One of the most recognized icons of Mexico is the mariachi moderno tradition, which in the global popular imaginary, is associated with nostalgic, humorous, and emotional songs of love, heartache, death, drinking, and place. Inseparably fused to tequila and the historic charro figure, mariachi moderno completes a symbolic trinity of hetero-nationalist culture, conveyed within a popular imaginary of authentic mexicanidad (Mexican-ness). For mariachis and aficionados in Mexico, performative hypermasculine machismo acts as a perceptual baseline, structuring modes of feeling that signify an experience of authentic nationalist musicality This process is musically constructed in an incorporation of bodily movement, instruments, sound timbres, and symbolic clothing, simultaneously gestured with a heavy male-accent fusing an experience that feels genuinely Mexican. This reflexive signification is a consequence of the lived experience, shared dispositions, and competencies learned in the habitus, constituting real and imagined notions of hetero-nationalist culture. I refer to this musical semiosis as mariachismo, a neologism describing an intersubjective experience of machismo-infused mariachi subjectivity, ritualized through repeated gestures of sound, lyric, and corporeality. The semiotic power of mariachismo is most potent for subjects enculturated to Mexico's hetero-nationalist culture, shaped by popular imaginaries operationalizing gender and mexicanidad, connecting the two, making them feel unquestioned, …

Music plays an important role in Mexican funeral ceremonies, acting as a vehicle for men to acceptably express emotions of bereavement. As an important symbol of mexicanidad (Mexicanness), mariachi music is often used in traditional Catholic funerals, ritualizing grief equally as a mourning of loss and a celebration of the life of a deceased person. Although a form of popular music, mariachi's secular songs go through a process of sacralization, becoming meaningful sites for experiencing grief. As a musical expression of Mexico's idealized gender norms mariachi opens an aesthetic sphere for masculine grief to be expressed, experienced, and socialized in an acceptable form. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the musical mediation of masculine grief, experienced and ritualized within funeral ceremonies, and observed through an ethnographic study of Mexican immigrant communities.

The Dido myth has evolved and been adapted by many cultures over the centuries. Each Dido was altered to fit the needs of its creator, their society and customs. Despite these variations, every Dido retelling is derived from the Virgilian Dido, historical Dido, or chaste Dido narrative, or a combination of these stories. The pasticcio opera, Ópera armónica al estilo italiano que se intitula Dido y Eneas draws on the general Virgilian plot but emphasizes the chaste Dido narrative. The changes in the plot of Dido y Eneas reflect societal gender norms, theatrical conventions, and historical figures, specifically Queen María Luisa Gabriela, from eighteenth-century Spain. The Dido of Dido y Eneas can be divided into two main personas: Dido the queen and Dido the lover. Her arias, which come from preexisting Italian operas, convey the dramatic text very well. However, no matter what persona Dido portrays, she never fully loses control nor lets her passions rule her actions. Even in the moments before her suicide, her aria, "Punta intrepida," lacks the overt emotionality found in the popular Dido lament made famous by Purcell. This thesis aims to situate Dido y Eneas within the history of the Dido narrative and gender …

Sangpuy Katatepan Mavaliyw is a Taiwanese Aboriginal pop artist of the Pinuyumayan ethnic group. His albums have been acclaimed by Aboriginal listeners and Han-Taiwanese mainstream music critics for capturing the traditional Aboriginal sound and evoking the presence of the ancestors. In this thesis, I explore why Sangpuy's songs are understood to evoke ancestral spirit imaginary using a semiotic approach. I compare his music to traditional Pinuyumayan music such as pa'ira'iraw and shamanic songs to demonstrate how he uses similar musical gestures to evoke the sense of ancestral spirits. Other sonic elements such as the inclusion of the soundscape of a Pinuyumayan village provides a direct link to the lived experiences of the Pinuyumayan. I also position Sangpuy's music in the broader context of nationalism in Taiwan and how Sangpuy uses his music to negotiate Aboriginal issues such as land rights and environmentalism. Through this analysis, I demonstrate how Taiwanese Aborigines are incorporating their Indigenous ideology into popular music to carve out a space for themselves in Taiwanese society and garner more support for Indigenous rights in Taiwan.

Christopher Rouse (b. 1949), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his Trombone Concerto (1993) and a Grammy award for his Concerto de Gaudi (1999), has come to the forefront as one of America's most prominent orchestral composers. Several of Rouse's works feature quotations of and strong allusions to other composers' works that are used both rhetorically and structurally. These borrowings range from a variety of different genres and styles of works, from Claudio Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea to Jay Ferguson's "Thunder Island." Due to the more accessible filtering and funneling methods of musical borrowings (proliferation of mass media), the weighty discourses attached to them, and their variety of functions (critiquing canons, engaging in an allusive tradition, etc.), quotation has become elevated to the most prominent of musical actors that trigger narrative listening strategies, which in turn have a stronger role in the formation of narratives about music as well as narratives of music. The primary aim of this study is to adapt and apply more recent methodological narrativity frameworks to selected instrumental compositions by Rouse containing quotations, suggesting that their manner of insertion, their method of disclosure, and their referential potential can benefit from being examined through various narrative lenses …

In the summer of 1953, Karlheinz Stockhausen began composing his first piece of elektronische Musik at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne. Up to that point, Stockhausen's only experience with electroacoustic music was his time spent at the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française the previous year, where he assisted Pierre Schaeffer and composed a piece of musique concrète. An early case study in the marriage of serial aesthetics and electroacoustic techniques, Studie I is a rigorously organized work that reflects Stockhausen's compositional philosophy of a unified structural principle in which all musical materials and parametric values are generated by and arranged according to a single governing series. In spite of this meticulously wrought serial structure, Studie I displays features that are the consequences of the realities of electronic sound production either imposing on the sonic result, or altering the compositional plan entirely. I use a three-part approach to my analysis of Studie I by examining Stockhausen's serial system, the electroacoustic studio techniques in use in 1953, and the original recorded realization through spectrographic analysis. Using this methodology, I expose the blurring of the supposed divide between elektronische Musik and musique concrète by exploring the features that lie between the serial …

Often neglected in the musicological coverage of revolutionary music and theater, the Thermidorean Reaction phase (1794–1795) of the French Revolution was a period of governmental transition, in which Parisian theaters enjoyed the institutional and generic freedoms of the Le Chapelier Laws of 1791 in addition to relaxed enforcement of censorship. In recent years, Mark Darlow and Julia Doe's work has advanced understandings of operatic genres during the early years of the Revolution, which they characterize as a balance between "rupture and continuity" with artistic conventions of the ancien régime. I extend their methods of analysis to the second half of the revolutionary decade, exploring the impact that Thermidorian theatrical politics and legal (de)regulations had on operatic genre through the lens of Sapho (1794). This tragédie lyrique premiered at the Théatre de Louvois, a venue of ambiguous status within Paris's theatrical hierarchies. Featuring a libretto by Constance de Salm and music by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini, Sapho falls within the period of temporarily suspended theatrical privilege initiated by Le Chapelier and borrows key formal elements from "great" and popular operatic styles. The opera facilitates a discussion of how composers and librettists collaborated to navigate the rapidly shifting political and legal climate of Thermidor. …

The Composers' Collective, founded by leftist composers in 1932 New York City, sought to create proletarian music that avoided the "bourgeois" traditions of the past and functioned as a vehicle to engage Americans in political dialogue. The Collective aimed to understand how the modern composer became isolated from his public, and discussions on the relationship between music and society pervade the radical writings of Marc Blitzstein, Charles Seeger, and Elie Siegmeister, three of the organization's most vocal members. This new proletarian music juxtaposed revolutionary text with avant-garde musical idioms that were incorporated in increasingly greater quantities; thus, composers progressively acclimated the listener to the dissonance of modern music, a distinctive sound that the Collective hoped would become associated with revolutionary ideals. The mass songs of the two Workers' Song Books published by the Collective, illustrate the transitional phase of the musical implementation of their ideology. In contrast, a case study of the song "Chinaman! Laundryman!" by Ruth Crawford Seeger, a fringe member of the Collective, suggests that this song belongs within the final stage of proletarian music, where the text and highly modernist music seamlessly interact to create what Charles Seeger called an "art-product of the highest type."

In Victorian Britain, music circulating libraries libraries operated by music publishers Novello & Co. and Augener & Co. supported upper- and upper-middle-class patrons in their pursuit of cultural capital that would help them perform their socioeconomic status. Studying these libraries in the context of domestic music-making reveals the economic and social impact of these libraries in the lives of amateur musicians and in the music publishing industry. An analysis of the account books in the Novello Business Archives demonstrates that the direct income that Novello & Co., Ltd.'s Universal Circulating Musical Library generated was negligible at best. Yet the fact that the library continued to be part of the business for over forty years indicates that Novello & Co., Ltd. found it to be profitable in some way. In this case, the library could have helped the publisher to attract customers through branding and advertising, in addition to informing publishing decisions by tracking demand. Catalogs for music circulating libraries, as well as for the publishers who owned them, contain lists of library and publisher inventory and pricing. Studying changes in these catalogs reveals how patrons' tastes changed over time. A case study of violin-piano duets in multiple catalogs confirms a …

One of the difficulties of nineteenth-century form studies is ambiguity in ascertaining which formal types are at work and in what ways. This can be an especially difficult problem when multiple formal types seem to influence the construction of a single composition. Drawing on some recent innovations in form studies proposed by Steven Vande Moortele, Janet Schmalfeldt, and Caitlin Martinkus, I first develop a set of analytical tools specifically made for the analysis of sonata/variation formal hybrids. I then refine these tools by applying them to the analysis of two pieces. Chopin's Fourth Piano Ballade can be understood from this perspective as primarily following the broad outlines of a sonata form, but with important influences from the recursive structures of variation forms; Franck's Symphonic Variations, on the other hand, are better viewed as engaging most of all with multiple variation-form paradigms and overlaying them with some of the rhetorical and formal structures of sonata forms. I conclude with a brief speculation on some further, more general applications of my methodology.

This dissertation contextualizes Brahms's vocal quartets within a largely forgotten discourse about Hausmusik that flourished in German-speaking lands in the second half of the nineteenth century. In numerous texts about Hausmusik from ca. 1848-1900, authors conceived the genre as an aesthetically and politically conservative expression of German identity and connected its accessible style to an ideal of social cohesion in the pre-industrial age. Similar issues of national identity and musical style arise in the reception of Brahms's quartets, which, I contend, was informed by the works' generic status as Hausmusik. Critics either praised Brahms's works for their simple, folk-like style or disparaged their complexity, artifice, and foreignness. Ultimately, I argue, Brahms sought to elevate the genre of Hausmusik in his vocal quartets by integrating aesthetic and cultural values associated with this genre with a more sophisticated musical style. The works' stylistic and generic ambiguity and the disparity in critics' responses reveal competing aesthetic, political, and cultural world views immediately before and after German unification. Chapter 2 shows how discourse about Hausmusik constructed German identity in the private sphere by promoting a folk-like aesthetic and accessible musical style over the perceived cosmopolitanism and commercialism of Salonmusik and other repertoires. Chapter 3 …

From 1831 to 1836, Victor Hugo and Louise Bertin collaborated on an opera titled La Esmeralda. For Hugo, it would be the only opera libretto he would ever write, a mere footnote to his collection of widely admired novels, plays, and poetry; for Bertin, however, it would become her most important work, yet seemingly destined to fade into obscurity like so many great pieces of art. Using Schenkerian analysis, this thesis uncovers the tonal and voice-leading structure of the first act of La Esmeralda. A study of this nature, which operates from the premise that forms as large and complex as opera can be examined in terms of a large-scale structure, is valuable because it sheds new light on the correlation of tonal structure and dramatic organization. Through these methods, Act I of La Esmeralda is read as a background progression from D major (with F# kopfton) to F major, composing-out an F#/F♮ dichotomy introduced in the overture. With reference to several musical-symbolic ideas - including the representation of virtue through the pitch F#, the key of Notre-dame's bells - it is shown how the musical structure of Act I expresses the Hugolian themes of fate and decay.

This dissertation reexamines the music-theoretical writing of Georg Jospeh Vogler (1749-1814) in light of his educational background. His system, which is often characterized as "awkward" or "self-contradictory," is actually indicative of the rationalist/humanist preferences of Vogler's main source of training: the Jesuit Order. I argue that Vogler's theories and compositional style have been marginalized, partially due to their incompatibility with the more prevalent systems of his era, which were predominantly based in empirical modes of thought.

This dissertation investigates how German-language critics articulated and publicly negotiated ideas about music and expressionism in the first five years after World War I. A close reading of largely unexplored primary sources reveals that "musical expressionism" was originally conceived as an intrinsically musical matter rather than as a stylistic analog to expressionism in other art forms, and thus as especially relevant to purely instrumental rather than vocal and stage genres. By focusing on critical reception of an unlikely group of instrumental chamber works, I elucidate how the acts of performing, listening to, and evaluating "expressionist" music were enmeshed in the complexities of a politicized public concert life in the immediate postwar period. The opening chapters establish broad music-aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts for critics' postwar discussions of "musical expressionism." After the first, introductory chapter, Chapter 2 traces how art and literary critics came to position music as the most expressionist of the arts based on nineteenth-century ideas about the apparently unique ontology of music. Chapter 3 considers how this conception of expressionism led progressive-minded music critics to interpret expressionist music as the next step in the historical development of absolute music. These critics strategically—and controversially—portrayed Schoenberg's "atonal" polyphony as a legitimate …