In the first half of the twentieth century in Virginia, the town band was a popular concert venue and sometimes a symbol of community pride. Originally, community bands faced few competitors for entertainment popularity, but the advent of movie theaters in the 1930's, and eventually television in the 1950's, challenged the band's former role. Attendance decreased at band concerts and the community space that bands had occupied was allotted for other uses. Despite this decline, the town band survived. Virginia is home to at least 34 community bands today. This study presents a geographic analysis of present day community bands in Virginia. I visited 25 active bands and administered a twenty-five question, self-designed survey to 900 band members (98% response rate). I also personally interviewed conductors and band presidents. Members reported demographic information and the distances and time that they traveled. I also explored how band members perceive their role in the community based on their participation in the community band. I then examined the variation of responses across the state. Results show that bands in Virginia consist primarily of educated, retired individuals with previous musical experience. While traveling the same distance, band members spend more time traveling in regions with large metropolitan areas than in rural regions. Finally, although band members in rural areas received higher sense of community scores than those in metropolitan areas, the scores for both areas were encouragingly high. The results indicate that although regional variations exist for the variables of travel and sense of community, community music in Virginia has a solid rate of participation, and community bands will continue to serve their respective regions in the state. / Master of Science

Traditional, participatory music is a powerful medium through which people express and shape their ideas about identity, mobility, social relations, and belonging, and through which people are in turn shaped. The everyday cultural practices of playing, sharing, and dancing to traditional music, as well as discussions about the nature of traditional music and production of events involving traditional music, all work to construct the region called Appalachia. Through this dissertation, I seek to answer some simple questions that have complicated answers involving place, identity, power, and social relations, with economic, social, and emotional ramifications: Who gets to be an Appalachian musician? How is this accomplished? Who gets to decide? Using a social constructionist theoretical base and drawing on such literatures as cultural geography, music geography, musicology and ethnomusicology, Appalachian studies, and critical regionalism, I employ ethnographic techniques, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis to understand the workings of old time music and the self-understanding of musicians that play and sing traditional music in eastern Kentucky, a core area of Appalachia. This dissertation shows that vernacular roots music in eastern Kentucky is both an inclusive and a contested phenomenon. In describing and analyzing the spaces for music in Appalachia, the old-time community in eastern Kentucky, the dynamics of festival hiring negotiations, and interviews with white and African American musicians, both male and female, I show how Appalachian space is produced simultaneously on many different scales. This construction is a dialectical process, articulating between the power expressed on a micro scale between individuals and the power used by individuals and institutions to define the region through representation. This dissertation demonstrates two main processes: how Appalachian space is negotiated and produced through interactions at jam sessions and other events, and how the musicians perform community in these interstitial moments. Contributions of this dissertation include attention to micro scale interactions and embodiment as a key component of spatial production, participant observation as a research method in music geography, and increased understanding of the performance of race and gender in cultural and spatial production.

This study compares and describes the urban landscape of concert venues in Berlin and Stockholm with a focus on popular music. It features research of spatial patterns among concert venues, gathered from participant observations and semi-structured interviews with agencies and officials in the music scene. These patterns make us want to understand the relationship between venues, why they sometimes agglomerate by size in a more gentrified environment. By comparing the spatial patterns with music export data, an illustration of globalization is developed. Further, this study connects to the political controversy of the contemporary view on music, as a source of economic growth or not. The central concept of analysis is the division between high profitable hit music and conventional music. Theoretical perspectives of global economic system is the base for the hypothesis that music is not a homogeneous entity. It is rather polarized in two spheres depending on the status in the global economic system. This study suggests thathit music is a cultural product built on immaterial values and place branding for political agendas, rather than a cultural expression or genre of music like any other. This part of the music economy show specific patterns of localization.