Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Music

This dissertation aims to explore and describe, in ethnographic terms, some of the principal formal and non-formal environments in which jazz music is learned today. By elucidating the broad aesthetic, stylistic, and social landscapes of present-day jazz pedagogy, it seeks to encourage the revitalization and reorientation of jazz education, and of the cultural spaces in which it takes place. Although formal learning environments have increasingly supported the activities of the jazz community, I argue that this development has also entailed a number of problems, notably a renewal of racial tensions spurred on by 1) the under-representation of non-white students and faculty, especially black Americans; 2) the widespread adoption of 'color-blind' methodologies in formal music-learning environments, which serve to perpetuate ambivalence or apathy in the addressing of racial problems; 3) a failure adequately to address cultural studies related to the black heritage of jazz music; and 4) the perpetuation of a narrow vision of jazz music that privileges certain jazz styles, neglects others, and fails to acknowledge the representative intersections between jazz and related forms of black music. The study seeks to answer two main questions: What is the nature of the twenty-first-century learning environment? Moreover, how do cultural and racial dynamics affect the ways in which jazz is taught and understood in formal and non-formal settings? My proposition is that teaching jazz as a part of a broad spectrum of black musical styles and cultural traditions, which I shall call the black musical continuum, provides solutions for the dearth of cultural competency and narrow vision of jazz found in many learning environments. Through a continuum theory, I seek to provide a framework for viewing, teaching, learning, and performing jazz that situates it within the larger socio-cultural context of black American music. I argue that such a reorientation toward African-American cu (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Graeme Boone (Committee Chair); Ryan Skinner (Committee Member); William McDaniel (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American Studies; Black History; Black Studies; Cultural Anthropology; Fine Arts; Folklore; Music; Music Education; Performing Arts

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2015, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

Proceeding from the fact that blackness is yoked to the visual, this dissertation uncovers some of the ways in which performative, expressive, and artistic uses of sound and music can work to disquiet racializing scopic regimes or “black visuality.” Herein, I follow scholars like Paul Gilroy, Lindon Barrett, Fred Moten, and Nicole Fleetwood—the latter of whom enjoins that foreclosing the visual to blackness is self-negating. My methodology consists of extremely close analysis performed on a heterogeneous array of black cultural objects and practices that function as interconnected case studies. Specifically, Sonic Overlook examines the voice, noise and improvisation, sampling and remixing, natural and industrial soundscapes, avant-garde film and cinematic voiceover, film scores, and jazz, hip-hop, and blues. Chapter One thinks through issues of blackness and sonicity by performing an exegesis on Miles Davis and his “voice,” which comprises a variety of significatory and affective practices including, but not limited to, vocal utterances. In reading an iconic post-beating photograph along with Miles' music and performance, I demonstrate how the use and refusal of the (black) voice assumes deep significance. Chapter Two considers William Greaves' singular cinematic experiment, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), arguing that a seemingly oblique or “absent” engagement with blackness is foundational to the film's overarching strategies of misdirection and leads to explicit epistemological and ontological claims about race made through sound; Symbiopsychotaxiplasm elides black visuality by not talking about blackness but by sounding it instead. Chapter Three reads a variety of objects—DJ Spooky's The Rebirth of a Nation (2004), Black Kirby's remix-inspired visual art, and Killer Mike and El-P's song and video, “Reagan”—in order to establish remixing as a signal sort of conceptual mobility often connected to visual fields but that also works to disrupt racist ocular modes. Chap (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michael Gillespie (Committee Chair); Robert Miklitsch (Committee Member); Marina Peterson (Committee Member); Akil Houston (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American Studies; Art Criticism; Black Studies; Film Studies; Motion Pictures; Music

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2014, African-American and African Studies

This thesis examines the complex sociocultural dynamics that surround the concept of jazz theory from two broad perspectives: formalized or academic jazz theory, which emerged as a result of the formal institutionalization of jazz in the academy, and organic or intrinsic jazz theory, which first arose from African American music-making practices. This dichotomy does not suggest that the majority of jazz community members exist at the extremes of either of these two poles. Contrarily, most musicians tend to occupy the grey area somewhere in between. The aim of this study was to shed light on the complex and elusive intersection between formalized and organic approaches to jazz theory. Through an analysis of informal, formal, and virtual (internet-based) jazz music-learning environments, the results offer a thick description of the way in which notions of "jazz theory" affected the social lives of musicians, fostered racialized jazz identities, defined community boundaries, and influenced music-making practices. The paper includes a variety of case studies, such as Miles Davis' experience studying music at Julliard, an analysis of the first methodological theory books published for jazz students and educators, online forums where jazz students discuss music theory, and ethnographic data related to modern day jazz theory that I collected from nonacademic and academic jazz learning environments. Two theory-related books examined included George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept and David Baker's Jazz Pedagogy: A Comprehensive Method of Jazz Education for Teacher and Student. In both, the cultural contexts in which the works were created and how many students and educators misinterpreted or omitted elements that reflect the tabooed subject of race were considered. The study also relied on original ethnographic content collected during a field study at a Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop, a racially charged debate between two Aebersold camp attendees, a meeting wi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: William McDaniel PhD (Advisor); Ryan Skinner PhD (Committee Member); Horace Newsum DA (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; Music; Music Education

PHD, Kent State University, 2008, College of the Arts / School of Music, Hugh A. Glauser

Part One is a ballet based on a short story by George MacDonald, best known as a nineteenth-century Christian apologist and writer of children's tales and other stories. One of these is typical of his adult writings, which tend toward the macabre, allegorical, supernatural, and Christian symbolism. The Castle is a fairy tale underscoring the waywardness of the universal Church in relation to the Lord. As a fantasy, the short story lends itself to the versatile medium of dance. The Castle ballet is scored for large orchestra with percussion, set in eight movements: Overture, Contemplation, Family, Rebellion, Evening, The Party, Lament, and Redemption. It portrays the rebellion of a family against the authority of an eldest brother and sister when insisting on having an extravagant party in the confines of a vast castle. A storm breaks up the party at its height, freeing the brother and driving off the guests. Family members are terrified and repentant as they wait for the brother's judgment. The sister intervenes and the brother shows mercy. The music is programmatic and integrates representative elements such as themes, motivic development, polymeter and polyrhythm, and harmonic variation. Part Two applies traditional tertian approaches to chromatic harmony as a basis for analysis and composition by extending the principle into the third and fourth octaves above the root. It is felt provable that resonant overtones may be reinforced by what are normally considered dissonant chromatic tones with the intention and/or result of an extended consonance. Called “hyperextended tones,” these include the raised fifteenth, raised nineteenth, and raised twenty-third, which are justified in the harmonic resonance of a single fundamental tone, and in the individual tones that make up any given chord. Historical support is found in popular, classical, and jazz styles. Studies in physics have also shown that the mechanics by which timbre, harmony, beat waves, and roughnes (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ralph Lorenz PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Frank Wiley DMA (Committee Co-Chair); Thomas Janson DMA (Committee Member); Donald Gans PhD (Committee Member); Per Enflo PhD (Other) Subjects: Music

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2007, Music Composition

Peregrination: a Musical Sketch of Europe in Four Movements for alto saxophone, cello, piano, and percussion is a thirteen-minute musical depiction and interpretation of my travels in Europe during the summer of 2006. A detailed map of my travels in each city provided the seed data for the piece's chance operational aspects. Each movement represents a single city and as such has a single tonal focus. However, different golden-section-related systems are used to organize time and tonal arrivals. The structural harmonic content of each movement is generated by a Neo-Riemannian Tonnetz overlaid upon the map of my journey within that city. Elaborative techniques include Neo-Riemannian binary-generated cycles, serial techniques, traditional functional harmony, Indonesian interlocking ornamentation, and bounded-entropic indeterminacy. The overall harmonic structure of the piece is also generated by overlaying a Tonnetz on the map of my whole trip through Europe.

Committee: Elainie Lillios (Advisor) Subjects: Music