Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses

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Author: Sharp, Christine Audrey × End date: 2023 × Start date: 2020 ×

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    ‘RESILIENCE’ AND EVERYDAY LIFE AS ‘TRAUMA’: LEARNING LESSONS FOR GROWTH THROUGH USING MUSIC
    Sharp, Christine Audrey ( 2023-02)
    In the subfield of sociomusicology, traditional approaches to understanding music use in everyday life have focused on use in specific and isolated cases. For instance, in Tia DeNora’s foundational text, Music in Everyday Life (2000), theoretical explanation of the interplay of these cases is lacking. This thesis proposes a new theoretical framework and model that expands on this approach to include a more holistic explanation of music use that builds on interdisciplinary and specific perspectives of resilience and everyday life as trauma. I argue that these new perspectives, utilising the theory of posttraumatic growth, can fill this gap and explain music use in everyday life as a process of ‘learning lessons for growth’, thus contributing new analytical approaches to sociomusicology. Besides DeNora’s text, the interdisciplinary works specific to this thesis are from David Chandler and Mark Epstein from the fields of global politics and psychology respectively. The particular music that is analysed to demonstrate the framework are pop songs from a recent Billboard ‘Global 200’ chart and a classical song cycle, ‘Narrow Sea’, recently composed by Caroline Shaw. Also considered in these analyses are music videos and social media.
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    Delta Goodrem’s musical expression before, during, and after traumatic illness: an interdisciplinary analysis
    Sharp, Christine Audrey ( 2020)
    While scholars of Western art music have begun analysing trauma directly, scholars of popular music have largely focused on what I call ‘indirect analyses’ of trauma through issues of consumerism and identity. Because trauma is at the heart of mainstream media narratives, I contend that scholars should directly research it in popular music. In this dissertation, I examine how popular music can be used to express a personal transformative experience resulting from trauma. I analyse Australian popstar/singer-songwriter Delta Goodrem’s transformative experience as a result of traumatic illness, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, in her first three albums Innocent Eyes (2003), Mistaken Identity (2004), and Delta (2007). I employ an interdisciplinary approach using positive psychology’s Post-Traumatic Growth Theory (PTG) as an analytical lens to demonstrate how Goodrem’s transformation reveals issues of resilience, gender, and maturation. I argue that Goodrem’s musical expression in the albums reflects the three main areas of growth found in PTG: self-identity, relationships, and life philosophy. Until this research, no scholar has attempted to use PTG as an analytical framework for analysing trauma in music. This dissertation thus introduces PTG as a new theoretical concept to music studies and contributes to our understanding of how artists employ music to make sense of personal trauma.