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This study examines the presentation of religion in the cheapest printed wares produced in London c.1550-1640: broadside ballads, woodcut pictures, text-dominated broadsides, and octavo chapbooks. During the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the trade in this 'cheap print' became increasingly specialized. The 'ballad partners' collected a stock of titles, increased the use of illustrations, and organized themselves for more efficient distribution. They published large folio woodcut pictures, and began to develop a new line of chapbooks. The thesis investigates, not only the spread of readership, but the interweaving of the printed word with existing cultural practices, both oral and visual. <i>Part 1</i> deals with the broadside ballad as song, disseminated by a network of travelling performers and pedlars. <i>Part 2</i> looks at the broadside picture as an image for the wall, placed against the background of domestic wall painting and painted cloth. Only in <i>Part 3</i> do I follow the development of 'cheap print' intended primarily for reading, in particular the 24-page octavo format which became the standard 'small book' after the Restoration. I have dated the beginnings of this trade to the second decade of the seventeenth century, and have traced some three dozen extant 'penny merriments', 'miscellanies' and 'godlinesses' published before 1640. Just as 'cheap print' was shaped by existing non-literate traditions, Protestant ideas and images were modified by older beliefs. Reformers wrote hundreds of ballads in the first half of Elizabeth's reign, of which some fifty showed enduring commercial success. By comparing the original output of the Protestant publicists with this seventeenth-century 'stock', I show the partial success of the reformers' goals, as the doctrine of salvation by faith, Protestant martyrs, and Old Testament episodes infiltrated the ballads. In the woodcuts and other visual art, the gap between Protestant 'iconophobia' and the continued demand for religious pictures was bridged by 'stories' for walls, chosen from the lower rungs of the 'ladder of sanctity'. Texts themselves became a common form of decoration: broadside 'tables', bearing pithy aphorisms and excerpts from Scripture, sanctified the walls of the good householder. Finally, the octavo repentance tract replaced the broadside ballad as a medium for the evangelical message, but the moralistic 'penny miscellanies' reflected the conservative religion of many ordinary parishioners. The study of these cheap forms of print shows their manifold uses, during a period of transition to widespread literacy. At the same time, it reveals some aspects of the process by which a new, post-Reformation, religious culture was created.

This thesis examines Shona commodified songs in order to develop a set of criteria for critically determining whether a Zimbabwean popular song has appropriated a Shona traditional song and whether this enables the song to be categorised as “commodified Shona traditional music”. The study identifies and analyses Zimbabwean popular songs by selected musicians. It identifies strategies and patterns adopted by the musicians to reconstruct Shona traditional sources. The study also questions why the musicians draw from the indigenous sources in certain ways and how the commodified songs are meaningful to them and Shona community members in general. The analysis shows that there are certain cultural values associated with each of the distinct Shona musical genres namely mbira, ngoma and jiti. These determine how the songs are adapted. Mbira music is believed to be the product of ancestors and therefore all the popular songs that reproduce mbira traditional sources must retain “standard basic” structural elements. The melorhythmic patterns associated with ngoma traditional sources are usually maintained in popular music. While text constantly changes, traditional themes are usually continued. However, the perception and understanding of cultural values usually differ from one popular musician to another depending on varying personal backgrounds and compositional purposes. Generally, there are four strategies employed in the adaptation of Shona traditional music. These are imitation, sampling, combining two or more distinct indigenous styles and abstract adaptation. The inclusion and exclusion of Shona indigenous elements in popular music performance play an important role in the reconstruction and negotiation of cultural heritage and identity for contemporary musicians and audiences.

Student Number : 0302215H - PhD thesis - School of Language and Literature Studies - Faculty of Humanities / This study explores the meaning of contemporary Kenyan popular music by undertaking literary interpretations of song lyrics and musical styles. In making these interpretations, the fabric of popular song is shown to be a network of referents and associations with texts situated both within and outside of the song-texts. As polyphonic discourse, these vast range of textual and paratextual referents opens up various points of engagement between artiste, songtext and audience and in the process, the surplus meanings generated by both the poetry of the text and the referents embedded within it account for the significance of popular songs as concrete articulations that mediate the realities of modern Kenya. Through the six chapters that make up the core of the study we see the mini-dramas that are played out in the material conditions within which the songs are produced; in the iconographies that are generated by artistes' stage names and album titles; in the strategies of memory work that connect present-day realities to old cultural practices; in the soundtracks of urban spaces and in those of domesticated global cultural trends and finally, in the mediation of the antinomies surrounding the metanarrative of the nation and the realization of political transition. I conclude by suggesting that Kenyan popular music demonstrates how contemporary postcolonial texts inform one another, opening up a dialogue between texts and also between local events, experiences and knowledges. Equally important, the study defines contemporary Kenyan culture by working out the sources of the images and idioms built up in this music and accepting the complexities of postcolonial existence as a site of fluid interaction between various cultural practices and competing modernities.

In this thesis I explore how music-text relations in Frank Zappa’s music work together to express a central narrative, with a particular focus on his use of musical allusion. First, I frame Zappa’s creative perspective from a Dadaist philosophy, illuminating an underlying critique of American culture through the use of musical and lyrical devices such as allusion. I explore how Zappa uses allusion as a narrative device and how these allusions affect a listener’s interpretation of a track. Finally, I provide an in-depth analysis of “Billy the Mountain” from the 1972 album Just Another Band From L.A. I first present an overview and analysis of the narrative as it is presented in the lyrics and then explore how musical parameters contribute to the narrative of the track. By understanding the interaction of music and text, I create a platform from which Zappa’s music can be better understood.

presente estudo pretende analisar o Heavy Metal no Brasil nos anos 1980, historiando sua origem, bem como sua chegada ao Brasil e a forma como esse estilo foi absorvido pela juventude brasileira, destacando suas especificidades. Ao historiar esse processo, daremos ênfase ao panorama político, econômico e social do país no período e suas articulações com o movimento heavy metal, procurando responder até que ponto essas condições influenciaram a estética desse movimento, e como ele foi adaptado e absorvido no panorama cultural brasileiro, influenciando-o por sua vez / This study aims to analyze the Heavy Metal in Brazil in the 1980s studies the history their origin and their arrival in Brazil and how that style was absorbed by Brazilian youth, highlighting its specific features. When recounting this process, we will emphasize the political, economic and social landscape of the country in the period and its articulations with the heavy metal movement, seeking to respond to what extent these conditions influenced the aesthetics of this movement, and how it was adapted and absorbed into the cultural landscape Brazilian, influencing it in turn

This dissertation is about the mediation of cross-cultural difference among Moroccan and Spanish musical practitioners. It is based on the idea that negotiations across the gaps of such difference have been promoted through the increased circulation of people, products and ideas in the modern era. Based on fieldwork during the years 2003-2007, primarily in the urban sites of Granada, Spain and Fez, Morocco, the project focuses on popular music, how both the production and reception of music are critically bound up with notions of genre, how resulting associations of musical practice are affected by different uses of technology, and how musical practices of all types partake of and help form different ideas of belonging.

presente estudo pretende analisar o Heavy Metal no Brasil nos anos 1980, historiando sua origem, bem como sua chegada ao Brasil e a forma como esse estilo foi absorvido pela juventude brasileira, destacando suas especificidades. Ao historiar esse processo, daremos ênfase ao panorama político, econômico e social do país no período e suas articulações com o movimento heavy metal, procurando responder até que ponto essas condições influenciaram a estética desse movimento, e como ele foi adaptado e absorvido no panorama cultural brasileiro, influenciando-o por sua vez / This study aims to analyze the Heavy Metal in Brazil in the 1980s studies the history their origin and their arrival in Brazil and how that style was absorbed by Brazilian youth, highlighting its specific features. When recounting this process, we will emphasize the political, economic and social landscape of the country in the period and its articulations with the heavy metal movement, seeking to respond to what extent these conditions influenced the aesthetics of this movement, and how it was adapted and absorbed into the cultural landscape Brazilian, influencing it in turn

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in an electronic version. Also available from UMI Company.