Thesis--Guo li Taiwan da xue, Taiwan, 1986. / Music in Chinese and staff notation. Includes bibliographical references (p. 214-226).

Thesis--Guo li Taiwan da xue, Taiwan, 1986. / Music in Chinese and staff notation. Includes bibliographical references (p. 214-226).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 320-345). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.Mus.)--New Zealand School of Music, 2010. / Title on disc: Irish music in Wellington : Field recordings. Includes bibliographical references.

Treatise (D.M.A.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2005. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.M.) / This thesis explores the role played by medieval images, music, and poetry in the Mittelalter movement of German folk rock in order to uncover its ideological underpinnings and comment on its artistic and social value. This is achieved through analysis of select recordings, music videos, and interviews with Mittelalter artists, as well as "digital ethnography" carried out on fan forums dedicated to Mittelalter bands. It is determined that the movement as a whole has a strong liberal bias and is less concerned with portraying historical accuracy than it is in championing individual freedom, growth, and tolerance. This thesis concludes that its artistic value varies widely but that its great value lies in the culture of collaborative creativity it fosters.

This dissertation examines the economic, aesthetic, and affective significance of the resurgence of street vendors and their song in Cuba after nearly five decades of silence following the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Their temporary disappearance came hand in hand with the banishment of private modes of labor and entrepreneurship on the island. From colonial times until 1959, street vendors and their songs were a central component of everyday sociality and street economies in Cuba, as well as an integral part of a transnational popular music repertoire. Their recent resurgence overturns prior labor and economic policies in a general context of precarity and accumulated scarcity originating from Cuba’s complex historical position in the global reconstitution of Cold War politics. Since 2010, the Cuban state has sanctioned economic reforms that reintroduce massive forms of self-employment. Significantly, the majority of these can only be exercised through ambulatory vending. As such, the very notions of self-employment, entrepreneurship, and consumption that arise in contemporary Cuba depend, to a large extent, on the mutual circulation of sound and goods. For many self-employed Cubans, no transaction is possible without potential listeners. This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cuba between 2015 and 2019, focusing on questions that emerge in the interaction between vendors, consumers, and the state, as mediated by vocal practices, listening techniques, and the circulation of sound within the particular architectural configuration of Havana. Throughout the dissertation, I develop the term, aural economy, as encompassing the ways in which sound enables modes of exchange as much as sound itself becomes an object of transaction and regulation. I argue that the aural economies arising in contemporary Cuba provide a central way to understand how Cubans negotiate a life worth living under precarious conditions, proposing ways in which to interrogate the unique relationship between aurality and the economy currently reconfiguring the Cuban public sphere. The first chapter examines the aural and racial imaginaries of internal migration from Cuba’s Eastern provinces to the capital, interrogating forms of storytelling that in turn theorize the relationship between notions of song, labor, and dwelling. The second chapter examines the life and labor of a famous peanut vendor in Havana’s old town, interrogating the complex and unequal relationships that unfold between Cuban workers and tourists. The third chapter examines artistic interventions that interrogate the nature of street-vendor songs and approach them as objects of aesthetic experimentation, raising questions about how race, gender, and music hierarchies are linked through questions of labor on the island. The fourth chapter presents a contrastive case study around the aural economy of “el paquete,” an alternative mode of internet consumption in Cuba that circumvents limited access in the island. Taken together, these chapters approach sound as an entry point into the multiple ways in which the mutual relationships between work and life are articulated and contested in contemporary Cuba, linking the affective and the aesthetic with the economic and the infrastructural.

This thesis examines contemporary folk music from no earlier than 2006, specifically music of the bands The Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, and Bon Iver. Providing a close reading of select songs, I prove that modern music is seeing a revival in the Romantic Era and Transcendentalist ideals and philosophy. The works and philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), John Keats (1795-1821), as well as Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), among others and their critics are all considered for points of comparison to the modern lyrics. The reason for this revival is considered in the conclusion chapter in terms of why there is a reaction against the technology driven culture in favor of one that romanticizes the thoughts and ideas of the Romantic era writers, their emphasis on nature, emotion, and the imagination which opposed the logic, reason, and technology of the industrial revolution, just as today there is a reaction to the alienation caused by technology.