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Hardcore music is intrinsically anarchistic. The hardcore music scene represents a radical departure from contemporary society. Rejecting the materialism, militarism, and hedonism of the mainstream music scene—and, by extension, modern culture—hardcore music presents an alternative lifestyle rooted in solidarity, equality, and liberty. Indeed, the culture of the hardcore scene approaches a transitive, nomadic model of an anarchistic commune built on resistance as a way of life. In this study, I identified the ways music and lyrics craft attitudes and environments for revolt and rebellion, cultivating critical thinking and disobedience in equal measures. In order to understand the hardcore community, I conducted interviews, studied political theory, analyzed the lyrics of hardcore bands, and synthesized the data to draw connections between major thematic elements of this community. I've found that hardcore music has created a countercultural ethos that subverts and defies political apathy and instigates direct action in order to revolutionize the political process and erect spaces of anarchic solidarity.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of music and authoritarianism in Conakry, Guinea. Representations in the scholarly and popular literature often emphasize African music as a site for resistance and oppositional politics, while musicians who support the state are seen as tools of propaganda. In this thesis, I examine instead the choices and subjectivities of musicians who sing for an authoritarian state. As I show, musicians in Conakry, across genres and generations, rarely express dissent and overwhelmingly adopt cautious and conservative positions towards the state. I describe these stances as operating within a politics of silence that has emerged over the past half-century of authoritarian rule in Guinea, deriving from norms of ambiguity and secrecy in Mande culture. I begin in Chapter One by considering the foundational moment of the Guinean Cultural Revolution to examine how music became intertwined with a political culture of control under the regime of Guinea’s first president Sékou Touré. In Chapters Two, Three and Four I then investigate the legacy of the Revolution in shaping musical practice in Conakry today. My analysis is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2009, following a military coup d’état. I use the particular circumstances of the post-coup moment in 2009 as a lens through which to understand the ongoing legacy of authoritarianism on Conakry’s musical and political landscape. I consider the afterlife of musical nationalism as musicians from the Revolution seek to find a place in the post-nationalist state; anxieties about praise-singing and music professionalization that have sharpened since the Revolution’s end; and the politics of youth music as young people negotiate between ideals of protest and the quiet accommodation of power. As I argue, silence is a form of agency for musicians in Conakry as they attempt to negotiate the complexities of life in an authoritarian state.

This dissertation is the culmination of a three year research project into sacred singing among evangelical Christians living in North-East Scottish and Northern Isles coastal communities.  The exact geographical area in question was the stretch of coastline between Aberdeen and Wick, and the Orkney and Shetland Islands.  The aim of this project has been to record and analyze current practices, placing them historically and contemporaneously within the faith communities and understanding them in their social and cultural contexts.  The pivotal role of sacred music in the community was researched, along with the meaning of the music to the participants, and its role in constructing personal and group identity.  Religious traditions and fishing heritage have been explored with particular reference to the construction of a distinctive ‘soundscape’.  As far as possible, examples of sacred singing outside church worship have been documented including singing in the workplace, in the home, and in the public sphere.

M.Mus., Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 1998

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.

Bluegrass as it is played in the United States today is not simply a resistant category of country music, but performs a particular and emergent view of past/present relations. More than a "micromusic" mediating between "supercultures" and "subcultures" (in Mark Slobin's terms 1993), in fact bluegrass's complex history resists simple top down or bottom up perspectives, articulating a distinct space of authenticity. Active `genre tending' in a jam setting poetically articulates emergent social relations, in a specific spatiotemporal frame, at New York City's The Baggot Inn jam scene, a site of bluegrass performance at which the genre is employed creatively as a way of socializing and articulating contemporary presence. Learning a genre on an individual level is an actively embodied linking of technique and feeling, and differing listening experiences may lead to differing ideas of what a musical text represents. Expressive skill, executed through embodied musical gestures derived from specific pieces of music, may embed personal biography with social history and experience. Successful coperformance of a genre (bluegrass, in this case) requires a dynamic performative flexibility. This flexibility in turn can permanently affect both player and context, though different players may have to work to agree or disagree. These live, face to face interactions which depend on local specifics, maintain the coherence of the wider musical genre that facilitates those very actions themselves.

Vast numbers of historical field recordings are currently being digitised and disseminated online; but what are these field recordings-and how do they resonate today? This thesis addresses these questions by listening to the digitisation of recordings made for a number of ethnographic projects that took place in Britain in the early 1950s. Each project shared a set of logics and practices I call national phonography. Recording technologies were invested with the ability to sound and salvage the nation, but this first involved deciding what the nation was, and what it was supposed to sound like. National phonography was an institutional and technological network; behind the encounter between recordist and recorded lies a complex and variegated mess of cultural politics, microphones, mediality, sonic aesthetics, energy policies, commercial interests, and music formats. The thesis is structured around a series of historical case studies. The first study traces the emergence of Britain's field recording moment, connecting it to the waning of empire, and focusing on sonic aspects of the 1951 Festival of Britain and the recording policies of national and international folk music organisations. The second study listens to the founding of a sound archive at the University of Edinburgh, also in 1951, asking how sound was used in constructing Scotland as an object of study, stockpiling the nation through the technologies and ideologies of preservation. The third study tracks how the BBC used fieldwork - particularly through its Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme (1952-57) - as part of an effort to secure the aural border. The fourth study tells the story of The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, produced by Alan Lomax while based in Britain and released in 1955. Here, recordings were presented in fragments as nations were written onto long-playing records, and the project is discussed as a museum of voice. The final chapter shifts perspective to the online circulation of these field recordings. It asks what an online sound archive is, hearing how recordings compress multiple agencies which continue to unfold on playback, and exploring the archival silences built into sonic productions of nations. Finally, online archives are considered as heritage sites, raising questions about whose nation is produced by national phonography. This thesis brings together perspectives from sound studies and ethnomusicology; and contributes to conversations on the history of ethnomusicology in Europe, the politics of technology, ontologies of sound archives, and theories of recorded sound and musical nationalisms.

Summary: Few people know that there are two kinds of Maori music. The kind with which most people are familiar - known as Action Song - dates from perhaps the first or second decade of this century. In its present form it is little more than a Maorified form of Western popular music. The other kind of Maori music has a long tradition dating back to the beginnings of the Maori people. Even today it remains associated with the old values and institutions of Maoridom. It exhibits, in consequence, great tenacity of style. It is with the older form of music that this thesis is concerned. Since, so far as the writer is aware, there is no generally accepted name which incorporates the whole of the older song tradition, it will be called here Maori chant. This term is used as inclusive of waiata, patere, pao, and all the other forms discussed. It is used in preference to the term Maori song which could also include Action Song.

Thesis (M.M.)--Bowling Green State University, 2007. / Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 52 p. : ill. Includes bibliographical references.