The subject of this study is the historical development of a vehicle for a form of western art (the orchestra) in China from 1840 to the present. The writer was primarily concerned with how the orchestra developed in broad socio-economical, political-cultural, and historical contexts with an emphasis on elaborating certain conditions responsible for the specific features of this development. The following major aspects of the development of the orchestra in China are discussed:1)The uniqueness of China's culture before accepting western culture;2)Reason and procedures by which China accepted western music and its orchestra;3)The social change in the 1950s which affected the function of the orchestra in China;4)The influence of political movements and individual roles on the development of the orchestras in China;5)The emergence of the orchestra as a cultural symbol during China's modernization;6)The fact in which the orchestra become a cultural symbol during China's modernization;7)Roles and functions of the orchestra during the cultural merging of China and the West;8)The future of the orchestra in China.The purpose of this study is to confirm the cultural assimilation of the western orchestra as a world-wide trend, one in which East and West enrich one another. / School of Music

The French Popular Front was a coalition of left-wing political parties (Communists, Socialists, and Radicals) united through a common desire to combat fascism and improve the living conditions of France's workers. Between 1935 and 1938, the ideology of the Popular Front, largely informed by that of the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF), exerted tremendous influence on the cultural life of the French nation. Many cultural and musical organizations heeded the Popular Front's call for broad-based anti-fascist solidarity among intellectuals, artists, and the working class. In the realm of culture, this translated into multiple initiatives designed to bring art to the masses and to encourage the proletariat to become more active in the cultural life of the nation. / Sympathetic to the Popular Front's larger political aims, a number of French musicians and composers became affiliated with the Communist-sponsored Maison de 1a Culture and its affiliated musical organizations, the most prominent of which was the Federation Musicale Populaire (FMP). They participated in the administrative, cultural and intellectual life of the FMP; they took part in conferences, wrote articles on the theme of "music for the people," and were advocates for the organization within French musical life at large. Furthermore, these composers wrote works for government-commissioned events, for amateur groups, and for spectacles designed for mass audiences. / Some of the FMP's most prominent proponents (Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and Arthur Honegger) were former members of Les Six, a group that had been particularly interested in borrowing music derived from "popular" sources like the music hall and the circus following World War I. This study argues that the aesthetic approach of Les Six, which found support in FMP presidents Albert Roussel and Charles Koechlin, was reinvigorated during the Popular Front for a much more clearly defined political purpose. While the general interest in "popular" sources was still maintained, composers at the FMP now sought to integrate folklore and revolutionary music into their works "for the people" in an attempt to create and underline cultural links between workers and intellectuals---a compositional approach for which this dissertation coins the expression "populist modernism." / This study, the first book-length examination of French musical culture in light of Popular Front politics, concentrates on some of the period's most significant populist modernist works and draws upon contemporaneous journalistic coverage and archival documents that in many cases have hitherto never been the object of musicological study. The research shows that in 1936, following an initial infatuation with the genres and styles of socialist realist Soviet works, French left-wing composers developed a more inclusive view of what constituted music "for the people." Composers continued to write music indebted to politically resonant popular sources like folklore and revolutionary songs, but they also drew upon these genres in works (like the collaborative incidental music for Romain Rolland's Le 14 Juillet) that employed modernist compositional techniques. Though this approach was most obviously felt in the numerous works composed for organizations like the FMP, populist modernism also emerged in works performed at the Theatre de l'Opera-Comique and the 1937 Paris Exposition. By cutting across musical genres as well as institutional and social contexts, populist modernism emerges as the dominant aesthetic trend in French music during the years of the Popular Front.

This thesis examines the music of the Subanen people of the Zamboanga Peninsula in western Mindanao, the Philippines through an investigation of their most important ceremony, the Buklog. Esteemed as the most elaborate and expensive socio-religious festival of the Subanen, the Buklog derives its name from a wooden structure holding the dancing platform called buklog. The Buklog is generally celebrated to propitiate the gods in some specific event in which the entire Subanen community participates. The occasion may be a thanksgiving for a bountiful harvest, for healing, or for prestige for a new leader or a home comer. A Buklog may also be held as a memorial for the recent dead to reinstate their souls to heaven or as a fulfilment of a ritual vow or debt to restore order and salvation to creation after natural disasters, calamities and epidemics. (For complete abstract open the document)

Judith Butler’s writings on gender ostensibly changed the way gender is considered with regard to an individual’s subjectivity. Her writings expressed a discursive parameter that changed the theoretical standpoint of gender from that of performance, to that of performativity. In short, the notion of gender became understood as a power mechanism operating within society that compels individuals along the heteronormal binary tracts of male or female, man or woman. Within the strata of popular culture, this binarism is seemingly ritualized and repeated, incessantly. This treatise examines how rock music, as a popular and widespread mode of popular music, exemplifies gender binarism through a notable ndrocentrism. The research will examine how gender performativity operates within the taxonomy of rock music, and how the message communicated by rock music becomes translated into a listener’s subjectivity.

For this project, the author uses Bakhtin's theory of carnival to illuminate Zappa's sound and rhetoric. The author hopes that by using this theoretical lens allows audiences to understand Zappa's choices in subject matter. Those who can see his work as satire and understand the use of carnivalesque techniques in challenging authority see the genius in his work.

The trumpet, or some ancestral form of the trumpet, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself. Despite its long history, however, the trumpet's solo repertoire remained limited and relatively unvaried until the second half of the twentieth century. Like most music, the American trumpet sonatas from the 1950s are a reflection of the culture and history surrounding their composition. The purpose of this research is to show how the trumpet sonatas by George Antheil, Kent Kennan, Halsey Stevens, and Burnet Tuthill are both distinctly American and unmistakably from the 1950s. The post-war era in America is often viewed as a time of unbridled optimism stemming from economic prosperity and the nation's military and industrial supremacy. The decade of the 1950s is often viewed today as a simpler, happier time in America's history. The trumpet sonatas of this era reflect this primarily in their ebullient rhythms and brilliant, often heroic melodies. However, darker characteristics of the decade (the rise of communism, for example) also make veiled appearances in these four sonatas. After an overview of the social and musical trends of the decade, the central chapter of the work delineates formal, thematic, and tonal structures of each of the four sonatas and their constituent movements. Highlighted throughout the analyses are similarities between the pieces, especially intervallic structures, motivic rhythms, and melodic construction. The final chapter discusses these similarities further and integrates them into 1950s American history and culture.

This study exp !ores the relationship between an individual's interest in and exposure to the rap/hip-hop genre and the messages and values contained within the music, as well as the role of self-esteem in generating interest and motivating exposure to rap/hip-hop music. A survey questionnaire was administered to 213 students at a community college in northern California. Interest and exposure to rap/hip-hop were found to be significantly correlated with acceptance of a number of values portrayed in the music. However, those most interested in and exposed to rap/hip-hop music were less likely to perceive negative social values in the music as well as believe these values characterized rap/hip-hop artists. Self-esteem failed as a predictor of interest and exposure to the music.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture (Prof), 2016 / ‘Africa United in Cultural Diversity’ is what is written in bold on a musical event poster outside Home Affairs, during the 2015 xenophobic riots in Johannesburg. In smaller writing it says ‘Opening the doors of learning and culture from Cape to Cairo ’.This thesis is an exploration of how music can act as a universal medium of engagement in an urban space, where interactions between an African diasporic and the local communities can occur. The thesis discusses the relationship between inclusiveness and civic life through Sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s hypothesis of The Third Place (A place between home and work that is critical to the cohesion of diverse society). I also look at ethnomusicologist Ruth Stone`s work on the development of cultural music traits in Central and Southern Africa. Additional I speak to famed composers and performer of traditional Southern African music Dizu Plaatjies. What emerges from this research is a unifying musical pattern (Keita`s Asymmetric Timeline) that mirrors the qualities of The Third Place in its engagement with the inhabitants of the city and sense of the familiar amongst the general public. My building design process then demonstrates that through the use of these two, a spatial and networked experience of African culture can be created in the city. Informing a place where a dialogue of understanding between an African diasporic and the local communities can begin to occur. This place provides an exciting opportunity for designing the way that production and engagement of vernacular music is used as unifying source in shaping The Third Place as a musical performance venue. / MT2016

No description available.

This thesis builds from press accounts of Bruce Springsteen’s South by Southwest keynote address, taken by many to be a renewed call to arms of the classic mantras of the rock ethos in the age of a declining recording industry. In tracing the ways the speech circulated I argue that its discourse was rearticulated toward quite different (and concerning) ends. Throughout, I aim to show the apparatuses of power that sustains the rock liberation fantasy. I read the coverage of Springsteen’s address as a therapeutic discourse meant to soothe the anxiety over the closure of agency in the age of neoliberalism. The general problematic for the thesis, then, addresses an anxiety over the collapse of freedom and as such works to offer broad reflections on the nature of radical agency in our increasingly neoliberal present. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection