No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation synthesizes critical theories of identity with music theoretical analysis to explore how listeners use popular music as a means of identity construction. Focusing on Radiohead’s 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool, the dissertation investigates the various sociological and musical frameworks that illuminate how the songs interact with listener expectations in the process of interpretation. Work on popular music and personal expression is already present in sociology, anthropology, musicology, and other disciplines, though that work rarely engages the close readings of musical processes that I employ in the dissertation. Richard Middleton (Studying Popular Music) and Tia DeNora (Music in Everyday Life), for example, apply a wide variety of methodologies toward identifying the complexities of identity and popular music. For the dissertation, though, I focus primarily on how Judith Butler’s conception of interpellation in Giving an Account of Oneself can be used as a model for how musical conventions and listener expectations impact the types of identity positions available to listeners. For Butler, interpellation refers to how frameworks of social norms force subjects to adhere to specific identity positions. This dissertation will explore both the social and musical conventions that allow for nuanced and critical interpretations of popular songs. Although many theorists have probed Radiohead’s music, this dissertation synthesizes robust analytical approaches with hermeneutics in order to explore how Radiohead’s music signifies, both in the context of their acoustic components and with regard to how this music impacts the construction of listener identities. Radiohead’s music is apt for these analyses because it often straddles the line between convention and surprise, opening several avenues for critical and musical scrutiny. I also argue that listeners interact with this music as if the songs are agents themselves––they have powerful emotional and physical effects on us. / Music Composition

No description available.

Note:

Jazz and rock have been historically treated as separate musical traditions, despite having many similar musical and cultural characteristics, as well as sharing significant periods of interaction and overlap throughout popular music history. The rift between jazz and rock, and jazz and rock scholarship, is based on a set of received assumptions as to why jazz and rock are different. However, these assumptions are not naturally inherent to the two genres, but are instead the result of a discursive construction that defines them in contrast to one another. Furthermore, the roots of this discursive divide are to be found in the history of popular music journalism. In this thesis I challenge the traditional divide between jazz and rock by examining five historical case studies in American jazz and rock journalism. My underlying argument is that we cannot take for granted the fact that jazz and rock would ultimately become separate discourses: what are now represented as inevitable musical and cultural divergences between the two genres were actually constructed under very particular institutional and historical forces. There are other ways popular music history could have been written (and has been written) that call the oppositional representation of jazz and rock into question. The case studies focus on the two oldest surviving and most influential jazz and rock periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. I examine the role of critics in developing a distinction between the two genres that would eventually be reproduced in the academic scholarship of jazz and rock. I also demonstrate how the formation of jazz and rock as genres has been influenced by non-musicological factors, not least of all by music magazines as commercial institutions trying to survive and compete in the American press industry.

The purpose of this study is to survey the song lore of the American youth culture, beginning with the rock Int roll era of the fifties, treating the topical-folksong movement of the early sixties, and finally focusing upon the folk-rock genre that resulted from an amalgamation of the two forms of expression. In addition to the art of folk rock and the cultural values reflected in the lyrics, attention will be given to the folk aspects of the performance, the life-style of the performer, and the participation of the youth as a cultural group.

In 1995, fiddler Ashley MacIsaac released the album Hi, How Are You Today? that featured MacIsaac performing traditional Celtic tunes accompanied by modern rock instruments. The musical genre transformation on the album (notable because people who were not fans of Celtic music bought this album, tracks were released for airplay, and music videos accompanied the singles) can be studied according to the types of genre transformation outlined by Alastair Fowler in Kinds of Literature. If MacIsaac's goal was to offer a popular rock album while playing traditional tunes on the fiddle, critics and members of his audience inevitably questioned his motivation, from which charges of pandering and exploitation followed. Alternate interpretations stressed that MacIsaac was merely adapting traditional music to reflect a changing musical climate. This thesis examines such perspectives, along with the global phenomenon of modernizing folk music amidst the ambiguous boundary between popular and folk musical genres.

No description available.

This thesis is based on two years of participant observation in a municipal youth club in a Swedish city suburb. In focus is a group of 14-19 year old boys and their relations to peers and to the staff of the club. Rock music playing, the activity they engage in, is studied as a part of the youth club practice, and seen as a communicative process in which relations are lived out. Two approaches are identified; "to go for it" and "to have fun" both of which become important in the boys´ musical awareness, as well as their attitude to life. The youth club is seen as a place where a particular kind of democratic dilemma is grappled with. The club has the pedagogical aim of creating meaningful leisure time on the visitors tenns, but also of disciplining them and functioning as an instrument of guidance into adult life values. Questions of power-relations and institutionalization are discussed through notions of the dialectic of control (Giddens); of authority (Sennett), and of Goffman's analysis of life within public institutions. In this setting, the complexity of power and of growing up in modem society are studied. Both groups; the staff and the visitors, are seen as jointly shaping and recreating a communicative practice through interaction, with music playing as the medium through which relations are transformedand hierarchies seemingly overturned at the same time as social control is cemented and protest limited.