Music

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End date: 2009Subject: search.filters.subject.Ethnomusicology

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    KOREAN DANCE AND PANSORI IN D.C.: INTERACTIONS WITH OTHERS, THE BODY, AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY AT A KOREAN PERFORMING ARTS STUDIO
    (2009) Ash-Morgan, Lauren Rebecca; Provine, Robert C.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This thesis is the result of seventeen months' field work as a dance and pansori student at the Washington Korean Dance Company studio. It examines the studio experience, focusing on three levels of interaction. First, I describe participants' interactions with each other, which create a strong studio community and a women's "Korean space" at the intersection of culturally hybrid lives. Second, I examine interactions with the physical challenges presented by these arts and explain the satisfaction that these challenges can generate using Csikszentmihalyi's theory of "optimal experience" or "flow." Third, I examine interactions with discourse on the meanings and histories of these arts. I suggest that participants can find deeper significance in performing these arts as a result of this discourse, forming intellectual and emotional bonds to imagined people of the past and present. Finally, I explain how all these levels of interaction can foster in the participant an increasingly rich and complex identity.
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    Ritualizing Barong and Rangda: Repercussions of a Collaborative Field Experience in Kerambitan, Bali.
    (2009) Tafoya, Xochitl Ysabela; Dueck, Jonathan; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The dance-drama called Barong and Rangda a ritual, is one of the vital events that breathes life in the small village, Banjar Tista, and extends beyond the boundaries of its "performance" area. In this thesis, I depend on Ronald Grimes' concept of "ritualizing" as a continuum in the context of my fieldwork in Bali, Indonesia. The ritual cycle and the collaborative fieldwork process are analyzed through the impressions of each fieldworker. Barong and Rangda is a well-documented dance-drama and part of the longer Calonarang story. This dance-drama is a mythological battle between the lion, Barong, and the witch, Rangda, and is performed authentically to create spiritual balance and cleanse its community members of evil. This ritual performance reaches beyond the time and place in which the performance originates and creates a ripple affect on the village members, those in trance, musicians and cultural outsiders alike.
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    Current Trends of Dialect Preservation Through Musical Performance in the Pennsylvania German Community of Southeastern Pennsylvania
    (2008-02-11) Yadush, Chantel Lynn; Dueck, Jonathan; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purpose of this thesis is to examine who the Pennsylvania Dutch people are in light of American immigration history, interviews with Pennsylvania Dutch community leaders and scholars, performance observations, and printed text resources in order to evaluate how members of the Pennsylvania German community are actively promoting and preserving the Pennsylvania German dialect through the medium of performance. There is a general consensus among people familiar with the Pennsylvania Dutch culture that the Pennsylvania Dutch language is disappearing. Within the past 100 years cultural centers and educational institutions have been established to encourage and support preservation of the Pennsylvania Dutch language in Southeastern Pennsylvania. This study explores how and why musical performances within the community are fueled by a revivalist mentality to preserve the Pennsylvania Dutch language.
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    The Aesthetics of Motion in Musics for the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Rumi
    (2007-06-04) Vicente, Victor Amaro; Provine, Robert C.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation investigates the concept of motion as a fundamental aesthetic element in the devotional music, dance, and rituals performed in honor of the celebrated thirteenth-century Persian mystic poet and saint, the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Muhammad Rumi. The main focus of the study is threefold. First, it investigates the prevalence of the notion of movement in Islamic music and culture, specifically within the Sufi communities of Turkey, in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the relationship between music, aesthetics, and worldview. Secondly, it explores how musical performance functions as a form of devotion or religious worship by focusing on the musical repertories performed in honor of a single holy figure, the Mevlana Rumi. Finally, it provides an ethnographic account of contemporary developments in Sufi musical culture in Turkey and across the world by describing the recent activities of the Mevlana's devotees, which includes members of the Mevlevi Order of Islamic mystics as well as adherents of other Sufi brotherhoods and followers of so-called New Religions or New Age. The primary research for this study involved two short one-month field trips to Turkey and India in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and a longer one year expedition to Turkey in 2004 and 2005, which also included shorter stays in Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt. Additionally, the dissertation draws directly from critical theories advanced in the fields of ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and ethnochoreology and focuses on the kinesthetic parameters of music, dance, trance, and ritual as well as on broader forms of socio-cultural movement including pilgrimage, cultural tourism, and globalization. These forms of movement are analyzed in four broad categories of music used in worship, including classical Mevlevi music, music of the zikr ceremony, popular musics, and non-Turkish musics.
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    "Vysotsky's Soul Packaged in Tapes": Identity and Russianness in the Music of Vladimir Vysotsky
    (2006-06-02) Miller, Heather Lynn; Provine, Robert C.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study examines the relationship between music, identity, and Russianness as demonstrated by the songs of the bard Vladimir Vysotsky. The career of Vysotsky occurred within the context of Soviet Russia, but more broadly, his songs embody characteristics specific to Russian culture. For this study, I draw on the fields of ethnomusicology, history, and cultural studies to assist in the interpretation of music and identity in a cultural context. By investigating the life and career of this individual, this study serves as a method in which to interpret the identity of a musical performer on multiple levels. I gathered fieldwork data in Moscow, Russia in the summers of 2003 and 2004. Information was gathered from various sites connected to Vysotsky, and from conversations with devotees of his music. The role of identity in musical performance is complex, and to analyze Vysotsky's Russianness, I trace his artistic work as both 'official' actor and 'unofficial' musician. Additionally, I examine the lyrics of Vysotsky's songs for the purposes of relating his identity to Russian culture. In order to define 'Russianness,' I survey theoretical perspectives of ethnicity and nationalism, as well as musical and non-musical symbols, such as the Russian soul (dusha), all of which are part of the framework that creates Russian identity. In addition to Russian identity, I also address a performer's musical identity which focuses mainly on musical composition and performance. In determining Vysotsky's unique musical identity, I compare the compositions of his avtorskaya pesnya ('author song') to two other bards who were his contemporaries. This comparative analysis demonstrates that even within the same musical genre, performers employ distinctive compositional and performance practices particularly identified with that individual. I conclude that identity is a multi-layered framework, and that this framework is, in actuality, comprised of different identities. In the case of Vysotsky, some songs display a national identity, whereas in others examples, he displays an identity based on social status or ethnicity. The arrangement of these identities can change, and interpretation of the identity framework is dependent on specific music examples and performance contexts.
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    Rewriting the Soundscape: Towards a New Understanding of Sami Popular Music and Identity in the New Millennium
    (2004-12-06) Moore, Rebecca Elizabeth; Dueck, Jonathan; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purpose of this thesis is to illuminate the shifting focus of Sámi musicians and audiences in expressing identity through an analysis of Sámi history and original fieldwork on current Sámi popular music. In the new millennium musicians increasingly explore musics of many cultures, and identify the Sámi vocal tradition of joik as just one aspect of their broad musical influences. This does not connote an abandonment of traditional Sámi music, however, nor does it signal a lack of interest in asserting a distinctively Sámi identity. Instead, it reflects a desire of musicians and audiences to explore, through music, the globalized, multicultural worlds in which they live and the increasing interest in self-determination and in the expression of a more internalized, personal sense of identity. The study is based on published literature, interviews with experts in music, cultural studies, and radio programming, and attendance of popular music performance.
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    Music, Ritual, and Diasporic Identity: A Case Study of the Armenian Apostolic Church
    (2004-04-26) McCollum, Jonathan Ray; Pacholczyk, Jozef; Music
    This study examines the relationships between music, music-making, and ritual performance in the Armenian Apostolic Church. By looking at music-making as a ritual liturgical symbol of faith, I explain the meaning of liturgical music practice and its function in teaching the fundamentals of faith. Drawing upon the fields of ethnomusicology, theology, and ritual studies, I explore the theoretical orientations and methodological strategies that assist in the interpretation of music in ritual contexts. By examining various theories of symbol and ritual combined with fieldwork, I interpret Armenian Apostolic liturgical music using a theoretical methodology that investigates the operation of liturgical music within ritual contexts. Because "faith" is not empirically observable, I focus on "the conception of faith" as it is performed by participants in the Divine Liturgy. In addition to looking at these aspects, I also extend my search past that of the "official" Christian Armenian community by asking what purpose the Armenian Apostolic Church serves in the community as a whole, even amongst non-Christians or non-practicing Armenian Christians. There is a discourse that runs through Armenian literature and politics that to be "Armenian" is to be "Christian." Is this the reality of the situation? Is Armenian Christianity perceived as faith, heritage, or both, and to what extent does the Divine Liturgy play a role in realizing Armenian identity? The purposes of this study are to interpret ritual in light of our physical, social, political, moral, aesthetic, and religious existence, to analyze and interpret liturgical music, to contribute to the development of a critical theory of music as a ritual symbol, and to address issues of identity. I conclude that if the symbolic activity of ritual performance evokes participation that is empirically observable, as an outward performance and transformation or "rite of intensification" of a deeper display of the conception of faith, liturgical music-making becomes integral to the liturgical rite itself. Also, in terms of Armenian identity, the Armenian Apostolic Church is essential to the negotiation of cultural identity outside of their historic homeland of Armenia, even amongst Armenians who do not actively perform the Divine Liturgy.