Identity is a powerful concept that influences behavior and health. For over thirty years, researchers in sport psychology have been using the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale (AIMS) as a research instrument providing insights into the relationships between athletic identity and health variables. While musician identity is recognized as an important factor to be investigated in relation to occupational health, there are no known robust instruments like the AIMS in music psychology research. The current study aimed to adapt and validate the athletic identity measurement scale for use with musicians. The AIMS history includes episodes of modifications for performance enhancement of the instrument that resulted in five different models. The validation process includes evaluating the psychometrical properties across all five models. The sample included student musicians and non-student musicians (N = 1040). The traditional confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation method were used. The exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) and robust weighted least squares (WLS) was utilized to explore a new method of estimation that was known to resolve issues consistent with the CFA and ML method. The goodness-of-fit indices of CFA and ESEM were compared. The results showed that the MIMS is a reliable and valid …

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.

This dissertation explores Robert Schumann's treatment of phrase boundaries in the Novelletten, Op. 21, and his other piano works from the late 1830s. It argues that in contrast to Classical-style works, which generally feature clearly delineates phrases and formal sections, Schumann's works of the 1830s undermine formal boundaries, making it difficult to discern exactly where phrases and sections begin and end. I examine three means through which Schumann promotes a sense of formal continuity in his music: (1) by beginning phrases with a cadential harmonic progression; (2) by ending phrases without a cadence; and (3) by weakening the boundary between the middle section and the recapitulation in small-ternary-form pieces. The dissertation culminates with a detailed analysis of Noveletten Op. 21, No. 5.

This thesis is a critical analysis and creative commentary providing research and insight into my 150-minute multimedia exhibition, "Femininity: Ownership and Power," that premiered October 23, 2021. All of my research, composition, and collaboration efforts seek to recontextualize the semiotics of ‘femininity' through ownership and empowerment from varying intersections and identities. The titles of the eight works composed and premiered as part of the exhibition include: a beautiful reckoning; Dust; Moirai; Gaia; Portrait of the American Woman; Shared, In Balanced Contrast; At My Intersection; and I See You. Also included was #pinkcode, an exhibit that features a fuschia graphic user interface for an interactive modulation synthesis application built in Csound designed to bring femininity into computer music spaces. The musical compositions vary in instrumentation including flute, alto flute, voice, guitar, viola, harp, cajon, vibraphone, live electronics, and fixed media. They also vary in medium including live performance, virtual reality video, music video, audio-reactive TouchDesigner video, immersive text projections, light show, and live dance. Feminist texts by women poets and authors recited by women personally connected to me are also included in the fabric of the musical fixed media of multiple pieces in the thesis exhibition. Collaborators of artistic media including …

This dissertation explores the influence of melody on harmonic function in pop and rock songs from around 1950 to the present. While authors define the term "function" in several ways, none consider melody in their explanations, and I contend that any discussion of harmonic function in rock must include melody. I offer a novel perspective on function by defining it through what I call tension-as-anticipation, and I define a "melodic function" that accounts for the sense of tension and relaxation a melody creates within a particular moment in a track. My dissertation defines two types of melodic function—dominant and tonic—based on the melody's goal-directed scale-degree content, position within a phrase, and relation with the harmony. Dominant-melodic function results in two musical phenomena that I call the "imposed dominant" and the "dominant remainder." An imposed dominant occurs when a dominant-melodic function is initially dissonant with the harmony and resolves over a tonic. A dominant remainder occurs when a dominant-melodic function occurs over a harmonic resolution to the tonic, creating a slower dissipation of tension. Tonic-melodic function produces a phenomenon I call the "tonic anticipation," where a melody outlines a tonic mode over a pretonic harmony, creating a maximum sense of tension-as-anticipation. …

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, …

This dissertation explores middleground functionality of six-four chords by combining a voice-leading approach with hypermetrical analysis. By acknowledging the functional ambiguity of certain six-four chords that do not fit into traditional classifications (Aldwell and Schachter's cadential, consonant, passing, and neighboring six-four), or that can be seen as fitting in more than one category, I show that our interpretation of deeper-level structures is contingent upon how we choose to hear the functionality of these harmonies. Three types of six-four chords are introduced: cadential/consonant, passing/cadential, and neighboring/consonant six-four, illustrated by works by Robert Schumann, Brahms, and Saint-Säens. Each pair refers to an ambiguity—the same chord invites two alternative harmonic interpretations. I call these chords nontraditional in the sense that they shed more light on the musical structure with their ambiguity, rather than when being wedged into a single type of a six-four chord. This approach renews the ways of hearing the malleability of nonconventional Romantic structures and permits us to trace the path of each work as a unique tonal trajectory from a listener's perspective.

Christian Wolff's alternatively notated scores grant the performer several interpretive choices. These pieces feature symbols (known as "coordination neumes") that instruct performers when to begin and end a sound event in relation to the sounds being made around them, thereby generating a reactive improvisation between the musicians. Among these scores are five compositions that form the basis of this project: For 5 or 10 People (1962), In Between Pieces (1963), For 1, 2, or 3 People (1964), Septet (1964), and Edges (1968). Focusing on these pieces specifically, this dissertation explores the unique performance practices required by Wolff's indeterminate music and contextualizes that music within his career in classics and comparative literature, particularly with regard to the concept of translation, and within his creative communities. These creative communities include his fellow New York School composers, New York's wider downtown artistic scenes in the 1950s and 60s, and the experimental music scenes at Cologne and Darmstadt. While scholars such as David Behrman, Thomas DeLio, and Mark Nelson have addressed the interactive quality of Wolff's notation and the technical skills needed to execute his pieces, I argue that there are deeper processes at work in these compositions that go beyond typical discussions of …

Music binder's volumes, or collections of sheet music typically bound by women in the nineteenth century, constitute an informative and underutilized set of historical artifacts. Each binder's volume can be viewed as a Spotify playlist frozen in time. An individual volume contains more than just the volume's individual pieces; it also holds the marginalia, the choices women made on what to include in a binder, and information on where and how music was produced. This dissertation examines music binder's volumes quantitatively, processing information found in binder's volumes by using the MARC and other cataloguing data to construct a relational database. I engage with broad questions of music publishing and consumption and provide a method to contextualize qualitative results on a larger scale. In doing so, I make two distinct contributions to music research and the digital humanities. First, this project offers a clear path for engaging with music binder's volumes and material history of nineteenth-century America in ways that scholars have rarely engaged in prior to this point. I highlight how data analysis provides new framings for binder's volumes and for sheet music consumption both at the song-level and at larger levels of the data. Second, and more broadly, this …

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.

This thesis' focal presentable object – to swim in air – is a mythosystem comprising six iteratively malleable experiential systems of intermedial musical and visual performance works composed by myself between the years 2018 and 2023. Conceived through the lens of Jennifer Walshe's New Discipline, created within my practice cycle's nodal context, and connected by a sub/conscious structure of perceptual timbre, the mythosystem and its parts form the centerpiece of this discussion of context, process, and method. As described in this document, the creative practice of nodal context and the adaptive intermedial methods used in the conceptualization and composition of to swim in air were developed through a personal and pragmatic application of feminist writer and independent scholar Sarah Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, and composer, musicologist and trombonist George Lewis' curatorial decolonization guidelines as outlined in his "8 Difficult Steps to Decolonizing Music" towards the creation of presentable cultural objects which invite variable and continuous interaction from their participants through the exploration of the reciprocity of community, multi-practice creative strategy and malleable forms. Throughout this document I discuss how through the exploration of the reciprocity of community, multi-practice creative strategy and malleable forms I have addressed concerns of …