Music as Pure Duration: a dialogue between music and philosophy is a multi-method Practice Based Research project that contributes to dialogue between music and philosophy within the field of music. The thesis is comprised of a compositional portfolio and written component. It places hybrid of New Music and Electroacoustics in dialogue with Metaphysics. By interpreting Bergson’s temporality and Husserl’s consciousness of internal time through music, it questions how temporality is distinct in music compared to physical objects and sound. Chapter One defines the study. Chapter Two focuses on the composition of Sedemus, reading the design schematic of a chair as instruction for music. It discusses the relationship between spatiality and temporality, accuracy and interpretation. Chapter Three critiques Sedemus, leading to the dialogic composition of Sedere Audire. It differentiates analytical knowledge from intuitive knowledge in the context of music and sound. Chapter Four offers music as a metaphysical concept, realized as Day Born. It investigates the heard and the audible. Underpinned by Husserl’s treatment of Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, it is succession, simultaneity, and continuity that appear critical to the differentiation of non-audio and audio entities. In the context of Hermann’s definition, Chapter Five focuses on analytical accuracy in the sonification of a cuboid and uncovers a tension between validity and aesthetics. Chapter Six presents compositions informed by the concepts of unfolding (in Struck), differentiating analysis and intuition (in Discern), and piano as object or musical instrument (in Reduce). Chapter Seven summarises the research findings and points towards continuing research. Sedemus, Sedere Audire, Day Born, and the sonifications demonstrate new insights gained through practical and philosophical analysis whilst Struck, Discern, and Reduce demonstrate tacit and intuitive knowledge. This research is intended to be of interest to musicians, especially those seeking to embed their music practice within philosophy. It is expected that philosophers with specific interest in temporality, Bergson, or Husserl, may also find interest.

This thesis examines themes of male control and female resistance in commercially recorded American roots music of the interwar period, focusing primarily on recordings made in the years 1920-1940. It argues that much of the roots music recorded during this period communicated powerful messages about gendered and racial hierarchies to consumers. Rooted in close textual analysis of song lyrics and visual marketing materials for a plethora of commercially available roots music, the thesis deploys methodologies drawn from history, literary, cultural studies, and musicology. It questions why scholars have understudied themes of gendered power contestations and social control in commercially recorded roots music and the accompanying marketing materials during the interwar period. Although scholars have acknowledged intersections of race, class, gender, and the construction of segregated roots music markets during the nascent stages of a rapidly-developing fledgling industry, this thesis contends that lyrical content and marketing materials also intersected with white supremacist and eugenic ideologies, reflecting ideas about social control of women during the interwar period. It advances extant scholarship on black and white female roots music artists active during the interwar period, underscoring and illuminating themes of female resistance to male control, inside and outside of the worlds created on commercial recordings.

The contribution to knowledge, and the core of the research, is a tonal foundation based on glissandi using compositional techniques derived from synergy of glissandi, microtonality, and isorhythm. The techniques are performed on specially constructed guitars in 18, 24, 30, and 36 tet (tone equal temperament). Guitar based musical artefacts demonstrating some possible techniques are arranged on two compact discs: CD1 ‘Experimental Miniatures’ and CD2 ‘After Twelve’.

Background: This context statement describes the formation and organisation of a community music centre www.coda.org.uk from the personal story and perspective of the founder and director. The work was undertaken at a time (1995 – 2005) of changes in music education in the UK and changes to the funding environment for the arts. It includes the background to the formation of the Music Research Institute www.mri.ac.uk. The paper is supported by evidence of correspondence, the author’s own writings from a national music education magazine, annual reports from the time and the author’s own examples of music, workshops and perfomances. Methods: The statement uses an autoethnographic approach with a retrospective analysis of the story placing the work into the organisational, educational and social context of the time. It explores through developmental models the drivers for the direction and decisions made to fund and grow the organisation. Case studies and evidence in piano tuition, music therapy and governance are used to support the statement. Conclusions: The statement identified aesthetic and organisational connections and threads of relationships that became concrete in the culture and style of the organisation. It also identified challenges of funding a large capital project in community music making set against an establishment and conservatoire ecology of music making and learning. The statement concludes by defining a six point list of innovations of combining formal and informal music making within a centre for life-long learning for all ages and all abilities.

This thesis explores the production of DIY punk alternative cultures, communities and identities as activism. Based on an ethnographic study of DIY punk in North East England, it combines and integrates the disciplinary approaches of sociology, cultural studies and geography. Using an interpretivist epistemology, the research focuses on DIY punk participants’ subjective realities and experiences, through participant observation, of punk events and shows, and interviews. Carried out by a researcher who was both embedded in the scene, as a punk participant, and outside it, as an academic PhD student, it enhances methodological and epistemological debates about the ‘insider/outsider’ research stance and subjectivities. This thesis promotes DIY punk as a relevant and rich area for scholarship. It theorises DIY punk participation as cultural production (Moore, 2007), existing within a framework of activism, as participants attempt to bring into being ‘hoped-for futures’ (Chatterton & Pickerill, 2010) using a multitude of tactics. Identifying multi-layered and multi-scalar acts of resistance, the narrowness of the concept of activism in the literature is critiqued. A more inclusive conceptualisation of activism, as more than oppositional, is proposed. A DIY ethic is theorised as anti-capitalist and interconnected with other complexly interwoven ideologies and politics. The everyday challenges that participants face, in negotiating a DIY punk ethic, and the interface between DIY punk culture and ‘mainstream’ society, are examined. Participants narratively construct DIY punk through ongoing negotiations, which affect how participants produce and interact with and in DIY punk spaces. The research contributes to scholarship on punk and community by arguing that DIY punk cultural production is strengthened by notions of community. It has wider relevance by exploring the meaning of community in a unique cultural context. It offers a definition of community that recognises DIY punk communities as imagined (Anderson, 1991) but sensitive to the significance of place.

The main aim of this thesis is to explore the use of learning technology within the music technology curriculum. First of all, it is recognised that there is a problem for music technology tutors in providing support for students who have 24-hour access to a music technology studio: typically, there is no support available outside of normal working hours. One solution is to implement the use of learning technology in the studio. However, there is no research to date in the field of music education that considers the pedagogical value of an interactive multimedia-based tool for music technologists. In order to address this matter, two learning technology interfaces were designed to support music technology students in different areas of the curriculum, specifically recording and psychoacoustics, and empirical work was carried out in order to evaluate their effectiveness. The intention was for both interfaces to enable contingent learning, or learning at a time of need, so that music technology students could undertake a creative task and retrieve help without having to leave the studio environment or seek assistance from a member of staff. In the light of general educational literature on learning and teaching, the information contained within the pages of these interfaces was divided into two categories, procedural and conceptual. The former provided step-by-step guidance on the execution of a task, while the latter provided broader theoretical knowledge associated with that task. A second aim of this thesis is to examine the effect of acquiring procedural and conceptual information through the interfaces on students' abilities to perform a task and retain knowledge about it. Two experiments were carried out involving 48 first-year undergraduates and 30 second-year undergraduates respectively. For each experiment, the students were divided into two groups and were required to carry out a task using one of the interfaces. In completing the set task, the first group was asked to gather procedural information from the interface, while the second group had to gain conceptual information. One month later, the students were asked to carry out the same task, but without using the interface. On both occasions, the students submitted task material for assessment. In general, the results showed that there were some significant differences in the levels of knowledge retention and task performance between the two groups of students, notably in favour of those who had acquired conceptual information.

This narrative study into music and initial teacher education explored seven primary student teachers' stories of 'musical self'. They identified themselves as `not musical' at the start of their journey. The complexities of their personal and professional stories were explored examining culturally and socially rooted assumptions within their narratives. Research into student teachers' `musical self' is limited. The lenses of symbolic and interpretive interactionism and social constructionism supported analyses of students' co-construction of a teaching 'musical self'. Using Kuhn's (1962) paradigm theory, literature on music education's philosophies, principles and practices throughout the twentieth century were examined. This research built chronological biographies of students' contextually constructed teaching 'musical selves'. The students' subject and pedagogic knowledge development was tracked informing the in-depth interviews. The analyses of their stories were through thematic induction. Their own music making and successes with children did not appear to change their self labelling. The transactional self was underpinned by situated self referencing during interactions that created resilience in the students' ability to maintain 'not musical' labels. Strategies of self handicapping (Rhodewalt and Tragakis 2002) and self protection (Higgins 1999, Forgas and Williams 2002c) were regularly employed by the students. My initial assumptions of students' lack of musical expertise and experience proved inadequate as their musical backgrounds were more complex. The hegemony of Western High Art Music upon music education practices and perceptions proved influential through socially and culturally constructed norms for judging musical value and musicianship. The three key themes were durability of self labelling as 'not musical', WHAM effect upon individual conceptions of musical self and impact of various contexts upon the musical self. Emotional experiences and approving/disapproving atmospheres of authoritative people created durable labelling of the self as 'not musical'. Contextually based comparisons and expectations impacted negatively on their perceptions. Students separated their teaching and personal musical selves creating a false consciousness about 'musical self'. Students concluded they were 'not musical enough' to teach rather than 'not musical at all'.

This thesis explores the nature of the second folk revival in the North East of England. While there have been several major studies of the various national folk revivals during the 1950s, '60s and '70s, there is a paucity of scholarly accounts viewed through a regional lens. This study therefore builds on a common perception of North Eastern regional particularity to establish the ways in which the folk revival as experienced by its members within the region was distinct from that detailed in the literature on the wider (inter-)national folk scene. Using comparative examples drawn from the regional and international folk movements, the thesis contextualizes and differentiates the general trends within the second revival as a whole and its North Eastern manifestation. There are some evident discrepancies relating, for example, to levels of political involvement in the respective folk scenes but also broad similarities in chronological developments. These trends are explored through a number of themes, beginning with the weaving of a constructed regional folk-cultural identity out of a diversity of ethnic, local and occupational strands. Secondly, the common assumption that the North East is a region with a rare continuity of traditions is interrogated, alongside an acknowledgement that this was a time of rapid social change, mobility and dislocation from older cultural practices. The basic dichotomy of 'mediator' and `mediated' is questioned and found wanting, particularly in a region where young revivalists were rarely far — temporally, geographically or socially - from the source of their tradition. The ways in which the media represented and altered folk traditions, and how these representations were used to build regional consciousness is considered, as are the 1960s developments in heritage and tourism which saw vernacular culture taking on a much greater significance in the region's economy. Further, celebratory imagery is shown to have a long history in musical representations of the region, but with a contemporary focus on stoicism in the face of decline. Finally, the reasons behind the folklorists' imperative to locate the `authentic' are sought in relative degrees of alienation from contemporary society, resulting in a dissolution of the barriers between 'genuine' and 'invented' tradition.

This study explores the themes of continuity and change in twentieth-century British cultural history, particularities of place and regional identity in the North of England, and the cultural transfer of North American popular music in Britain between 1956 and 1965. By means of a comparative historical investigation of youth culture and popular music in Liverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne, the work engages with existing debate among historians surrounding the nature and extent of cultural change for the period usually referred to as 'The Sixties', and whether or not it is possible to speak of a 'Cultural Revolution'. Spanning the years between the initial impact of rock 'n' roll and the immediate aftermath of the Beat Boom of 1963-64, a phenomenon described by one commentator as representing 'perhaps the North's greatest single cultural 'putsch?', the thesis examines the role of urban and regional identity in the process of cultural production, reproduction, and consumption. Theoretical insights derived from the associated disciplines of sociology and cultural studies are employed which offer an opportunity for a novel and dynamic analysis and interpretation of the empirical historical evidence. This research is especially pertinent at a time when historians are increasingly looking to the regional and inter-regional, as opposed to the national and international, for explanations of continuity and change. There is a burgeoning interest in the history of popular culture inspired by the transition of post-modern society from one of production to consumption. Cultural and economic theorists have called for more historical investigation to inform current debates regarding the post-modern city's ability to attract a 'creative class' as a means towards urban regeneration. This study informs these debates by bringing the above themes together in a unique historical analysis of cultural continuity and change, Northern identity, and popular music.

Teachers' thinking underpins their actions, in various ways, consciously or nonconsciously, and therefore it is necessary to understand their thinking in order to understand their teaching. Part of such thinking concerns subject knowledge, which is an important, albeit often assumed, feature in professional practice. For primary school teachers who cover the breadth of the National Curriculum there are particular issues. In music, despite frequent reports from Ofsted referring to the good quality of teaching, there still appears to be considerable lack of confidence among such teachers, frequently linked with a perceived lack of subject knowledge. Subject knowledge in music is under-researched in this country and this small-scale study was intended to explore the nature of teachers' beliefs about music in education. In a qualitative case study approach, the teachers in a two-form-entry, inner-city primary school talked individually, in three separate sessions over the course of an academic year, about various aspects of music in education. They also constructed concept maps to represent their thinking. A process of inductive and iterative analysis led to the identification of four main findings concerning enjoyment, the value of music, issues relating to instrumental teaching and the use of schools' broadcasts. These aspects form the basis of a discussion which moves beyond the original research questions to build an orthogonal model that conceptualises and contextualises teachers' thinking within two dimensions representing their professional/non-professional lives and the formal/informal contexts of musical involvement, nested in their beliefs regarding the nature and value of music. It is suggested that this model might also apply to other subjects. There are implications from this study not only for teachers themselves and for the schools in which they work, but also for those involved in supporting student and practising teachers through ITE, INSET and CPD, as well as for policymakers.