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This dissertation analyses identity formation through music among contemporary Colombian musicians. The work focuses on the emergence of musical fusions in Bogotá, which participant musicians and Colombian media have called "nueva música Colombiana" (new Colombian music). The term describes the work of bands that assimilate and transform North-American music genres such as jazz, rock, and hip-hop, and blend them with music historically associated with Afro-Colombian communities such as cumbia and currulao, to produce several popular and experimental musical styles. In the last decade, these new fusions have begun circulating outside Bogotá, becoming the distinctive sound of young Colombia domestically and internationally. The dissertation focuses on questions of musical circulation, affect, and taste as a means for articulating difference, working on the self, and generating attachments others and therefore social bonds and communities. This dissertation considers musical fusion from an ontological perspective influenced by actor-network, non-representational, and assemblage theory. Such theories consider a fluid social world, which emerges from the web of associations between heterogeneous human and material entities. The dissertation traces the actions, interactions, and mediations between places, people, institutions, and recordings that enable the emergence of new Colombian music. In considering those associations, it places close attention to the affective relationships between people and music. In that sense, instead of thinking on relatively fixed and consistent relationships between music, place, and identity, built upon discursive or imagined ties, the work considers each of these concepts as a network of relations enmeshed with each other and in consistent re-articulation.

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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.

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In this thesis, First Nations popular music is examined as a polysemic sign (or symbolic form) whose meaning is mediated both socially and politically. Native popular music is a locus for the action of different social forces which interact in negotiating the nature and the meaning of the music. Music is socially meaningful in that it provides a means by which people construct and recognize social and cultural identities. As such, First Nations popular music functions as an emblem of symbolic differentiation between Canadian natives and non-natives. Native pop music plays host to a number of political meanings embedded in this syncretic musical form. Struggle over meaning is mediated within the music itself: in the lyrics, in the music, in the juxtaposition of musical styles, and between music and text. Mediation on all of these levels is further influenced by the mass media. Meaning on individual, local and national levels is dependent on the socio-political positioning of both the performers and the audience. Because socio-political positions are themselves fluid, political meanings are also in constant flux. As a polysemic sign vehicle, First Nations popular music is a locus for these various meanings and a site for the construction and deconstruction of political discourse.

This research concerns itself with the development of a theory in the grounded tradition to account for the social construction of an identity as musician by music education students in Canadian universities. The principal data gathering techniques were semi- and unstructured interviews and participant observation, first at the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Music, University of Western Ontario with further periods of interviewing at the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia. The pilot study was conducted at Memorial University of Newfoundland where the author was, at the time of writing, an Associate Professor and Co-ordinator of Music Education in the Faculty of Education. Data collection and analysis were completed simultaneously and the interviewing became more focused on emerging categories and their properties, particularly concerning the construction of identity. The core categories discussed concern the apparent sense of isolation and the development of a symbolic community in the music school, as suggested by Cohen (1985). Further core analytic categories include the music education students' perceptions of Others as outsiders to their own insider symbolic community, and the students' perception of social action, including the notion of deviancy, which contributes to their construction of this symbolic closed community. An examination of models of social action is undertaken. The notion of making points as suggested by Goffman (1967) provides a beginning model for the identification and accumulation of status points which students appear to use in the process of identity construction and validation. Further discussion examines the nature of the music education sub-group as a stigmatized group. The nature of the category musician is examined and substantial comparison and contrasting with the position presented by Kingsbury (1984) is undertaken. The analytical categories of talent and music as in-group constructs are examined. Finally the processes of Self-Other negotiation on are explored and a theory is developed to account for the construction and maintenance of musician identity. The emerging theory borrows extensively from those analyses of the roots of social interaction recognised in the labelling tradition which are concerned with the construction of identity in negotiation with Others, and most specifically draws upon the notion of societal reaction. The research is guided by those theories and methodologies generated by symbolic interactionism developed by writers such as Blumer, Meltzer and Denzin and follows the traditions of sociological research in educational settings by such writers as Baksh, Martin and Stebbins in Canada, and Hargreaves, Woods, Ball, Hammersley and Lacey in the U.K.

Previous researchers such as McGuire & Slater (2005) noted that people have an inherent need to share favourite music with other people, and also theorised that a democratisation of culture is taking place with consumers effectively standing by (or in some cases even replacing) traditional tastemakers by sharing music with one another through the Internet; thus shaping culture and in turn themselves. In addition, this theory supports the notion that once music consumers discover others online who have similar or interesting tastes, they may begin to interact with one another; therefore leading to the formation of communities around an artist or genre (or around a particular tastemaker such as a podcaster) which may also provide benefits to consumers in other areas of their social lives. The motivation of this thesis was to explore how these online social influences compared to the traditional offline social influences that can be inferred upon music consumption behaviours and habits. Methods of consumption can include listening to music alone or with others, obtaining music in different formats and on various platforms, and attending live events such as music shows or festivals. A study was conceptualised on behaviours relating to live music consumption, with a literature review being conducted on the exploration of the music industry and its digitisation, identity theory (both individual and collective), and social influence. The research methodology was separated into two phases; the first being a qualitative exploratory investigation consisting of a webnography data collection which was used to examine relevant trends in online forums, and the second an online survey. The online survey allowed for the quantitative testing of the theoretical frameworks identified by the literature review, as well as enabling the development of predictive models for live music consumption behaviours in both the online and offline social contexts.

In this thesis, First Nations popular music is examined as a polysemic sign (or symbolic form) whose meaning is mediated both socially and politically. Native popular music is a locus for the action of different social forces which interact in negotiating the nature and the meaning of the music. Music is socially meaningful in that it provides a means by which people construct and recognize social and cultural identities. As such, First Nations popular music functions as an emblem of symbolic differentiation between Canadian natives and non-natives. Native pop music plays host to a number of political meanings embedded in this syncretic musical form. Struggle over meaning is mediated within the music itself: in the lyrics, in the music, in the juxtaposition of musical styles, and between music and text. Mediation on all of these levels is further influenced by the mass media. Meaning on individual, local and national levels is dependent on the socio-political positioning of both the performers and the audience. Because socio-political positions are themselves fluid, political meanings are also in constant flux. As a polysemic sign vehicle, First Nations popular music is a locus for these various meanings and a site for the construction and deconstruction of political discourse. / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate

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.