Korean popular music (hereafter K-pop) can be understood as an inclusive cultural phenomenon. K-pop fandom constitutes a sizeable portion of this phenomenon and is characteristic, to a large degree, of K-pop culture. However, female fans, especially in Korea, are frequently disdained in mainstream Korean culture, and their fandom has been undervalued and derided. Challenging this negative view of female fans, I autoethnographically examine Korean female K-pop fandom, based on my field research in Korea from August 2015 to September 2016, and from the end of December 2016 to early January 2017. I first introduce and explain various Korean slang expressions describing fandom, including “ppasuni,” a disparaging expression to describe Korean female fans. Drawing upon the concept of musicking (music as an activity people do, functioning as a verb), I chart multiple forms of musicking, which Korean female K-pop fans do before, during, and after concerts. Focusing on musicking during concerts, I analyze fan chanting and singing during musicians’ live performances, also known as “ttechang.” I also illuminate how female fans construct a K-pop soundscape through their different voices around the concert venue. In addition to these music-related fan practices, I explore a wide array of cultures and subcultures that Korean female K-pop fans build. Further, I investigate how Korean female fans perform feminist fandom, as well as how these fans participate in political activities through fandom. Thus, I contextualize K-pop fandom in a range of social and political phenomena. I then propose two concepts to reach a new understanding of K-pop and its female fandom – “K-popping” and “fanscape.” Building on the concept of musicking, I suggest K-pop as an action, and re-conceptualize K-pop as a verb, that is, “K-popping” or “to K-pop.” Also, to avoid confining Korean female K-pop fans and their activities to fan-“dom,” which differentiates and even marginalizes the fans, I expand the terminology for K-pop fan practices to fan-“scape.” This term, “fanscape” can be defined as not only a place or event where fans are present to perform their fandom, but also as a collage of different sounds, images, texts, and activities, which Korean female K-pop fans create.

Sounds of Subic Bay is a “history through sound” of U.S. Naval Base, Subic Bay in the Philippines during the 1950s and 1960s. During these two decades, Subic Bay grew into one of the U.S. Navy’s most important overseas military bases due to its role as a repair, supply, and logistics station during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. I write about how the sounds produced by U.S. Naval personnel, materials, and infrastructures functioned as structural forces at the base, and I focus on the base’s domestic, city, and industrial sound spaces. I demonstrate that writing history from a sonic perspective complicates and enriches understandings of the Navy’s role and presence overseas in the Philippines. I argue that a sonic analysis of Naval Base, Subic Bay highlights the importance of culture in military histories, and the importance of military analyses to ethnomusicology.

I introduce the methodology “oblique listening,” a technique of reading and analyzing U.S. naval and other archival sources ethnographically. Through oblique listening I identified sound in historical materials and used that information to comment on issues of culture and militarization. I also frame my research around the concept of “self-noise,” a technical, submarine term that I repurpose to interrogate the impact of military sound at Naval Base, Subic Bay. I write about how Navy-produced sounds influenced life at the base, and I ask why those sounds are rarely part of histories of Subic Bay, and how sound changes understandings of the Navy’s history at Subic Bay. I ask questions like, “what did U.S. Naval Base, Subic Bay sound like?” “Why did the base sound the way it did?” “What can sound tell us about U.S.-Philippine history?” “How do sound, politics, and militarization intersect?” “How were military sounds heard and politicized?” I argue that sound reflected and influenced the political, military, and cultural impact of the U.S. Navy in the Philippines. This history through sound of the U.S. Navy at Subic Bay challenges familiar historical narratives of the naval base, highlights neglected people, places, and moments, and demonstrates that sounds are important to and embedded in U.S. Naval history.

My dissertation examines gender and sexuality constructs in Thai classical music, and how they are reinforced and challenged through the participation of queer men musicians in khrueang saay or string music. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Bangkok, the work is situated within ethnomusicology and uses ethnography as its primary method of representation. It is informed by theoretical frameworks from gender, queer, Southeast Asian, and media and cultural studies. My core argument is that the presence of queer men string musicians exposes but does not interrogate heteronormativity in the tradition.

I begin by tracing of the construction of gender-defined rules in Thai classical music during the early to mid-19th century. This resulted in the feminization of string music, a precondition for the subsequent emergence and visibility of queer men musician. I pay attention to various gendered performance and performative methods through which queerness is articulated through musical rendition, embodied gestures, and homoerotic interpretation of song texts. I also investigate the social lives of queer men musicians string music circles as a contentious space, variously faced by both inward and outward pressure to conform. I focus on gossip about musical linages to challenge often smoothed-out notions about social interactions among Thai classical musicians. I then examine queer men musicians’ consensual pressure to conform in hyper-gendered institutions to avoid the shame of nonconformity and to maintain their social status. With the close interwovenness of gender, sexuality, queerness, and heteronormativity, I extend the concept of queer worldmaking as a modality in ways that are reconciliatory and oblique.

My dissertation contributes to the critical examination of underrepresented groups in Thai classical music and expands the boundaries of knowledge pertaining to gender, sexuality, and queerness as they intersect with musical performance. My research is part of a broader conversation about ethnomusicology and sexuality, an area that has been very slow to arrive in the discipline. This work joins the rich, critical scholarship of gender, sexuality, and expressive cultures in Southeast Asia from a specific underrepresented angle of queer subjects’ lived experiences that are closely associated with classical performing arts.

The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident that struck Northeast Japan on March 11, 2011 (3.11) prompted an array of local, national, and global musical responses. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork primarily in Sendai, Japan, I examine how musical performance serves as a community building mechanism in the wake of a disaster with a focus on music’s place in earthquake and tsunami recovery efforts. I treat music as a cultural tool to navigate towards post-disaster recovery, demonstrate post-disaster solidarity (albeit in sometimes problematically self-fulfilling and exploitative ways), and begin to rebuild and restructure post-disaster identifications, normalcy, and livelihood. I outline musical responses to 3.11 from a variety of different angles including songs that have become anthems of the disaster as representations of recovery and solidarity, songs newly composed shortly after 3.11, the revival and development of localized folk performing arts and matsuri festivals, musical activities by outsiders for disaster victims, staged performances that showcase disaster survivors, and musical objects that help prolong memories of 3.11. I highlight the issues and challenges that have arisen with each type of musical response, while also showcasing the ways that these activities are contributing to the region’s recovery. By putting these activities in conversation with each other and by demonstrating how they interconnect and address varying facets of post-disaster recovery, I aim to show how musical performance and recovery in all its forms from personal, local, cultural, social, economic, and national, are interconstitutive. I offer a broad yet detailed framework of the types of musical support activities developed in response to 3.11, examine the carefully constructed structures of each type of support, and show how they abide with cultural and national expectations of recovery. I suggest ways that the cultural particularities of post-3.11 musical activities could be reinterpreted and applied by readers to help rebuild and sustain the musical cultures of their own communities in the event of a catastrophe, and consider what “hope” means in the aftermath of tragedy.

This study of avant-garde jazz and free improvisation in the greater Los Angeles region investigates the musical and social role of experimentation. A major aim of this study is to reassess the criteria for the sustainability of an experimental music scene. Whereas economics are often invoked in the arts to assert the longevity of musical production, the LA experimental jazz scene offers alternative benchmarks for success.

This study also contributes to the knowledge of communal and cultural arts organizations in LA. I show how LA has sustained small and specific spaces in which experimental jazz flourishes in this region. It is imperative to understand this music in a local context to assess the current economic, political, and ideological fit of experimental jazz within the larger arts culture in LA today.

My ethnographic research is focused on two major organizations that promote experimental jazz in the region, Angel City Arts and the Blue Whale, and includes interviews with eight musicians and concert promoters, including Jeff Gauthier, Rocco Somazzi, Nicole Mitchell, and Matt Zebley. A goal of this study, largely stemming from these interviews, is to show how musical improvisations embody alternative worldviews that challenge the status quo and demand constant innovation and change. These improvisatory ideologies inform the strategies enacted by Angel City Arts and the Blue Whale. They offer two different alternative sustainability models that are largely community-based, and use experimental tactics not as a means to an end, but as concrete strategies to achieve practical goals. However, the community faces severe economic hardship and thus improvements are necessary to ensure the scene's prosperity. I argue the need for the scene to engender forums unique to a public discussion of their challenges, and to embrace an explicitly activist culture that boasts experimental values. I hope the overview of and insight into the nature of the development of experimental music scenes I provide will inspire future strategies to help the community overcome the inherent challenges to sustain and keep their music exploratory.

This thesis examines how individuals use sonic practices to shape the social space of the Camino de Santiago, specifically analyzing how pilgrims’ and locals’ musical encounters create the contemporary Camino. The pilgrims’ practices and spaces simultaneously intertwined with, rivaled, and sounded in synchrony with lived places grounded in local histories and politics. As I understand the Camino not simply as a site to practice one’s own culture or religion through music and sound but also to become immersed in and begin to understand others’ customs, contestations, and transformations between the international pilgrims and the local Spaniards characterize the route. The contemporary Camino is marked by a new emphasis on sustained spiritualities, encounters with transformed cultural heritage events, and heightened access to fleeting global-local interactions. Based on accounts of listening practices and interpretations of events, I first study how ritualized global musical encounters utilized cosmopolitan musical knowledge while simultaneously depending upon national difference to facilitate sentiments of communitas. Next, I examine how Catholic religious music delineated sacred places for the pilgrims, demarcating for them which sonic events were part of the Camino. Exploring religious festivals, I demonstrate how pilgrims were witnesses to Spanish cultural and musical practices that heightened the authenticity of the experience, as they ascribed varied levels of meaning and significance to places along the way. After arriving to Santiago, I investigate the ways politically charged performances and assertions of regional identities in Galicia expanded and interacted with the religious to signify locality and reterritorialize place. Finally, I end by exploring one particular song sung throughout the Camino and how its lyrics and history embody the many themes throughout this thesis.

With the rise of social media and Internet 2.0, Asian Americans have experienced increased visibility through various social media and streaming video websites. Using a combination of virtual ethnography and real-time ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis explores not only the reception and framing of Asian American musicians on the Internet, but also the content of the videos uploaded by these artists. In addition, the strategies employed by Asian American Internet musicians, including the activation of panethnicity, presentation of masculinity, and self-branding across social media platforms, play a significant role in these artists’ degree of success and visibility through streaming websites such as YouTube. Ultimately, this thesis argues that while YouTube provides a platform for wider Asian American visibility, it also serves to ghettoize Asian American artists, providing them with limited options for self-representation to gain success.