Paris (1774). The versions studied in my thesis, however, were adapted and included music by other composers, such as Johann Christian Bach and Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi. There were a number of added scenes, new characters, and inserted arias, sometimes in a very contrasting style to what Gluck and Calzabigi tried to achieve in their reform of opera seria. For this reason, the reworkings have often been called pasticcio versions in modern literature.  Through a comparative study of the music manuscripts and the printed libretti, I show that these four productions of the opera exhibit four unique approaches to performing the opera at public opera houses in the late eighteenth century. Orfeo was consistently lengthened in order to make the performance long enough for an evening at the opera, but how it was changed varied considerably according to the context of the performance. This suggests a complexity and nuance of the practice of adaptations and substitutions in late eighteenth-century opera in general, and the reception of Orfeo in particular, that have not previously been fully acknowledged.

Contemporary music analysts have generally downplayed the relevance of composer intent, a dismissal which ignores the potential for an enhanced expressive context afforded by composers' own assessments and also contributes to the silencing of already othered voices, such as in the case of queer and trans composers. Allowing the trans composer a voice in the reading of their work affirms the integral part of the trans experience that is self-determination. Over time, this project to tell trans stories evolved into a series of vignette-like analyses of trans composers’ works in which I use a methodology that incorporates the voices of living composers while building on and modifying the work of music theorists and queer theorists, and moving queer musicology towards a new trans musicology that includes non-binary genders. This thesis demonstrates my theoretical framework using interviews of six transgender composers to supplement my analyses of their works. By analyzing the work with the added context of the composer’s statements about their own music, my analyses paint more nuanced and complete pictures of the work that reinvest music analysis with the trans voice behind the composition.

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Many scholars have discussed Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). While discourse has mainly focused on Schenkerian analysis, recent scholarship has started to examine the role of Schenker as a person (e.g., Schenker as a Jewish individual, Schenker as a racist, etc.), and how these identities influenced his views on music. Yet, within these new explorations and discussions, the aspect of disability and Schenker as an individual with a disability have not been as seriously examined. After examining his biography through the lens of disability in the introduction (Chapter 1), this thesis discusses disability's influence on Schenker through two additional chapters. The second chapter explores disability within the social context of fin-de-siècle Vienna and attempts to deduce, from the opinions of Schenker’s contemporaries, what Schenker's own views on disability might have been. The third chapter then demonstrates, through statistical analyses, that disability affected the everyday mechanics of writing for Schenker and how this in turn influenced his style of prose. The thesis concludes (Chapter 4) that there was a correlation between Schenker’s disability and the different writing styles observed in his earlier work and his later, post-disability work. By shedding light on Schenker’s disability, the thesis aims to provide a platform for future discussion on this subject, either in the field of musicology, music theory, or disability studies.