Excerpt: African Americans have lived in Southwest Virginia since the early eighteenth century, and their traditions—their verbal folklore, customary folklife, and material culture—have long influenced cultural life in Southwest Virginia. African American music has been particularly impactful in the region, yet many people today are unaware of the extent of that influence.

This dissertation centers on creating a new critical edition of the Rip Van Winkle overture. One of America's earliest opera composers, George Frederick Bristow (1825-1898), completed the opera Rip Van Winkle in 1855. When he revised it twenty-five years later in 1880, the composer omitted the original overture which was then thought to be lost. A concert version of this overture exists today only in manuscript form, located at the New York Public Library. Rip Van Winkle is significant to the history of American Music because it is one of the earliest operas composed by an American, and the first to be written on American subject matter (in this case, Washington Irving's story of the same name). Adding to the work's considerable historical significance is that the overture was one of the first American pieces performed by the New York Philharmonic Society, in which Bristow was a violinist. There is currently no scholarly edition of the overture, and thus this edition will fill a significant gap in the understanding of nineteenth-century American music. This critical edition of the overture to George Frederick Bristow's Rip Van Winkle was created in order to be published and available for performance and study, shedding light on the often under-represented American opera in the United States.

My dissertation is a foray into blues music's intricate web of racial taxonomies, an aspect that has been neglected by most existing studies of the genre. In particular, I am interested in significant changes that took place in the 1960s under which blues was reconfigured from "black" to "white" in its production and reception while simultaneously retaining a notion of authenticity that remained deeply connected with constructions of "blackness." In the larger context of the Civil Rights Movement and the burgeoning counterculture, audiences for blues music became increasingly "white" and European. In their romantic embrace of a poverty of choice, "white" audiences and performers engaged in discourses of authenticity and in the commodification, racialization and gendering of sounds and images as well as in the confluence of blues music's class origins. I argue that as "white" people started to listen to "black" blues, essentialist notions about "race" remained unchallenged and were even solidified in the process. By the end of the 1960s, moments of cross-racial communication and a more flexible approach to racialized sounds had been thwarted by nostalgia for and a reification of essentialist categories. This marked the emergence of a conservative blues culture that has continued into the present. Individual chapters focus on key figures, events and institutions that exemplify blues music's racial politics and transnational movements of the 1960s.

Thesis--Indiana University, 2006. / Computer printout. "While the present study will focus specifically on the evolution of tonality in Ginastera's compositional style, I begin by surveying the small body of general scholarship pertinent to Ginastera, starting with his own published comments. This critical survey serves two purposes: it provides a general overview of the scholarship to date regarding Ginastera; and it demonstrates the shortcomings of that scholarship in relation to the study of tonality's evolution in Ginastera's music--hence the rationale for the present study."--Leaves 1-2. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 269-284), abstract, and vita.

Aaron Copland¡¦s Clarinet Concerto was written for jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman in 1948. The composition used not only the jazz style of 20s that he had been appreciated, but also the frequent used compositional techniques -- developing and expanding the plain materials that presented into various ways. Moreover, besides the treatment of jazz rhythms, the combination of elements of Brazilian folk song and American popular music were also applied to the Clarinet Concerto. Although ¡§concerto¡¨ has never been the center of Copland¡¦s works, the Clarinet Concerto has taken an outstanding place in the 20th century clarinet repertoire. This is explained by the arrangement of instrumentation, the originality of structure and the techniques of using plain materials. It combines the characteristics of uncomplicated melodies and meanwhile demands challenging performance techniques. This research includes three chapters. The first chapter introduces Copland¡¦s musical career, shifts of style and the illustration of the Clarinet Concerto¡¦s background. The second chapter brings in the discussion of the concerto from three aspects -- structure, musical elements and performance practice. The final chapter deals with the distinctiveness of the Clarinet Concerto.

This thesis explores the relationship between black gospel music and the African American freedom struggle of the post-WWII era. More specifically, it addresses the paradoxical suggestion that black gospel artists themselves were typically escapist, apathetic, and politically uninvolved—like the black church and black masses in general—despite the “classical” Southern movement music being largely gospel-based. This thesis argues that gospel was in fact a critical component of the civil rights movement. In ways open and veiled, black gospel music always spoke to the issue of freedom. Topics include: grassroots gospel communities; African American sacred song and coded resistance; black church culture and social action; freedom songs and local movements; socially conscious or activist gospel figures; gospel records with civil rights themes.

Country music, considered a uniquely American musical genre, has been relatively under-researched compared to rock and rap music. This thesis proposes research into the topic of country music, specifically the ways which country music songs portray gender. The thesis uses Billboard chart data to determine commercially successful songs, and performs a content analysis on the lyrics of these songs. I will select songs from a fifty year period ranging from 1955 to 2005, so as to allow for a longitudinal study of potential changes in presentation. Attention will be focused on the lyrical descriptions of men and women and how their roles are described in the songs.

This dissertation analyzes the impact of musical transatlanticism on the identities of American communities. I do so through case studies in three time periods: seventeenth-century colonial Massachusetts, the post-Revolutionary Early American Republic, and early twentieth-century Progressive era Chicago. I develop an Atlantic musicology approach that which moves beyond national and nationalist frameworks and traces the strong and lasting musical connections between America and Europe. I explore three kinds of musical transatlanticism: the migration of musicians, the transmission of musical works, and the circulation of ideas about music. Music that crossed the Atlantic Ocean underwent changes wrought by transcription, translation, and contrafacting, and I argue that these changes were instrumental to the self-fashioning of American identity. Intercultural encounter and ideas of difference also drove communities to delineate their conceptual boundaries, although not without ambivalence. Ever in a state of flux, music reflected groups’ self-conceptions both locally and for transatlantic audiences in an ongoing process of conscious and unconscious musical adaptation. A wide-ranging project such as this demands a myriad of historical sources, which range from printed musical volumes to newspapers to diaries and letters. These variegated materials call for an interdisciplinary approach, and I draw on analytic methods from musicology, archival methods from history, and interpretive lenses from ethnomusicology and Atlantic history. I begin with an introduction that elucidates the conceptual and historiographical stakes of the project. The first two case studies focus on puritan psalmody in the seventeenth century. Chapter 1 analyzes puritan ideas about the affective power of music to promote personal piety, and Chapter 2 examines the role of music in colonial encounters with the native population of southern New England. Moving to the late eighteenth century, Chapter 3 traces the circulation of political song, particularly partisan and patriotic American contrafacta of British tunes, through the public print sphere. Chapter 4 turns to the domestic sphere, using one woman’s musical activities as a guide through the contemporary debates over feminine musical accomplishment. Chapter 5 enters Progressive-era Chicago, where European immigrants brought Old World folk repertories to the aesthetically and civically idealistic programs at the Hull-House Settlement. / Music

The Azusa Street Revival was a movement started in 1906 by a small group of black individuals at a prayer meeting in Los Angeles, California. The revival is largely considered the beginning of the Pentecostal movement. This paper investigates the relationship between the worship practices of the Azusa Street Revival and the musical and religious traditions of the West and Central African peoples who were the ancestors of some of the most prominent and influential participants in the movement. These practices, which include spirit possession, physical movement and rhythm, musical collaboration, and indeterminate times of worship, seemingly made their way from Africa into the daily lives of African American slaves, where they were adopted by participants at the American camp meetings of the early nineteenth century. From there, these West and Central African musical traditions became instituted in the holiness movement, the precursor to the Azusa Street Revival.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1974. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.