Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
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ItemNavigating Kol Isha: Women's Voices in The Australian Jewish Community( 2020)Kol Isha is a religious law that states men should not hear women’s singing voices. This law is most often referred to in synagogue, where women do not take on any ritual roles and sit separately from men. Over the past fifty years, new styles of prayer have emerged that attempt to maintain tradition, whilst allowing women to sing and actively take part in ritual. This dissertation examines how Orthodox Jewish women maintain authenticity as Orthodox Jews and feminists whilst negotiating Kol Isha. It interviews seven self-identifying Orthodox Female Jewish Women, who have attended such congregations about how they negotiate secular and sacred values during prayer. Preliminary findings suggest that women negotiate their authenticity by taking part in current ideological conflicts within their communities. Their standpoints are made public through where and how they use their voices within sacred settings.
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ItemDelta Goodrem’s musical expression before, during, and after traumatic illness: an interdisciplinary analysis( 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.
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ItemHyper-visibility and under-representation: inclusivity, diversity, and the alternative music scene in Melbourne( 2020)This ethnographic study documents the lived experience of People of Colour (PoC) making alternative and punk music in Melbourne, Australia. Exploring local discourse on cultural diversity, inclusivity and racial difference, I offer previously undocumented Australian perspectives on race and popular music. The study traces issues of whiteness, anti-racism and punk in Australia down to three key components: subculture, genre and capital. Through formal, semi-structured interviews, the study asks how notions of cultural diversity impact alternative music scenes. I argue that PoC in these scenes experience race-based exclusion, both a result of the longstanding erasure of PoC from written histories of Western punk, combined with Australia’s specific position as a white multicultural, settler-colonial nation. In challenging the notion of punk as a white musical tradition, and recognising the specific conditions that foster racism in Australian music scenes, my informants and I discuss how anti-racist values may be meaningfully embodied in local music contexts.
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ItemA systematic review of motion tracking technology and violins: applications to injury reduction( 2020)Violin is one of the most widely taught string instruments in the world. Despite the performance technique variations, there is the universal possibility of attaining a performance-related injury. Physical cause of such injuries is still relatively unknown. The purpose of this study was to identify literature on performance-related injury and technological application to harm reduction. Using a systematic review, three literature databases were searched through October 15 to 17, 2019. The search consisted of three combined groups of keywords: violin (e.g., violinist, violin performer) AND musculoskeletal (e.g., musculoskeletal, upper arm injury, overuse injury) AND motion tracking (e.g., motion tracking, kinesiology). The initial literature search strategy resulted in 192 potentially relevant articles. Finally, 26 articles were included in this review. The publication content suggested that motion tracking has a prominent position in violin performance injury reduction and pedagogy if a cross-disciplinary approach is taken. This research’s systematic review found an emerging field that heavily employed a quantitative research method, 3D motion capture; EMG; and Ultrasound technology, and was written primarily for a scientific community. Further research in this field would benefit greatly from the integration of both 3D motion capture and electromyography technologies.
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ItemMga awit mula sa kalooblooban: finding Filipino national identity in song: a contextualisation and analysis of prison songs written during the Marcos regime( 2019)The Marcos dictatorship pushed identity into new spaces as a matter of necessity during the martial law period in the Philippines in the late twentieth century. During this time voices were suppressed, and culture limited in its ability to be critical. The representation of core tenants of a society’s character in its art and culture is a well-understood concept, and when layers of colonialism, political dictatorship, and the restricted liberty are added into this context, a different perceptive can be understood about the way that society is under duress. This thesis argues that songs written in the Philippines between 1972 and 1983 by political prisoners reflected qualities in national identity. This thesis will outline the deeper historical context of the prison songs and analyse a number of important influences on them in order to tie the threads of Filipino history together across centuries and generations. This thesis shows how identity reflected influences on the Philippines and how subsequent qualities manifest within art. Furthermore, using the Marcos martial law period as an example of this, the way in which that identity was shaped, challenged, and moulded to express discontent with the governmental practices. Within this, songs and poems were written by political prisoners’ act as representations of those actions and propose and conceptualise a perspective on the past and present that give to the future.
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ItemMaximum volume yields maximum results: loudness as a compositional device in extreme contemporary music( 2020)This paper seeks to explore the ways in which loudness is used as a compositional device throughout three different performances by artists Sunn O))), Merzbow and Cat Hope. Section one discusses the concept of loudness as both an acoustic phenomenon, that enhances affective experiences, and as a cultural signifier, in which affirms scene identities that base their music on the use of loudness. This section also examines the literature on the use of loudness in extreme contemporary music in particular. Section two consists of case studies which analyse recordings of recent live performances from Sunn O))), Merzbow and Cat Hope. These analyses via spectrographs discuss the compositional framework of the performances, the performance techniques used, and the technical production of the sound, in relation to the use of extreme volume.
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ItemBlobs, Buzz and Rapid Patterning: Intra-Active Tools for Composition, Improvisation and Analysis( 2020)The world-renowned tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain once said a musician should “allow the instrument to speak” and “discover what the instrument wants to do.” After hearing this I was intrigued, inspired, and deeply unsettled. What do these statements mean? Are they meant literally or figuratively? Is it possible for an instrument to have agency? And what would it mean for an instrument to be an agent? More specifically, what would that mean for musical praxis? In this thesis, I examine conventional dichotomies and dualisms between human/non-human, theory/praxis and composer/improviser. I propose a language and framework for thinking about composing and improvising that draws on new materialist and object-oriented ontology philosophies. By considering human-instrument-concept intra-actions, this framework critiques the notions of the genius and virtuoso while providing a language to conceptualise my own creative work and that of other contemporary musicians. Central to my thinking are the concepts of blobs, buzz and rapid patterning, which are explored in diverse sonic, visual, social, environmental, biological, zoological and paradigmatic examples.
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ItemFrom resistance to incorporation: how Kendrick Lamar turned from Black saviour to Black salesman( 2019)Rapper Kendrick Lamar came to prominence with his 2015 album, To Pimp A Butterfly, an album built upon a platform of political resistance and Black liberation. However, on his 2017 album, DAMN., we see him move away from this political standpoint and cater to a mainstream audience. This thesis examines how this shift manifests and how Black artists fall victim to the process of incorporation by the mainstream culture industry. As racial symbolism is commodified and consumed by mainstream audiences, who may ignore or misread the political history of hip hop and Black resistance, how can Black identities remain authentic? How can racial minorities attain liberation from white supremacy?
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ItemChanging landscapes and soundscapes: the guitar in 1960s film Westerns( 2019)The Western film genre has long served as a staple of Hollywood filmmaking and has thus been characterised, at least in its early forms, as a uniquely American film genre. The Western is immediately recognisable from its visual iconography: the cowboy, horses, Colt and Smith and Wesson revolvers, train robberies, outlaws, Indians, Mexicans, shoot-outs, gold shipments, brothels, and bars. Equally important to its characterisation is the music that accompanies these visuals, both in diegesis and underscore. From the nineteenth century onwards, the guitar has been connected with notions of the ‘frontiersman’ and ‘cowboy’ and has thus developed a close association with the Western in films from the twentieth century. During the 1960s the Western genre underwent its most dramatic transformation. In response to growing sentiments in popular culture that the Western was reinforcing a false narrative of American frontier history the genre begins to shift in semantic and syntactic content. As such this thesis focuses specifically on the representations of the guitar in the Western during this period. Beginning with psychological Westerns that emerge from Hollywood in the late 1950s, the guitar is inextricably connected with notions of American and Hispano-American identities. Moving into the 1960s we begin to see a distinct revisionism in Hollywood and international filmmaking and the guitar adopts a more nuanced position. The films of Sergio Leone, with music composed by Ennio Morricone, present a ‘modernised’ and popular usage of the electric guitar, as well as presenting contemporary evocations of acoustic Spanish classical guitar repertoire. Finally, the films of Sam Peckinpah utilise the guitar in a definitely revisionist framework. The guitar is shown to be a folkloric marker for Mexican identity as well as a medium for the contemporary and popular song-based score.
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ItemThe use of irrational time signatures in Thomas Adès’ works( 2019)A host of institutions, the Western art world, and the musicological community at large engage in a continual discourse to explore, test, and invent new concrete avenues to record and accurately communicate artistic expression. Although the language of music has undergone considerable developments in melodic and harmonic theories and practices over the past few centuries, mainstream musicological dialogue has yet to focus on rhythmic and (particularly) metrical advancement. Few composers have tested the bounds of musical metre, and fewer still have done so with as much acclaim as British composer Thomas Adès. Known as a prolific triple-threat (composer, pianist, and conductor), Adès has continued to make art music accessible while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of “New Music”. One compositional technique that has set his oeuvre apart is his recurrent application of irrational time signatures. Despite their frequent use of irrational time signatures, Adès’ works remain popular with performers and audiences alike. It is therefore hypothesised that the convention is used primarily to ease Adès’ communication of complex rhythmic ideas to the performer, to facilitate the process of learning and performing his works without hindering audible intelligibility. Through a thorough investigation and examination of Adès’ compositional output to date, it is the aim of this dissertation to ascertain some of the purposes of irrational time signatures. It is hoped that this will aid future composers’ apprehension and enrich performers’ interpretation of the convention.