Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 119-123). / Street musicians in South Africa work within a challenging macrostructure. In order to maximise their success within this performance environment they must develop strategies to overcome the difficulties that South Africa's streets present. Various social issues: unemployment, crime, health and xenophobia, have a direct impact on its street musicians, who predominantly come from lower income groups. The changing tourism industry, which is a vital source of income for these musicians, also presents challenges and opportunities. Together these aspects create a unique street environment within which to examine the role of the musical storyteller, and a performance space that requires the development of specific skills by the street performer to maximaise its advantages. Watching a performance by a group of South African street musicians, telling a complex narrative to their audience, I realised that these performers might not only be fulfilling various social functions, but might also be playing a role in actively performing, and contributing to, genres of South Africa's traditional musical heritage. I wished to explore this and began to interview selected street performers, and to observe and record their performances. The boom in the South African tourism industry encourages street musicians to develop styles of performance and musical storytelling that rely heavily on styles of traditional music. However, their repertoires are extensive, and keep altering. There is no pre-established, repeated canon of material to study and draw conclusions from. I therefore had to approach this study with a different intention. I did not look for single musical narrative items, which I could then dissect and present, but rather I attempted to identify unique aspects of this performance environment and the patterns, or frames of behaviour these cause and inspire.

Chan Ka Chun. / "Architecture Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Master of Architecture Programme 2002-2003, design report." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 57). / Chapter 01 --- Introduction --- p.01 / Chapter 02 --- Translate Music into Architecture --- p.03 / Chapter 03 --- Music as a Metaphor --- p.07 / Chapter 04 --- Design a program for music --- p.09 / Chapter 05 --- Acoustic of performance --- p.11 / Chapter 06 --- Study of street music performance --- p.13 / Chapter 07 --- Site Analysis --- p.15 / Chapter 08 --- Design Intention --- p.17 / Chapter 09 --- Design Development 01-04 --- p.25 / Chapter 10 --- Final Design --- p.43 / Chapter 11 --- Reference --- p.57 / Chapter 12 --- Acknowledgement --- p.58

Between approximately 1850 and 1936, the barrel organ was one of the most commonly heard instruments in the streets of New York and the frequent subject of written, visual, and musical accounts created by middle class authors and artists. The instrument's loud, wheezy tunes inspired heated debates that began in the nineteenth century and were often aligned with the broader social upheavals caused by Italian immigration. Despite their frequent differences in perspective, most written accounts characterized organ grinders as poor, uneducated, Italian immigrants. Musical representations of street music developed a similar proclivity to emphasize Italian alterity. As early as the 1850s, it was common to quote popular dance idioms to evoke street music, a trend that continued well into the early twentieth century in Tin Pan Alley songs. These strophic songs offered more elaborate portrayals of organ grinders, mimicking the dialect of Italian immigrants through clipped, misspelled syllables. Street musicians declined in the twentieth century, but such stereotypes continued to resonate strongly within fictive musical portrayals. In Charles Ives' From Hanover Square North, the clashing quotations of a gospel hymn aurally signify the program's commuters and organ grinder, whose music animates the scene similar to a tableau found within Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The House of Seven Gables. In contrast to Ives' idealistic conception of street music, Charles Cadman's opera The Willow Tree depicts a murderous street musician whose association with pleasant, Italian folk music does little to belie his unstable actions. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's 1936 decision to stop licensing organ grinders created a controversy that may have influenced representations of organ grinders in Marc Blitzstein's I've Got the Tune and the animated short Organ Grinder's Swing. The 1936 controversy suggested that not only were middle class audiences concerned with unprecedented waves of Italian immigration, they were also worried about an urban soundscape increasingly saturated with noise. It was these twin problems that led a class of educated New Yorkers to create meaning by reverting to ethnic, class-based stereotype.

The soundscape plays a key, if often overlooked, role in the construction of public urban space. Street music – a conscious deliberate propagation of sound in public space – opens an entryway into comprehending the role of sound in the city, and what it reveals about the city’s inhabitants. Ethnographic fieldwork in Brussels and Stockholm focuses on street musicians of all kinds, exploring how their music is shaped by their personal motivations, how their practices negotiate meaning in sound and in space, and how their rhythms shape, and are shaped by, the city. These explorations give reason to question R. Murray Schafer’s philosophies on soundscape studies, particularly in the urban context. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s notions of the production of space, and rhythmanalysis as an analytical tool, the urban soundscape is understood as an ongoing negotiation of individual actions, where dynamics of power, identity, and ideology become audible. Street musicians and their sound cultures feature not just as a topic worthy of study, but also as a guide of how and why to listen to and analyze the rhythms of the city.

Thesis--Geneva. / "Propositions complémentaires" inserted. Bibliography: p. 321-334.

Thesis--University of Geneva. / Includes melodies with words. Bibliography: p. 321-334.

Thesis--Geneva. / "Propositions complémentaires" inserted. Bibliography: p. 321-334.

Thesis--University of Geneva. / Includes melodies with words. Bibliography: p. 321-334.