Beginning in the mid-1930s, government-sponsored fieldworkers canvassed the nation as part of a series of unprecedented folk music research, collecting, and recording projects, conducted under the auspices of the Federal One arts programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. In most cases, the thousands of instantaneous recording discs, transcriptions, and song texts were deposited at the recently established Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, under the watch of Harold Spivacke and John and Alan Lomax. The network of individuals involved in these projects reads like a who’s who of folklore and folk music scholarship of the era: Benjamin A. Botkin (Federal Writers’ Project, WPA Joint Committee on Folk Arts); Sidney Robertson Cowell (California Folk Music Project); Herbert Halpert (Federal Theatre Project, Joint Committee); George Herzog (Columbia University); Zora Neale Hurston (Federal Writers’ Project), and Charles Seeger (Federal Music Project, Joint Committee). The reasons behind making these collections were as varied as the individuals involved, but mainly reflected intellectual currents of the time: functionalism, comparative musicology, salvage ethnography, and an archival instinct. This dissertation explores the institutionalization of folk music during the New Deal era and the place of “the folk” within the prevailing “national fabric” metaphor used to describe the United States as, in theory, a culturally pluralistic nation.

Although scholars have thoroughly documented the music associated with the Vietnam War and the post-9/11 wars, virtually no musicological study has been conducted on the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The present work attempts to fill this lacuna by investigating American music stimulated by this war and placing it into the context of the culture from which it emerged. In addition to its value as a reflection on the Middle Eastern crisis and US-Iraq relations, this music served as a vehicle for cultural memories of World War II and the Vietnam War. The demonization of Saddam Hussein blatantly evoked Hitler, making an emotional case for a just war; the ubiquitous “support our troops” campaign not-so-subtly elicited Vietnam.

A brief historical overview offers background to the conflict and a discussion of US memories of Vietnam and World War II. Collective remembering, revising, and forgetting bolstered support for the war, support for the soldiers, and antiwar sentiments. Commercial popular music responses reflected these memories through a combination of communality and sentimentality, while also circumventing the more difficult aspects of the war. Other less mainstream musicians, such as Fugazi and Ani Difranco, responded with scathing lyrics against war, government, and society. A virtually unknown Persian Gulf War Song Collection at the Library of Congress contains more than 140 unpublished or self-published cassettes and 78s. Although of little commercial worth, the songs provide important insight into the way some Americans processed US involvement in the Gulf. Composers Lou Harrison, Jerome Kitzke, Laurie Anderson, and Aaron Jay Kernis also created musical responses to the conflict. Their expression of collective remembering relies on inclusive concepts of humanity, suffering, and empathy.

Gulf War music—whether mainstream or homegrown—reflected a widespread urge for solidarity, both for and against the war. Additionally, songwriters who addressed hostilities in the Middle East confronted the nation’s past, with cultural memories that adhered to and resisted dominant narratives. The findings of this study hold particular importance for adequate consideration of the Gulf War not only as a reaction to the Vietnam War, but also as a precursor for post-9/11 politically engaged music.

In 1939, the United States’ strained relations with countries in Asia and Europe echoed the challenges of war amidst a crippling depression. The city of San Francisco, known as the “Gateway to the West,” was the closest major continental American city to Asia. Selected in 1935 to host an American world’s exposition, fair organizers were quick to market the unique and long-term geographic and cultural relationship that San Francisco had with countries that bordered the Pacific Ocean. On February 18, 1939, San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE), which eventually attracted more than 8 million visitors, adopted the “Pageant of the Pacific” as its theme. The exposition served as a platform that attempted to facilitate a multicultural dialogue that promoted peace and was the first occurrence where the fine arts of the Pacific Rim were assembled at an American massed event.

The GGIE is a Depression-era massed spectacle that allows for an insight into the rise of mass culture and issues of local, regional, civic, national, and global communities as well as an example standardization of music and entertainment at American fairs. Popular musical figures were in demand at expositions and wielded a great amount of power in creating uniquely “American” music as well as shaping the sonic representation of a nation. The focus will be to construct a context in order to contextualize the GGIE within previous American world’s fairs, especially the 1894 California Midwinter Exposition and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

Corporate, academic, federal, and civic entities used music at the GGIE as a tool for marketing and propaganda as well as a form of protest. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers’ (ASCAP) staged a highly publicized musical protest during the last weeks of the GGIE. Using recordings and reviews, this examination will shed new light on the issues of music licensing, performance rights organization history, musical protest, and the reaffirmation of the American popular music canon on the West Coast in the final years before the United States’ involvement in WWII.

Geographically closer to the events in Japanese-occupied China than the concurrent New York World’s Fair, San Francisco hosted an exhibition that promoted peace in the Pacific with the focus on tourism and trade. The main purpose of the GGIE was twofold: to position the United States as a world power at the threshold of a world war and to aid the nation, and San Francisco in particular, during the Depression. The fair was not only an idealistic enterprise but also a practical one. Although this dissertation’s primary focus is musical, it also examines how issues of race and gender, copyright and technology, and Depression-era politics and Western identity underline the influence of world’s fairs on the modern cultural history of San Francisco, California and the United States.

This study traces the usage and development of the concept of “extended vocal techniques,” [EVT] from its early appearances in musical discourse in the 1970s to the present. Though many authors suggest a long lineage for EVT, the actual term is relatively new. In fact, this term is virtually absent from scholarly or journalistic literature before the 1970s. Vocal pedagogues and music scholars have contributed substantially to the discussion concerning which vocal practices, artists, and performance literature might be considered part of the EVT tradition. Musicological work more specifically focused on EVT has profiled individual performer-composers working experimentally with their voices, and many have woven critical theory into their analyses of these artists’ vocal practices. Curiously, few of these musicological studies have attended to their own acceptance of the EVT label, commonly applied to artists such as Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, and Pamela Z, among others. The oversight of the historical and critical issues underpinning the term itself has allowed EVT's definition to be tacitly shaped by each author’s cultural assumptions. These unacknowledged assumptions drive various definitions and responses to EVT, forming a hidden transcript that this project seeks to unearth.

By locating the appearances of the term EVT in musical discourse from earliest to latest, this work specifies the time period, social context, institutional affiliations, and musical background for each contributor to the EVT record and profiles representative artists from different social-historical contexts who have been frequently associated with EVT. Through an investigation of EVT’s various historical definitions, cultural implications, and power dynamics, I formulate a rhizomatic account of the development of EVT as a concept. Moreover, I examine how its differences and similarities over the years indicate our shifting perspectives on voices, bodies, music, and identity. Recasting EVT as a culturally-situated mode of listening holds the potential to move conservatory singing toward a more flexible, inclusive understanding of vocal practice that celebrates different bodies, abilities, and backgrounds.

This dissertation examines the aesthetic values of the experimental ‘noise’ scenes in Los Angeles from 2010 to 2014 using ethnographic methods. It centers around three main venues and the practitioners and audiences associated with them: (the) Handbag Factory, Dem Passwords, and the wulf. I interviewed twenty-three practitioners, venue owners and promoters, and non-performing audience members. I found that the aesthetic goals of the practitioners tended to center on the production, discovery, and reception of new and unique sounds (timbres) that will lead to new and unique aesthetic experiences. I asked the participants a battery of over one hundred of the same questions for comparison and analysis. The data collected informed my understanding of the sonic values of the participants in the experimental ‘noise’ scenes in Los Angeles. I synthesized this information to corroborate the main theses of the dissertation: that experimental ‘noise’ prioritizes timbre over pitch, and that it is characterized by its aperiodicity and ametricality in favor of what I call entropic rhythm. A keen interest in the characteristics of sound(s), their organization, and morphology has led me to the notion that timbre is ontology—not only as the being of sound(s), but as a mode of ontological agency through listening practices. I claim that these ideologies characterize experimental ‘noise’ as an artistic idiom in the twenty-first century.