Music

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Sounds of the Compact City: A Musical Urban Ethnography of Toyama City, Japan
(2021) Scally, William Donawerth; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
My dissertation explores the sonic and musical aspects of social life in Toyama City, a Japanese city of about 400,000 people that has recently been connected to Tokyo by a high-speed rail line. To support an aging and shrinking population while moving toward greater environmental sustainability and resilience in the face of a changing climate, the Toyama City government has enacted a series of programs termed the “Compact City Plan” to improve ease of access to public transportation and vital facilities while encouraging older residents to live in designated “residence encouragement zones” close to major transportation hubs. Drawing on extended in-person engagement, correspondence, and examination of online materials, I discuss the interplay of music, sound, and the natural and constructed environment. What emerges is a picture of social life in the city, animated and given meaning by individuals, communities, and patterns of movement in both its everyday life and in moments of celebration or catastrophe. This dissertation includes a detailed exploration of the sensory experience of the Toyama City center, an overview of several musical webs that rely on the movement of people into, out of, and within Toyama City, an overview of other webs that have coalesced around key individuals, and an account of several important festivals that occurred or were cancelled in 2019–2020. Tying these threads together is a discussion of the co-constituency of the human-made and natural environments and the ways that social worlds rise and fall from them. This is a study of both the connections and interruptions that characterize life in Toyama City. Part-way through my fieldwork period, I had to return to the U.S. as the spreading COVID-19 pandemic threatened safety, travel, and the operations of everyday life. This shift to remote fieldwork, however, also allows attention to Toyama’s connections and self-presentation to the rest of the world. Toyama is both similar to other small cities and unique, and this study of the city’s diverse sonic and musical life across multiple genres and in both local and virtual domains provides a model for making sense of the material life of a small city.
The Black Power Classroom: An Ethnomusicological Approach to Teaching African Heritage Awareness Through Music Education in Botswana and African America
(2019) Cunningham, Maya; Witzleben, John L; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The Black Power Classroom uses ethnomusicology to understand how culturally responsive music education is used to teach African American and Botswanan children their African heritage. I first interrogate the coloniality of minstrelsy and the distortion of Black America’s African heritage that warrants the need for African heritage to be taught to Black American children. I then overview the historical/contemporary agendas for Black education, and how music education fits into these agendas, by comparing those of African Americans to those of the “The State,” which operates as a colonial actor. I then analyze the use of culturally responsive instruction in a music program for African American fourth graders in Washington DC, drawing from Gaunt’s theory of kinetic orality. Finally, an analysis of how traditional music is used to teach cultural identity in Botswana elucidates the key components of a culturally responsive music education model that could be effective for African American students.
RELEVANCE, SELF-DETERMINATION, AND UNIVERSALITY THROUGH ST. AUGUSTINE CATHOLIC CHURCH'S GOSPEL CHOIR
(2019) Visceglia, Victoria Lynn; Lie, Siv B.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The Second Vatican Council provided ample opportunity for individual Catholic parishes to choose music that suited their congregations and contribute to the “Universal Church” through their particularity. St. Augustine Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. formed a gospel choir in light of this newfound freedom. Based on about one year of participant observation, this thesis analyzes the Gospel Choir’s role in making the Mass more relevant and interactive for parishioners. Singers maintain certain practices and ideals of the Church that they know make their ministry more effective while acknowledging the shortcomings of Catholicism at an institutional level. They animate listeners to respond dialogically with the Mass, allowing their lived experiences to inform their spiritual transformations. After more than 40 years, the Gospel Choir continues to navigate the boundaries between sacred and secular, Catholic and Protestant, and contrasting conceptions of African American identity.
“As We Circle The World”: A Performative Ethnography of Irish Step Dance and Music in the United States and Japan
(2018) Topper, Julia; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In this dissertation, I examine current practices of modern competitive Irish step dance and feis music accompaniment through case studies conducted in the United States and Japan. More than twenty years after Riverdance significantly heightened the visibility of Irish dance both in Ireland and abroad, what do contemporary transnational practices of Irish step dance and music look and sound like and how do we compare these practices cross-culturally? Through a performance-based methodology, I contextualize the ways local and transnational Irish step dance and feis music (a specialized traditional Irish dance music used to accompany modern competitive Irish step dance) aesthetics and community values interact and construct one another in the “focus locations” of studios, feiseanna and oireachtasaí (local and regional competitions), performance stages, and the body— sites of performance where the modern competitive Irish step dance tradition is presented, embodied, and circulated. By discussing these local and transnational flows in grounded and particular key locations and experiences of performance, I demonstrate how Irish dance practices and ideas related to those practices are in constant negotiation and renegotiation between the major transnational regulatory body of An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha (The Commission of Irish Dance, CLRG) and the local cultures of the individual schools and dancers under its purview. As it goes through these processes of negotiation, Irish dance both homogenizes and diversifies, circulating through the transnational cultural cohort that practices it. This study informs several areas of research, including ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology, Irish dance and music studies, studies on processes of cultural globalization, and Japanese performing arts and cultural studies. In this work, I argue for a body- and performance-oriented approach to fieldwork and research for scholars of music as well as dance, noting the crucial role of embodiment for not only achieving a deeper understanding of the performing arts traditions they study, but also unveiling values and aesthetics fundamental to the communities they work with.
"Jazz is Back": Alternative Jazz Venues and Gentrification in Washington, D.C.
(2016) Jackson, Benjamin James; Rios, Fernando; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Gentrification has dramatically changed the urban landscape of Washington, D.C. Non-profit alternative jazz venues have become important sites for negotiating this complex process that is re-shaping the city. Each such venue aligns itself with one of the two primary factions of gentrification: new urban migrants or long-term residents. Westminster Presbyterian Church’s Jazz Night in Southwest fosters a community of repeat-attendees resisting social displacement. The Jazz and Cultural Society unabashedly foregrounds ties to long-term residents in highlighting a black identity and its local interconnectedness. CapitolBop’s Jazz Loft demonstrates the difficulties that come with trying to cater to a young audience, and at the same time, resist gentrification. These venues present three perspectives on gentrification and together bring light to the overlapping complexity of gentrification.
Ideals, Aesthetics, and Practices of Professionalization in the Tokyo Jazz Scene
(2016) Scally, William Donawerth; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In the early twenty-first century, jazz has a history in Japan of approximately 100 years. In contemporary Tokyo, Japanese musicians demonstrate their right to access jazz performance through a variety of musical and extra-musical techniques. Those accepted as fully professional and authentic artists, or puro, gain a special status among their peers, setting them apart from their amateur and part-time counterparts. Drawing on three months of participant-observation in the Tokyo jazz scene, I examine this status of puro, its variable definition, the techniques used by musicians to establish themselves as credible jazz performers, and some obstacles to achieving this status. I claim two things: first, aspiring puro musicians establish themselves within a jazz tradition through musical references to African American identity and a rhetoric of jazz as universal music. Second, I claim that universalism as a core aesthetic creates additional obstacles to puro status for certain musicians in the Tokyo scene.
MUSIC, TRANCE, AND TRANSMISSION IN THE SANTO DAIME, A BRAZILIAN AYAHUASCA RELIGION.
(2015) Blocksom, Benjamin Nye; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This thesis illuminates the core values within Santo Daime communities and how these are transmitted and practiced during rituals. Santo Daime, a Brazilian Ayahuasca Religion originating in the western Amazon state of Acre, is practiced both inside and outside its urban Amazonian roots, including most Brazilian states and smaller communities in a handful of Western countries, such as the United States, Mexico, and the Netherlands. Adepts of the Santo Daime combine the sacramental use of Ayahuasca (a psychotropic tea with a long history of use in the Amazonian basin), collective shamanism, and music performance practices (singing, dancing, and playing instruments) to achieve a state of religious ecstasy. Using a multi-disciplinary approach with emphasis on ethnography, an expansion of Judith Becker's categorization of trance, and musical and phonological analysis I argue that the doctrine of the Santo Daime and the transmission of these teachings through music are inseparable elements of producing and navigating the altered states of consciousness collectively experienced in Santo Daime rituals.
REPRESENTATIONS OF PACIFIC IDENTITY AT THE 2012 FESTIVAL OF PACIFIC ARTS
(2014) Sullivan, Kirk; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Since 1972, the countries of the Pacific have come together every four years to express their culture at the Festival of Pacific Arts. In 2012, I traveled to Honiara, Solomon Islands, for the eleventh iteration of this two-week festival. This thesis focuses on the traditional performances by twenty countries at the festival, and explores the presentational choices made by the Polynesian, Melanesian, Micronesian, and Australian cultures represented at the festival. The analysis of performances, recordings, and interviews, utilizing Appadurai's -scapes, reveals the economics, politics, and ideas of these Pacific Islanders in their negotiation of the balance between tradition and modernity. The Festival presents a Bakhtinian carnival allowing participants to demonstrate or resist clichés and conform to or break with conventions, values and established truths. The festival becomes a unique spectacle of resistance, experimentation, and discovery, a place for Pacific Islanders to negotiate their identity in the twenty-first century.
NATIVE CLASSICAL: MUSICAL MODERNITIES, INDIGENOUS RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES, AND A KANIENKÉHA (MOHAWK) CONCEPT OF NON:WA (NOW)
(2014) Avery, Dawn; Witzleben, John Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In this dissertation I explore how Indigenous methodologies that foreground cultural advocacy, revitalization, and education can be articulated using Indigenous language and cultural metaphor in research on North American Indian composers. Toward this end, I apply the Kanienkéha (Mohawk) concept of "non:wa" or "now" that also refers to three modes of perception--the now of the past, the present, and the future--toward understanding the intersection of innovation and tradition in classical Native music. This research joins the existing discourse that critiques binary oppositions separating Indigenous tradition (as past) and innovation (as present and future). Through interviews, fieldwork, and musical analysis, I illustrate Native values of interconnectedness, relationality, continuity, politics, and soundscapes in the processes of Native composition as well as the resultant works, I explore how these, in turn, may be understood through the application of Indigenous research techniques. In collaboration with a cohort of contemporary musicians, I look primarily at two Navajo composers--Raven Chacon and Juantio Becenti--and examine my own work as a composer, performer, and ethnomusicologist of Kanienkéha descent to explore the following questions: How can the topic of classical Native music best be served by using Indigenous methodologies in fieldwork, research, and representation and What is classical Native Music and is it different from other contemporary classical music styles? Drawing on the teachings of Indigenous dotahs (elders/teachers), the scholarship of ethnomusicologists, and examining oral and written tradition while using language and cosmology as cultural metaphors, I present a variety of possibilities for looking at Indigenous music through Indigenous eyes. Rather than offering a set of conclusions, I offer a set of tools for discussion and reflection: 1) how we might understand a definition of classical Native music; 2) how we are part of a modern movement of artistry; 3) how our creative processes reflect Indigenous sensibilities; 4) how specific composers are contributing to that movement; and 5) how Indigenous language, metaphor and worldview are a powerful and applicable epistemology for research.
Breathing It In: The Musical Identity of the Scottish Travellers
(2012) Tobler, Cheryl Annette; Provine, Robert C.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This study examines the creation and continuation of identity among Travellers with regard to their vocal music and storytelling traditions. Travellers are historically a nomadic ethnic group found mainly in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, and in smaller numbers in the United States. My study focuses specifically on the Travellers of Scotland, in particular those of Perthshire and Aberdeenshire. Known widely for their musical abilities, the historically peripatetic Travellers often introduced new tunes or new settings wherever they travelled and mingled with settled, or non-Traveller, communities. Within the past forty years the majority of Travellers have become settled, and many have managed to maintain their identity through their expressive culture, specifically music and stories. I examine how for many Travellers a previous peripatetic lifestyle and a current settled lifestyle have both contributed to and affected their musical identity. For this study, I draw on theories of identity and ethnicity, as well as the fields of folklore, ethnomusicology, history, linguistics and cultural studies to assist in the interpretation of music and identity in a cultural context. Fieldwork I conducted in Scotland, Ireland, and the United States informs my research into how Traveller identity and ethnicity is conveyed and sustained through their vocal music. I conducted fieldwork in Ireland in the summer of 2004; in the United States in the summer of 2003 and the fall of 2004; and in Scotland in April 2004, August 2005, from September 2006 to April 2007, and in January 2008. Information during my fieldwork was collected from personal interviews with Irish and Scottish Travellers, with folklorists, and with those who are music promoters. I also conducted extensive archival research at the School for Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh, at the Cecil Sharp House in London, at the gypsy archives of the University of Liverpool, and at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. I analyze the role performance has in portraying Traveller identity, both in public and private spheres. Both music and storytelling, intertwined within the same performative framework for Travellers, are examined together in my research. In examining the complex role of Traveller identity portrayed through performance, I also include transcriptions of selected pieces from Traveller repertoire that contribute to my analysis of how key elements of Traveller society are revealed through their music. Furthermore, I conduct a comparative musical analysis of a song performed by a particularly well-known musical Traveller family, the Robertsons, to examine the continuation of specific Traveller cultural traits through music transmission. Through a close examination of four specific Scottish Travellers (Stanley Robertson, Duncan Williamson, Sheila Stewart, and Jess Smith) I conclude that Traveller identity is strongly tied to an understanding of their ethnicity, and that a musical identity is clearly evident through their expressive culture, specifically ballads and stories.

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