Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Music|Performing arts|Native American studies'

American Indian music and dance traditions unilaterally contain the following three elements: singing, dancing, and percussion instruments. Singing and dancing are of the utmost importance in American Indian dance traditions, while the expression of percussion instruments is superfluous. Louis W. Ballard has composed a piece of music for percussion ensemble which was inspired by the music and dance traditions of American Indian tribes from across North America. The controversy that this presents is relative to the fact that there is no American Indian tradition for a group comprised exclusively of percussion instruments. However, this percussion ensemble piece, Cacega Ayuwipi, does exhibit the three elements inherent to all American Indian music and dance traditions. Cacega Ayuwipi is consistent with American Indian traditions in that the audience must see the instruments, watch the movements of the percussionists, and hear the percussive expressions in order to experience the musical work in its entirety.

The lives and careers of the three women composers Marion Bauer (1882-1955), Miriam Gideon (1906-1996), and Vivian Fine (1913-2000) spanned more than a century. Each wrote works for viola and piano, including Bauer's Sonata for Viola and Piano, op. 22, Gideon's Sonata for Viola and Piano, and Fine's Lieder for Viola and Piano. Together, these composers' careers encompass a number of important trends in the professional development of the twentieth century woman composer in the United States.

Women composers were hindered in their advancement and acknowledgement for a number of reasons. One of these was a lack of "female tradition", the absence of an existing community of successful women composers to look to as examples. Another was the "female affiliation complex", the idea that female professionals struggle to look toward their predecessors as models because the female tradition is devalued. First, this document will explore the lives and influences of Marion Bauer, Miriam Gideon, and Vivian Fine, aiming to contribute to a better understanding of how "female tradition" and the "female affiliation complex" affected these composers' lives. Second, each work for viola and piano will undergo theoretical analysis focusing on goal-directed linearity. Goal-directed linearity is an issue of interest to performers and will encourage a deeper understanding of the works in question, fostering their further performance and dissemination.

Since the mid-1970s, the indigenous ritual dance known as Danza has had a profound impact on the self-identification and concept of space in Xicana communities, but how is this practice received in the powwow space? My project broadly explores how studentorganized powwows at UC Davis, UC Riverside, and UC San Diego (UCSD), are decolonizing spaces for teaching and learning about Native American identities. Drawing on Beverly Diamond’s alliance studies approach (2007), which illuminates the importance of social relationships across space and time, as well as my engagement in these powwows, I trace real and imagined connections between Danza and powwow cultures. Today, powwows are intertribal social events organized by committees and coordinated with their local native communities. Powwows not only have restorative abilities to create community for those who perform, attend, and coordinate them, but they are only a small glimpse of the broader socio-political networks that take place throughout the powwow circuit. By inviting and opening the powwow space to indigeneity across borders, the University of California not only accurately reflects its own native student body who put on the event, but speak to the growing understanding of "Native American" both north and south of the United States border. Ultimately, I argue an alliance studies approach to historical ethnography and community-based methodologies in music research are crucial, especially in the case of indigenous communities, who are committed to the survival and production of cultural knowledge embedded in music and dance practices.

This dissertation looks at critical interventions made by select San Francisco bay area choreographers and dance programmers interested in altering spectatorial norms for contemporary dance. Those selected have strategically employed food themes and materials in and as performance, simultaneously tapping into existing foodie ideology and redressing concerns about dwindling audiences for live dance performance in the twenty-first century. I argue that such efforts 1) bring to light subsumed race, class, and gender politics embedded in the trend towards "audience engagement," espoused by arts funders and dance makers alike as a necessary intervention for the survival of contemporary dance; and 2) open up discursive and experiential realms of possibility by favoring material, associative exchange, (re)awakening synesthetic sensory-perceptive capacities, inviting spectators to refigure themselves as co-creators in performance, and providing opportunities to reckon with exoticizing desires to enrich one's own culture by consuming another's.

In theoretically grouping these choreographies together I illustrate a spectrum of responses that clarify how food-oriented performance gatherings can operate not only as strategies for altering audience relations, but as sites for alternative knowledge production and fruitful commensal exchange. Such research draws from and intervenes in the overlapping fields of food studies, American studies, and performance and dance studies. This analysis is uniquely positioned amongst other work addressing the interstices between food and performance in its emphasis explicitly on Western concert dance. It also contributes significantly to the archives of an often overlooked San Francisco bay area dance community.

Methodologically I take a dance studies approach, generating choreographic analyses enabled through interviews with choreographers and dance programmers, my own work as witness/participant in the selected events, and archival research into feminist theories of performativity, anthropologies of the senses, contemporary theories of embodiment and select dance and theatre scholarship from the 1800s to the present. Throughout I prioritize the embodied experience of spectatorship, highlighting how contemporary corporeality is shaped by shifting inclusions and exclusions of various peoples and practices, capitalist economic models, the pervasive reach of readily-available digitized media, and both dominant and alternative systems of knowledge production.

The maroma in southern Mexico is an artistic performance that features acrobats as well as elements of theater, poetry, and music commonly performed by clown poets. The maroma's form and content is drawn from a mixture of medieval European street performances, pre-Hispanic indigenous acrobatic arts, and modern circus features. It is typically performed as entertainment in the context of the patronal saint fiesta, annual popular Catholic events that serve as significant spaces that furnish cultural elements for identity construction. The maroma was very popular in the capital of New Spain throughout the colonial period (1519-1822) but with the rise of the European modern circus was either incorporated or displaced. In the countryside, however, the maroma appears to have continued for a longer period of time. Currently, it is practiced among several ethnic groups, among them the Mixtecs in the Mixteca--a region that covers parts of the states Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Puebla. In the last decade in the Mixteca, maroma groups and state cultural institutions have worked collectively to "revive" the maroma as the practice has been declining since the mid-to-late 20th century. This thesis is a preliminary incursion into the maroma as currently practiced in the Mixteca Baja. I argue that due to the effects of transnationalism and because the maroma has been present at patronal saint fiestas for a long time, significant spaces that furnish cultural elements for identity construction and negotiation, the maroma has become a symbol of a "pan-Mixtec" identity, an identity that unites all Mixtecs regardless of their specific town or region. Drawing from second-hand sources and fieldwork conducted in the towns of Huajuapan de León, La Trinidad Huaxtepec, San Juan Yolotepec, Santa María Acaquizapan, and Santa Rosa Caxtlahuaca, this thesis introduces the practices of maromeros and the work of state cultural institutions to represent a slice of the maroma revival in the region. Moreover, it strives to contribute to the maromero revival by providing information on the maroma in historical context, current performance and performers, and the revivalist activities the regional state cultural institution has taken thus far.

This dissertation addresses the concept of the experimental in contemporary dance and performance. In it I argue that, although the word is used in very different ways in traditional artistic and scientific practices, a number of contemporary dance artists utilize experimental practices in their work that produce useful knowledge that is recognizable and transmittable beyond the walls of the theater or gallery. I have written about artists whose embodied work has been described as experimental, whose innovations and explorations have produced paradigmatic shifts in dance practice and new ways of knowing, both about and through bodies.

Using theories of embodied experience from performance studies, dance studies, phenomenology and enactive perception, I argue for shifting our attention beyond textual and visual models of understanding performance to a broader palette of sensory modes and ways that attendees and makers both enact them. I propose that by doing so we broaden the possibilities for understanding the effects of performance and gain much richer tools for creating, using and analyzing our experiences of performance. I make these arguments as a maker of performance and as one who attends, reads and writes about performances.

The final chapter is a reflection in language of my own experimental performance project Performance Research Experiment #2 which was/is a Practice-as-Research performance project that engaged and embodied ideas and practices of scientific experimentation to specifically explore ways that artistic practice and scientific practice may inform or interrupt each other. By extension the project tried to think, and move, through different ways that we know what we know.

When Robert Spano joined the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as music director in 2001, he brought with him a mission to change the soundscape of the American concert hall. His goal, to gradually change the public’s perception of new music by introducing accessible works of lesser-known living American composers, led to sustained partnerships with the composers that came to be known as the Atlanta School. In this project I trace the formation of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra up to Spano’s appointment as Music Director. I then examine Spano’s model for commissioning new works as both an effective means of disseminating new music and an attempt to “plug into” the standard repertoire. Finally, I explore the notion of “accessibility” as it emerged in the nineteenth century to distinguish between classes of music and to show how the term is wielded in much the same way today to keep modernist ideologies in control of the canon.