Michael Tenzer

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, biologist/ethnomusicologist VladimírÚlehla (1888-1947) transcribed hundreds of folk songs from Strážnice, his hometown in therural region of Slovácko, which lies at the border of present-day Czech and SlovakRepublics. For Úlehla, Slovácko songs were living organisms, intimately related to thelandscape and carried through time by family clans. Some of his interlocutors were relatives.Others were relations forged by decades of friendship. Vladimír was my great-grandfather,and his monograph Živá píseň (Living Song, 1949) provided a means for me to enter into amusical-cultural heritage that was ruptured when my father escaped communistCzechoslovakia and entered North America as a refugee. Informed by song transcriptions,Vladimír’s ideas about living song, childhood experiences musicking with family members,and ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation seeks to address the life of song, even whenhybridity, rupture, and transplant figure into that inquiry.Through a networked, rhizomatic framework and mixed-methods approach, thisresearch brings a number of theoretical, historical and methodological contexts to bear onaddressing the living nature of song. Family oral history, interviews with musicians, and folksong poetics gesture towards a Slovácko cosmology that inscribes a world co-inhabited byhumans, ancestral spirits, birds, trees, waters, mountains, and storms, all of which areconceived as animate and interrelated. Participant observation, my own research-creation andsubsequent song-bartering (Bovin 1988) offer glimpses into the powerful role that songsplay in connecting people with one another and with their ancestors. I describe how duringfieldwork, the cultural hybridity of my performing body called many complex and painfulhistories into question and disrupted folk song’s alliance with cultural purity, which wasespecially provocative in an era of heightened xenophobia. Weaving together a considerationof the formal qualities of songs, their affectual, emotional power, and the historical/politicalcontexts in which they appear, Slovácko songs emerge as agentive entities with which ahuman might collaborate in a variety of culturally-specific performance ecologies, therebyopening possibilities for ethical, anticolonial research practices and interpersonal encounterswithin a heterogeneous, multicultural society facing crises of social injustice, the COVID-19pandemic, and impending climate catastrophe.

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This dissertation sheds light on music connecting over one hundred gambang ensembles on the island of Bali today. Although the people, communities, and ideas that these ensembles are entangled with are as diverse as they are many, the melodies they perform connect in a rich and vibrant musical past. Drawing on a combination of epigraphical, archaeological, ethnographic, and musicological data, as well as earlier scholarship, this study advances our understanding of gambang music and brings attention to features often neglected in discourses that underestimate its role in Bali’s past. This involves engaging earlier studies, juxtaposing them, and then weighing the results against my own experiences, data collected during fieldwork, and careful analyses. At the center of this effort are notated melodies played by gambang ensembles that exhibit signs of a former entanglement with indigenous Javano-Balinese poetry called kidung. Evidence suggests these melodies, called pupuh gambang, emerged from interactions between literary pursuits, singing, and instrumental music several centuries ago. It also suggests they were created by literati associated with Balinese nobility. Earlier attempts to situate this music within a broader pan-Balinese music history and shed light on its relationship with kidung prosody have been hindered by misdirected speculations, variation in notated melodies across manuscripts, and presumptions about the melodic contours the notation prescribes. Based on a four-year field study and subsequent analyses of recordings and notation, this dissertation critically engages prior scholarship, providing nuance to earlier characterizations of gambang music that have inhibited deeper inquiries into its origins and relationship with indigenous poetry and singing.

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Politics touches many aspects of modern life, from the food we eat to the products we buy and the sports we watch—as well as the music we listen to, study, and perform. Classical musicians are generally more cautious about entering political debates than popular musicians and celebrities. This caution is attributable, in part, to the historical suppression and censorship of classical musicians and composers. But classical musicians today are affected by—and are often implicated in—the systemic forces of racism, sexism, inequality, and other sociopolitical problems. In this dissertation I argue that classical pianists can and should engage in political speech and action.This study begins with a working definition of political music and surveys the history of political interference with classical music and musicians. I then outline three basic categories of political pianism: protest, commissioning, and programming. An exploration of protest highlights four notable pianists who engaged in political activism and speech. My discussion of commissions and programming critiques classical music’s structural and institutional biases towards white and male composers and contends that collaborations with composers and repertoire choices can function as political statements. The document also introduces two new piano works written by Joel Thompson and Peter S. Shin, commissioned with funding from the University of British Columbia’s Public Scholars Initiative. This dissertation is intended as a guide for pianists who wish to integrate their personal politics into their professional pursuits.

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For over a century the tango has been associated with the widely known musical, dance, and poetic traditions of Argentina and Uruguay. The genre, however, is not exclusive to the Argentine-Uruguayan tradition. Brazilian composers began writing tangos in the 1870s, which is approximately when the Argentine tango first started to take shape. Yet, while the genre known as Brazilian tango (Tango brasileiro in Portuguese) prospered during the first decades of the twentieth century, it lost its prominence by the 1930s. Despite this, many Brazilian musicians perform and record Brazilian tangos to this day. It has grown somewhat in popularity internationally over the past few decades, but the Brazilian tango still remains foreign to many pianists and piano students and is relatively unknown to the general population outside of Brazil.This thesis aims to draw attention to Brazilian tangos as a body of work in their own right and to shed light on this lesser known genre while demonstrating their interpretative and aesthetic benefits. This is achieved through: 1) an historical overview of the Brazilian and Argentine tangos and the origins of the term tango; and 2) an analysis and discussion of select Brazilian tangos encompassing formal, harmonic, and rhythmic elements, as well as personal suggestions with respect to practice.Its concluding argument is that the Brazilian tango should be more widely performed, as it can be of interest to seasoned pianists who aim to broaden their repertoire, as well as to late intermediate students, who can benefit from this genre as a means for improving their technical and musical skills.

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This dissertation is a study of the Sri Lankan drum known as the gäṭa beraya and how people have used it to communicate a variety of messages and ideologies to supernatural beings and to other people. It is also an analysis of how the orally transmitted music associated with the gäṭa beraya has been conceptualized and structured by performers throughout history, and of how this music has transformed in tandem with local, regional, and global changes.In tracing these musical transformations through historical analysis and ethnographic research, I show how gäṭa beraya drumming – and its associated dance-form, Kandyan dance – is deeply intertwined with Sinhalese Buddhist ontological worldviews and with forms of analogical knowledge that are embedded in oral poetry. Through musical analysis, I argue that gäṭa beraya drumming in historical ritual contexts has been structured according to principles that extend beyond conceptions of rhythm that depend on isochronous time-units. I also highlight the continuities and ruptures that have characterized the drumming tradition during and beyond Sri Lanka’s encounter with European colonialism. This historical narrative of musical change corresponds with the process whereby the drumming tradition expanded from being a small-scale purely localized practice – rooted in the bodies and beliefs of ritualists who are marginalized today– to becoming a visual and sonic icon that currently represents Sri Lankan cultural heritage on the world stage.This study of gäṭa beraya drumming also serves as a lens through which I historicize social formations of ethnicity, caste, and religion, examining in particular how pre-colonial practices were negotiated in the context of the colonial encounter. Through this discussion I highlight the ways in which the discourses of cultural reform that characterized the anti-colonial and post-colonial nationalist movements of the twentieth century have in turn influenced the ways in which gäṭa beraya drumming is conceptualized today. By making cross-cultural comparisons within the larger region of South Asia, this research aims to contribute toward broader discussions regarding transnational genealogies of thought and the impact of these discourses on social and musical practices.

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For adherents of West African vodu, music and spiritual practice are inextricably intertwined. Through music and ritual, mythology and cosmology are reified, ancestral ties reaffirmed, and memories of historical episodes are brought to life. The life of the community worshipping at the vodu shrine of Tɔgbui Aƒetɔku in the southern Eʋe community of Dagbamete, Ghana illustrates this dynamic process. Since the early period of colonial contact, and continuing into today’s post-colonial Ghana, traditional religion has been reduced to an anachronism that is assumed to be antithetical to progress, modernity, and “civilization”. Yet this shrine and the community it serves has reacted and adapted to these threats and thrives into the 21st century. This study examines the social and historical factors that led to the establishment and growth of the Tɔgbui Aƒetɔku; it catalogues and analyzes aspects of its musical repertoire; and explores its current status as a traditional socio-religious institution and its relevance in modern-day Ghana as it relates to community development and resilience against external agents of cultural change. The shrine of Tɔgbui Aƒetɔku has played an integral role in the preservation, continuation, and progression of indigenous belief systems and musical practice in Ghana. This has occurred despite efforts of denigration, conversion, and repression from the forces of the colonial encounter and its aftermath: missionary activity and the resultant mushrooming of evangelical Christianity in the country, globalization, and Western-influenced cultural imperialism. Despite social pressures against indigenous religious practices such as vodu, dozens of individuals of various ethnic groups across West Africa “eat the vodu” every week and become new members in the shrine of Tɔgbui Aƒetɔku. Aside from the perceived spiritual efficacy that the deity bestows upon shrine members, I suggest that the shrine (as well as its membership and community in which it exits) have thrived due to two main factors, 1) accessible music and dance forms, whose associated meaning strengthens an indigenous spiritual identity; and 2) a unified extended family who serve as leaders of the shrine and guide its development as a significant institution that serves the social, spiritual, and cultural needs of its membership.

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Kunqu is an operatic singing style that developed in the town of Kunshan near Suzhou, China in the sixteenth century. Kunqu is currently experiencing a revival in China, but only five professional musicians are actively composing, continuing the tradition of creating kunqu melodies with qupai (preexisting tune structures) for the singing of literary lyrics. This dissertation investigates current practices of kunqu composition with an ethnographic approach that employs a variety of research techniques including: translations of historical and contemporary compositional treatises, participant-observation in composition lessons, formal and informal interviews, as well as analysis of musical scores, sound recordings, and live performances. I theorize kunqu composition as a process of composers’ translating personal and intellectual knowledge of historical Chinese and Western music as well as collective knowledge of the key branches of kunqu theory into performable and audible musical works (introduction). To explain the genre’s musical vocabulary, I describe traditional and contemporary features such as: relationships between linguistic and musical tones, musical modes, qupai, rhythm and meter schemes, and use of musical instruments. I then describe the process of composing an aria from qupai according to contemporary practice (chapter 2). To contextualize kunqu composition, I trace the history of the genre (chapter 3). Then I analyze how two contemporary kunqu composers engage in methods of kunqu composition in their own creative and theoretical ways (chapters 4 and 5). Finally, I explore a musical dialogue between Western and Chinese musical cultures through examining Tan Dun’s version of the kun opera The Peony Pavilion performed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2012 (chapter 6).

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This dissertation examines the relationship between music and politics of black identities in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil), an epicenter of Afro-Brazilian culture. It focuses on discourses of blackness and on the role of grooves, instruments, symbolism, and perceptions of carnival music, candomblé, and jazz in the contruction of black identities in Bahia.I propose a model that integrates discourses of black primitivism and empowerment with seven notions commonly associated with black and African music: rhythmicity, percussiveness, spirituality, communalism, embodiment, traditionalism, and closeness to nature. My contribution uses a Foucauldian interpretation of these notions to explain how they work together to form discourses of blackness, not on the notions themselves for they are all widely known. The model accommodates a wide range of interpretations of these themes offering more flexible views of blackness. A Bahian big band called Rumpilezz that blends jazz with various forms of Afro- Bahian music (such as candomblé and samba-reggae), serves as my laboratory for applying this model. Aspects of public self-representation, performance practice, music structure, and musical reception are analyzed. Taking a constructivist approach, this study aims to respond to the following questions: 1) How do the most influential preconceived ideas about “African” music and culture impact musical activity in Bahia?; 2) What opportunities emerge when musical forms perceived as Afro-Brazilian encounter others seen as foreign?; and 3) How does music in Bahia express discourses of blackness?This work, based on ethnographic research, historical, cultural, and musical analysis, demonstrates that, in promoting black empowerment, Rumpilezz emphasizes the themes of rhythmicity, percussiveness and spirituality, and downplays the notions of closeness to nature and embodiment. In doing so, the orchestra reinforces the place of Bahia, and particularly of Bahian candomblé, as diasporic centers of black tradition. Finally, Rumpilezz is located in a broader tradition of jazz bands in the diaspora that appropriates African-diasporic music to promote black pride.

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Gamelan gong luang is a rare and sacred music ensemble performed in Bali, Indonesia. Its origins are only speculative, but it is believed to have existed before the arrival of migrants from Hindu Majahapahit Java in the 14th century. Today few Balinese have interest in learning to perform this music, which is intimately intertwined with ritual practices. My research involves the study of two interrelated aspects of this complex musical tradition. First, I focus on gamelan gong luang’s history, instrumentation, social organization, and function within Balinese society. And second, I focus on gamelan gong luang’s musical structure using analytical perspectives. Additionally, and in consideration of the results of my research, I reflect on gamelan gong luang’s future. I have two goals in writing this dissertation. First, I want to challenge younger generations of Balinese musicians that often fail to recognize the value of this musical tradition. Today, more diverse and rapidly developing modern musics, like the exciting world of gamelan gong kebyar, capture the attention of young musicians. To these young people gamelan gong luang is old-fashioned and unexciting. This research elucidates many of the unique characteristics of gamelan gong luang, and highlights new potentialities for its appreciation and thus continuance. I will also show that musical characteristics of gamelan gong luang live on in their transformation at the hands of many Balinese composers. My conclusion is that the loss of this ensemble would seriously damage the continuity of social and religious life in some places that rely heavily on its use in ritual, and for all of Bali and the world at large, a loss of cultural heritage. I also want to challenge misleading representations of Balinese music produced by non-Balinese scholars. In earlier publications, Western scholars (Small 1977, Kramer 1988) have stated that Balinese music is non-linear, with cyclic structures that repeat seemingly without end. Utilizing research methods acquired throughout my graduate studies in the Western scholarly world, and my lifelong training as a Balinese musician, I have created an in-depth analysis of gamelan gong luang music that shows that such interpretations are mistaken.

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This study combines classification and paradigmatic analysis of drum (kendang) stroke patterns, used in the Balinese dance-drama genre arja, with an examination of the musicians that play them. The heart of the work is an analysis of the interlocking kendang arja improvisations of various master drummers from different villages across Bali, each of whom draws influence from a style of playing that developed in the village of Singapadu in the early-to-mid 20th century. Patterns are evaluated and categorized in an effort both to understand the divergent paths that the Singapadu style took as it was diffused to various areas, and to create a grammar: a set of inherent rules that govern arja playing. These analyses are tempered by existing Balinese discourse on arja and other genres as well as by the ideas and opinions of various Balinese musicians.The study begins by tracing the historical development of arja and its musical features, with a focus on the role of the kendang within the genre. It then considers Balinese techniques of learning and teaching and surveys the extant Balinese discourse on kendang arja. Next, it introduces the original Singapadu style of arja, and discusses how this style came to be transmitted broadly across Bali where other equally famous styles did not, as well as presenting some of the reasons for and manifestations of regional variation in kendang patterns. The study proceeds with a deep analysis of patterns taught to me by various master drummers, including a discussion of how these may be seen as musical embodiments of the Balinese oral theory on arja. These patterns then become the basis for an examination of hundreds of improvised patterns from various recording sessions. The penultimate chapter delves more deeply into the distinctive experiences and ideologies of each of the drummers under examination, exploring the possible reasons behind their differing transformations of the Singapadu style with concepts adapted from linguistics as an investigative framework. The work concludes with a discussion of the place of music analysis within the field of ethnomusicology and its metatheory, and addresses the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration in the field.

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The Gnawa are a sub-Saharan-Berber-Islamic society found throughout Morocco with origins in sub-Saharan Africa and slavery. Their music invokes supernatural entities during an all-night ritual for purposes such as healing. Despite being marginalized for their ritual beliefs and practices, Gnawa music has become popular and is increasingly performed in secular contexts alongside sacred rituals. The aims of my dissertation are threefold: to analyze the Gnawa ritual with regard to structure, process and function; to investigate how Gnawa music is context-sensitive; and building on the first two points, to assess the impact of global forces on Gnawa ritual and music, and on its practitioners. My research imparts a musical dimension to the study of the Gnawa sacred ritual and to its secularized form, and engages in comparative analysis of improvised musical practices which articulate a dialogue with an evolving tradition. The inquiry draws primarily from my affiliation with a hereditary Gnawa family. In the first part I examine the world of the Gnawa and their music. This elucidates the habitus that informs the perception of social situations and gives meaning to the musical expression of ritual musicians. The second part investigates patterns and behaviors embedded in sonic structures of varied performances and correlates subtle differences in musical variations to performative intent. By first investigating the interaction between music and dance in a sacred ritual, then analyzing contrasting performances, I demonstrate how the Gnawa musical system operates as a referent to context and to mental activity (cognitive processes). Drawing on discourse of the African diaspora, I challenge the notion that the shift from the practice of ritual music for the local community to the performance of ritual music in festivals worldwide supports a concurrent shift towards desecration. Instead, Gnawa ritual musicians establish distinct spheres of practice which delineate the sacred from the secular.

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The Hani reside in the Red River region located in China’s southwest province of Yunnan. This study centers on dialogue forms of their oldest extant song tradition—laba. These songs are orally transmitted and composed extemporaneously using melodic and textual formulae. The study begins with an introduction to existing scholarship on laba epics, which provides the basis for an overview of Hani history and religious beliefs. This is followed by a study of the interpretation and structuring of dialogue songs based on recordings made between 2002 and 2006. There are two main types of male-female dialogues: those performed between lovers and those performed between siblings. The varied historical and contemporary social contexts in which these songs are performed give rise to multiple interpretations of song texts and to variations in the structuring of a song’s thematic content. Laba dialogues constitute both a type of verbal art and a form of conversation in which asymmetrical kinship relationships are maintained. The approach to analyzing laba texts as dialogical sites of cultural production is influenced by theories in ethnomusicology, anthropology, folklore and literary studies.This study also examines the relationships between poetic and melodic structure. Since laba is sung in a speech-like manner, its melodic contours are closely tied to the phonological qualities of the text. This study examines how recurring formulae form the basis for variation in both poetry and melody. Parallelism forms the basis of poetic structure, while a recurring phrase contour is the basis of an indigenous concept of melody called teisa. The analysis of laba melody and discussions of an indigenous one-melody concept draws upon perspectives offered by Alan Thrasher and Antoinet Schimmelpenninck on similar regional musics. Finally, this study examines how new contexts of laba performance and reception represent a lens through which the social impact of urbanization and capitalism on Hani village communities can be understood.

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Conversations with Silence is a collage theatre work of approximately 50 minutes in length. It is scored for mezzo-soprano, flute/piccolo/alto flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, cello, piano, percussion, and electroacoustics. The broad subject of the work is an exploration of female creativity and how gender plays a role in creating art. Although Conversations with Silence is an abstract examination of this topic, my inspiration began with four theoretical readings: Eva Rieger’s article "'I Recycle Sounds': Do Women Compose Differently?", Linda Catlin Smith’s essay “Composing Identity: What is a woman composer?”; Susan McClary’s book Feminine Endings; and Sally Macarthur’s book Feminist Aesthetics. In Conversations with Silence I emphasize many of the qualities of “feminist aesthetics” that were already present in my previous compositions in order to explore these musical ideas even further. The work consists of seventeen movements divided into five separate scenes. Each scene includes two to four movements and is centred around a different dramatic character. There is no linear narrative to connect the scenes and characters. In place of one story, Conversations with Silence offers an amalgamation of stories, characters, and ideas. Each scene has a different thematic focus, which relates to the central ideas of female creativity and feminist aesthetics.

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No abstract available.