Browsing by Subject "music and language"

This study explores Luciano Berio’s search for a utopian relationship between music and language. This utopian vision of pursuing the “eternal path between sound and sense” led him to initiate a series of “linguistic projects.” I illustrate Berio’s investigation of the relations between music and our cognitive ability, or “universality of experience,” in three areas: the analysis of music, its generation process and its perception.

Although the utopian search was left inconclusive, it allowed Berio to develop what he called a “music of musics” or a “language of languages” in music. I argue that Berio’s “meta-music” generates a signification system similar to artificial intelligence that is able to identify, analyze and produce music elements. The system is based on a hybrid of structuralist discourses addressing human’s linguistic capacity. My study discusses the earlier model of this system established in the electronic work Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1957‒58), its perfecting in the two symphonic works Sinfonia (1968) and Coro (1974), and its expansion onto the theatrical works La vera storia, (1982) and Un Re in ascolto (1984). I show that Lacanian psychoanalysis strongly informs La vera storia as well as its dramatic elements and provides a theoretical basis for the connection between signification and the unconscious. Concerning the perception of music, by deconstructing the hierarchy of a series of oppositions (e.g. sound-silence, Self-Others) in Un Re, I suggest that Berio introduced us to “deconstructionist listening” in relation to the human’s “universality of experience.”

This dissertation investigates identity, citizenship, and belonging on the Navajo (Diné) Nation in Arizona and New Mexico through an ethnographic study of Navajo country western bands and the politics of Navajo language use. As the second largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo have often been portrayed by scholars as a singular and somewhat monolithic entity. But my dissertation tracks the ways that Navajos distinguish themselves from one another by dint of geographic location, physical appearance, linguistic abilities, degree of Navajo or Indian blood, class affiliations and musical taste. These distinctions are made over and above citizenship requirements for enrollment in the Navajo Nation. Thus, I focus on how a Navajo politics of sameness and difference indexes larger ideas and perceptions of "social authenticity" linked to the ability to speak, look and act "Navajo." Based on 28 months of fieldwork, the dissertations draws on three types of qualitative data: 1) interviews with Navajo country music performers and Navajo language activists 2) participant observation that included playing with three Navajo country bands and living on the reservation 3) discourse analysis of musical performances, band rehearsals, Navajo newspaper articles and other media The resulting study joins linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of music (ethnomusicology) and American Indian Studies to show how "being Navajo" is contested and debated, and, more broadly, to interrogate the complex ways that indigenous identities are negotiated across multiple, often-contradictory and crisscrossing axes.