Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 485-509). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Music is often heralded as a means of bringing people together or celebrating diversity and therefore it is also often assumed that music can be a beneficial tool in conflict transformation settings. Despite this widespread belief there is little empirical evidence to support this notion. Indeed, there is more evidence that suggests the opposite; music can increase solidarity within one group but that very process strengthens the borders between what is accepted as in-group or out-group. It is this strengthening of identity borders that can lead to outright conflict if certain other social conditions prevail. One question remains, why is the belief in the power of music so widespread when there is evidence that demonstrates potential negative outcomes? In order to address that question, it is useful to observe that music continues to be used in community projects and within NGOs as a means to bond groups in social conflict despite the lack evidence to support their actions. The belief in the positive power of music has influenced behaviour so that musical activity is included in peace work. Indeed, belief can be seen as a prime motivator of behaviour in most sectors of the world, much more so than hard evidence. This thesis is an exploration of the social processes that occur in musical experiences that affect memory, identity and emotions and how they affect understanding and belief which in turn affects group behaviour. The research is inter-disciplinary, drawing on music sociology, social movements, cultural studies, ethno-musicology and conflict theory, and data was collected using qualitative methods (ethnographic interviewing, action research, observation/participation, grounded theory). The fieldwork was conducted with an inter-religious choir in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a comparative study conducted with a world-music community choir in London, UK.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 238-265).

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2005. / Includes bibliography (p. 448-471).

Thesis (M.Phil.) - University of Queensland, 2005. / Includes bibliography.

This dissertation comprises a musical history and ethnography of musical culture on the island of Mauritius in the southern Indian Ocean. It details two interrelated performance traditions, examining the history and practice of European art music on the island in parallel with that of an endemic song-and-dance tradition called séga. Mauritius, once a notorious nest of pirates and privateers, was a famous overseas haven of French culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wealth from trade, war, and piracy fueled a rich cultural scene that featured the latest music from Western Europe. Visitors to "The Little Paris of the Indian Ocean" also encountered séga, a percussion-driven music based on improvised songs and dances that developed amongst the island's African and Malagasy slaves. Today, séga is an integral part of the Mauritian tourism industry and is prominently featured in government cultural and educational programs. The general format of the dissertation is a musical history of Mauritius from its first human settlement in 1638 to the present day. It draws extensively on unpublished archival documents and on travelogues, letters, and diaries from visitors to provide specific details about the extent and nature of musical practice in Mauritius. It is also informed by historical newspapers, contemporaneous literature, and by recent discoveries in Mauritian archaeology. The narrative of the past half-century of Mauritian musical and cultural history takes the form of a musical ethnography and draws upon numerous interviews and on field research conducted in Mauritius from 2011-2012. The dissertation also includes a detailed study of music in contemporary Mauritian society, with special reference to the use of séga in nation-building policies, identity politics, the tourism industry, and in public education.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alberta, 2010. / Title from PDF file main screen (viewed on Feb. 8, 2010). A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Department of Music, University of Alberta. Includes bibliographical references and discography.

Taiwan’s pop music is enormously popular in China. This study aims to probe the reasons for this success as it has taken place against a backdrop of hostile political relations between the Taiwanese and the Chinese. The study explores the ways in which Chinese people and the Chinese media have negotiated and practised the work of ‘imagined communities’ through the consumption of Taiwan’s pop. It focuses on the cultural-political struggles of Taiwan’s pop in China, its mediation, and consumption as a cultural practice. The study suggests that deliberative mediation and a sociable mediation are able to coexist through the process of music consumption. The study has used a variety of research methods, including semi-structured interviews of Chinese audience-members; documentary, media and historical analysis; desk research; and a six-month period of observation in Beijing. It examines the experiences of 26 Chinese audience members living in Beijing or Taiwan who are fans of the ‘Little Freshness’ style of music. Four important media texts are discussed: 1) Chinese Central Television’s (CCTV’s) New Year’s Gala (1984–2014); 2) the magazine People’s Music(1980–2007); 3) Li Wan’s book, How Much Time has Gone By, the Forgotten Sorrow: Sixty years of Songs Across Three Places: China’s Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan (2012); 4) Zhang Lixian’s edited volume, Archaisms: Luo Dayou (2000). Using the concept of mediation, the study highlights the significance of a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1961) to identify how the ‘multi-mediated’ process of consumption of Taiwan’s pop is made up of emotion, conflict and negotiation from the interplay of relations between Taiwan and China. This has emerged as a combination of musical mediation and political mediation, a combination which, in turn, moved from the cultural consumption of Taiwan’s pop towards the practice of the political. The study reflects on related approaches to see their limits and problems when applied to the study of Taiwan and China, and proposes that music consumption requires the engagement of the biographies of both the audience-members and the musical work in order to ‘activate’ the social use of music. It draws on Williams’s concept of common culture as well as Mouffe’s idea of agonistic pluralism to suggest that participation in, and interpretation of, Taiwan’s pop may further propel both Taiwan and China towards commonly held, yet contested, cultures - in other words, that their citizens may come to possess plural cultural citizenships.

Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka kvinnliga sångares erfarenheter av att sjunga i genrer inom CCM på gymnasiet efter att de har gått i körklass i grundskola och om deras musikaliska och vokala identitet har påverkats av denna övergång och i så fall hur. Detta undersöktes genom kvalitativa intervjuer med fyra kvinnliga sångare som både hade gått de utbildningar som krävdes för att passa ihop med syftet och en eftergymnasial utbildning inom sång. Ur resultatet framkom det att sångarna använde musik och sin sång för att utforska och skapa sin vokala och musikaliska identitet. Det framkom även att lärarna hade stor påverkan på de hierarkier som skapades inom diskurserna och på elevernas handlingsutrymme. Sångarnas upplevda handlingsutrymme och agens visade sig ha stor påverkan på deras musikaliska och vokala identitetsutveckling. / The aim of this study was to examine female singers’ experiences of singing in the genres of CCM in upper secondary school after they had previously experienced singing in a choir program in the elementary school with a focus on the specific sound of Swedish choirs and to examine how their musical and vocal identity have been influenced by this. This was investigated through qualitative interviews with four female singers whose educations suited the purpose of the study and who also have attended a post-secondary education in singing. The result showed that the female singers used music and their singing to explore and create their own musical and vocal identity. It also showed that the teachers had a big influence on the power structures that were created in the discourses and also on the students’ room of manoeuvre. The singers’ perceived room to manoeuvre and musical agency proved to have a great influence on their musical and vocal identity development.

This diploma thesis focuses on the topic of gender in music and also its perception by the audience. The research topic was chosen for the increasing consumption of music media and for the lack of research focused on gender in music and on the perception of music lyrics in general. The research part uses both the qualitative content analysis of music lyrics contained in the sample of Billboard Top Charts songs for the past 50 years (between years 1970-2019), and also semi-structured qualitative interviews on a multi-generation sample. Included in the content analysis was the total of 500 songs, interviewed were 8 respondents of various genders and ages to accomplish a diverse sample. The topics of males, females and their relationship proved to be the dominant topics in the research music sample, and it also went through a significant development over time. The research identified a movement from metaphoric language to explicit, at the same time it identified a development of the metaphors. Also observed was the inclination to communicate different topics between male and female artists. Women were more focused on the topics of love, love triangle, end of the relationship, and submission. Men focused predominantly on the topics of sex, intimacy, and in the recent years also on money and addictions,...