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Review of Recent Music Scholarship: The Music of Multicultural America: Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States, 2nd edition. Ed. Kip Lornell and Anne K. Rasmussen. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Pp. 425, website and acknowledgments, introduction, notes, references cited, additional sources, audiographies, videographies, index.) Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Essays in Gender and Country Music. Ed. Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Pp. xviii + 280, introduction, notes, index.) Sing Me Back Home: Southern Roots and Country Music. By Bill C. Malone. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Pp. x + 355, credits and acknowledgments, introduction, notes, index.)

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.

Includes abstract.|Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-92). / The aim of this study is to research and asess the audition techniques of youth orchestras globally. The researcher aims to provide more information regarding a very important tool in the education of young musicians from all walks of life. The researcher will make use of the opportunity to discuss important aspects regarding the audition procedures, which has to be examined closely in order to have well balanced youth orchestras. The researcher feels that it is imperative to also realise the important role that youth orchestras play in creating excellent professional orchestras. Furthermore, the researcher aims to create a model for audition procedures. The researcher will assess all information at her disposal in order to create a model that shee feels will ensure fair auditions. It must be emphasised that this is a proposed modrel only and it will not be implied that the model must be used in its entirety in order to create fair auditions. The researchers is fully aware of the fact that each orchestra has a unique set of circumstances which has to be taken into consideration when executing auditions.

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This paper discusses historically and musically significant insights into how the Mozart clarinet Concerto, K. 622, should be performed. The clarinet Concerto was the last wind concerto composed by Mazart and was completed around November 15, 1791, less than a month before his death. Mozart's original manuscript was probably lost. The only extant autograph of the Concerto is a fragmentary one of an earlier sketch dating from 1789.

Research indicates that music teachers generally did not nurture student self-efficacy beliefs for musical performance, suggesting three possible reasons. It might be that teachers lack knowledge about self-efficacy, do not have a valid or reliable method to evaluate or measure student self-efficacy, or possess insufficient strategies for developing self-efficacy beliefs (Zelenak, 2011a). In light of these findings, Zelenak (2011a) developed the Music Performance Self-Efficacy Scale (MPSES) (see Zelenak, 2011b) to provide teachers a way to measure the strengths and/or weaknesses of the four sources of self-efficacy information as reported by their students in relation to music performance. The theoretical framework for this study draws from Bandura’s (1986) construct of self-efficacy, a derivative of social cognitive theory, which is based upon the interactive relationship among behavior, cognitive factors, and environmental influences, with forethought as a crucial factor. The purposes of this study were to discover to what extent the teaching experiences, education, and self-efficacy beliefs of teachers influenced student self-efficacy beliefs, and to discover to what extent student self-efficacy beliefs changed between pretest and posttest with teacher intervention of using self-efficacy enhancing teaching methods in the classroom. Participants were currently enrolled music students in middle or high school (N = 242) and their respective music teachers (N = 5) in one school district in West Virginia. Results were compared according to the students’ grade level as well as to the teachers’ teaching experiences, educational backgrounds, teachers’ reported self-efficacy beliefs, and teacher intervention. Due to small teacher sample, the current findings cannot be generalized Analysis of raw score data provided some insight into whether the independent variables affected the students’ pretest and posttest MPSES scores. All student participants’ scores improved from the pretest to the posttest, with the greatest changes being found in the teachers’ years of experience, educational background, and teacher self-efficacy categories; however, the statistical analysis of the data was found not to be significant. Future studies, especially those including qualitative data from teachers’ classroom experiences, would provide a wealth of knowledge for continued research on how music teachers can help nurture their students’ music performance self-efficacy beliefs.

Music is often studied in terms of its artistic value and expressiveness. While these are important characteristics, there are other observations we can make of scientific value, such as the effects of music on the human anatomy. At present, however, there is a general lack of scientific studies focusing on the effect music makes on specific physiological responses in the body. A limited range of these studies has included examinations of music preferences and correlating personality characteristics of participants, while some others have investigated the effects of music lessons on intelligence. While the previously mentioned research has contributed to some scientific understanding with regard to human physiology, it has not addressed how specific physiological processes of the human body responds to music. Through my own research, I hope to add to the body of musical research and health sciences, and help to close the gap between these two fields. In this study, one selection from a pool of five audio examples of different musical genres will be played to participants while their heart rate is monitored with a wrist-worn device in order to gauge possible differences in heart rate that might occur as they experience music. This assessment will also be paired with a self-perceived mood questionnaire by my participants in order to identify any correlations between the two. After my data collection is complete, I will statistically analyze the information and examine any parallels between the musical selections, genre, heart rate, and self-perceived mood. By analyzing this data, I hope to gain insight into possible human physiological responses as the subjects are exposed to different musical examples from various genres. I also hope to investigate the psychological realm of music, and determine its practical use in the medical field with regard to music therapy, which can lead to various treatments in post-traumatic stress disorder, and communicative diseases.

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