FAS Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I propose an analytical approach to art song grounded in the broad concept of intermediality. The term of intermediality denotes relationships between different expressive artistic media, encompassing both intermedial relationships between works in different media and intermedial objects (which fuse multiple component media parts into a new, inseparable whole with particular properties of its own). My intermedial outlook onto song is inspired by three French composers of mélodies working in Paris around the turn of the twentieth century––Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), Erik Satie (1866–1925), and Mel Bonis (1858–1937)––whose works, I argue, reveal various possible forms of intermediality that song can embody.

In addition to the most obvious combination in these songs––that of poetry and music––I also examine how the different composers and works musically incorporate the influences of media and expressive genres including visual art, typography, performance, personal philosophy, and religious practice in order to subtly critique and experiment with song’s possibilities. Likewise, I consider how effects that emerge from the situation of song’s word-music fusion should not be taken for granted. All the while, I propose novel contributions to music theory’s toolkit for the analysis of song, responding to existing methodological debates while expanding beyond traditional Germanic repertories for the study of art song.

Drawing on analytical, historical, archival, and theoretical perspectives, my dissertation’s chapters engage with how the three composers Poulenc, Satie, and Bonis each wrote mélodies embodying distinct intermedial situations. Chapter 1 focuses on Poulenc and what I term his “inter-art mélodies,” songs based on poetry with clear visual-art inspiration; examining the song cycles Le travail du peintre (with poetry by Paul Éluard) and Calligrammes (with poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire) alongside Poulenc’s own comments on mélodie writing, poetry, and visual art leads to a novel conception of Poulenc as an intermedial musical reader, with broader consequence for our understanding of both Poulenc and musical inter-art relations.

In Chapter 2, I turn to a theoretical and methodological intervention, drawing on issues raised by Poulenc’s example, defining relevant terms and contexts, and responding to existing issues in the academic study of song. Chapter 3 then turns to Satie and his 1914 song cycle Trois poèmes d’amour, arguing that Satie’s humorous techniques in this work emphasize song’s status as an intermedial object, and considering the unusual visual notations in his sketches and drafts as part of the cycle’s intermedial network; these lines of inquiry likewise inspire a theorization of how the intermedial situation of song makes Satie’s humor in the Trois poèmes possible.

Chapter 4, finally, analyzes compositional techniques in Bonis’ songs alongside her philosophical writings on aesthetics, morality, and faith. Focusing on religious-themed mélodies by Bonis in relation to both her writings and her life story leads to an expansive vision of songs’ intermedial network, in her case including relations among music, poetry, personal philosophy, and religious experience; this analysis also inspires further reflections on the issue of musical persona and personhood.

One political imperative has carried into the present from 19th-century British colonial governance, through post-Independence Indian national governance from 1947, and after the midcentury transnational pressures to industrialize agriculture termed the “Green Revolution.” This imperative: the Punjab province must produce and circulate more foodgrains in its supply chains for the sake of “development,” using the economic calculations of value across spatiotemporal motion termed “logistics,” and the increasingly capital-intensive agricultural techniques that these calculations require. But in Indian Punjab today in the aftermath of logistical development, impoverished villages wracked with opiate addiction depend on migrant truckers in Canada and Britain – logistical workers of a different stripe – whose donations fund massive village festivals. Both charismatic politicians and career criminals wield music for political gain within these wrestling and tractor tournaments, commissioning poetic and musical verses praising themselves and excoriating enemies, and ordering the extortion and assassination of controversial politically-affiliated musicians. These performances transcend mere rhetoric, generating political networks – including feuding criminal organizations – extending transnationally from villages to diasporic enclaves, and mediating millions of dollars in patronage. Yet the political figures who attempted to expand Punjab’s agrarian supply chains also sought to combat these patronage practices, which they considered corruption, and did so by using musical propaganda. What might the different potencies political actors assign music – capacities to repair or corrupt – indicate about the political economy of India and its diaspora, and about how people navigate its pressures and dangers? How do people attempt to turn the same musics into tools to seduce, symptoms of decline, and reasons to kill? I examine how people in Punjab have particularly invested music with political potential at moments where the pecuniary calculations of logistics overlap with the moral calculus of patronage (or its illicit equivalent, corruption). My first section examines the history of music in logistical policy. I begin in Chapter 1 with colonial development policies, whose efforts to expand agrarian supply chains and instill logistical calculations in Punjabi peasants through music propaganda and magic lantern shows failed to convince Punjabis, but convinced British nobility. Chapter 2 shows the continuation of these calculations among Indian nationalists, who pulled British political economic, and logistical, calculations of food supply and hungry mouths into new forms of eugenic population restriction, and new forms of eugenic musical propaganda. Chapter 3 uses oral history and government-internal documents to examine how these programs still target Punjabi villagers today, using the promise of musical persuasion to elide coerced sterilizations. My second section ethnographically examines music in the logistics-facing actions of interlocutors, actions built upon the aftermath of the policies in the first section. Chapter 4 maps how patronage and music remitted from North American truckers fuel Punjabi undocumented emigration over the US-Mexico border, and conflict in rural Punjab. Chapter 5 examines how the music and murder of Sidhu Moosewala, Punjab’s most famous musician, became grist for popular theorizations about the shadowy patronage relationships that structured Punjab’s agrarian-logistical politics, relationships that Moosewala’s music might symptomize, catalyze, or combat.

This dissertation accounts for some of the many musics, sounds, and silences that animate encounters among plants and Humans. Working across musicology and histories of botany, I interrogate the cliché of plants as silent lifeforms by considering how Humans negotiate questions of anthropocentrism and nonhuman agency during the process of making plants more audible for Human ears. I argue that attuning to the sonic lives of plants illuminates how musical and sonic practices serve the project of generating knowledge about the more-than-human world, and the constituent formation of identity amidst socio-cultural hierarches of Human and nonhuman beings. Each chapter spotlights different techniques for making plants audible and musical, in addition to addressing a variety of aesthetic arguments about music as a “universal” mode of communicating with more-than-human life. In so doing, I examine how Humans draw plants into our musical worlds by transforming botanical life into sensitive listeners, active performance partners, or material musical instruments in various contexts throughout the modern era. Such contexts range from the representation of floral scent in nineteenth-century art song known as mélodie (Chapter 2), electroacoustic music from the mid-twentieth century onward (Chapters 1 and 4), and online communities of passionate plant caretakers (Chapter 3). In examining the usefulness of techniques like singing or bio-sonification, my dissertation argues for a revised notion of “musicality” that includes not just Human or animal ways of sounding, but plant ones as well. In so doing, I argue that asking after the unheard influences of nonhuman life in shaping ideas/discourses about music and sound reorients our ears towards the centrality of multispecies relationships in shaping our acoustic environments.

In this dissertation, I trace the changes and continuities in the relationship between orchestras and their local communities through the lens of three organizations: the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO, founded 1916), Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO, founded 1895), and Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO, founded 1914). These ensembles possess rich histories and current agendas of community service, but they have rarely placed that past and present in dialogue. Through synthesizing materials from their archives, I argue that the lens of community brings the distinctiveness of an orchestra’s story into focus and that institutional storytelling which emphasizes historical community engagement can strengthen present-day community engagement.

In the opening chapter, I examine the motivations and impact of American performers, patrons, and advocates of European-derived classical music in rallying their cities around a symphony orchestra, tracing the concept of community through existing scholarly accounts of American orchestral history. Each of the following chapters covers a particular theme related to the community relationships of the BSO, CSO, and DSO, moving fluidly across the twentieth century. In Chapter Two, I show how the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s messaging, educational programs, and alternative concert formats in the 1920s and 1930s reflected an “Orchestra for All” ethos that intersected with local identity, alternately lifting up the community as deserving of art and disparaging many in the community for a lack of culture. Chapter Three steps outside the archives to center the history of Black and integrated orchestras in the U.S. in the context of community, with a focus on ensembles dedicated to European symphonic repertoire.

Chapters Four through Six deal with orchestras’ embrace of outreach to their local Black communities over the course of the twentieth century, particularly following the civil rights movement. In Chapter Four, I examine how the CSO and DSO incorporated this agenda into their institutional structure and how it was received by the community, revealing how orchestras tended to underestimate the severe damage done by previous exclusionary policies and rhetoric. In Chapter Five, I explore orchestra outreach initiatives involving the elevation of Black culture and artistry through special concerts (entangled with the legacy of orchestral “pops”) and symposia, as the CSO and DSO worked to find the balance of celebrating or marginalizing Black contributions to orchestral music and other local music traditions. In Chapter Six, I trace the BSO’s relationship with Black Baltimoreans across the entire twentieth century, modeling the sort of community-centric storytelling which I call on American orchestras to practice.

In Chapter Seven, I consider how orchestras tell their own stories (or local or national stories) at anniversary moments or, in rare cases, through the employment of archivists, highlighting the competing internal priorities for articulating an institutional narrative; and finally provide an overview of new developments and debates surrounding orchestra-community work in the twenty-first century. I present the intersection of history and community as a rich and promising area for orchestras to embrace as they seek to build trust and mutual respect with local residents and organizations.

I cast a new critical perspective on music theory’s pre-World War II avant-garde, revealing an integrated intellectual network spread across Russia, Central and Western Europe, North America, and Latin America. In the early twentieth century, I show, teleological music theories divergent from that of Arnold Schoenberg proliferated in experimental and atonal music, only to be suppressed in later reception, largely because of Schoenberg’s perceived continuity with music’s “Great German Tradition.” I recover these alternative music theories through a mixture of global historiography and archival research: In the US, Henry Cowell forged an international coalition with his theories of dissonant counterpoint and acoustics; in Paris as a Russian émigré, Ivan Wyschnegradsky developed alternative axioms for atonal music; and in Mexico, Carlos Chávez and Julián Carrillo negotiated discourses surrounding modernism and Indigeneity, both with each other, and in dialogue with the dissertation’s other protagonists. By taking a transnational approach, I destabilize conceptions of the pre-war avant-garde’s intellectual locus in the Second Viennese School—conceptions ascendant at least since Theodor Adorno’s mid-century writings—in favor of a rich and heterogenous global network.

This dissertation explores the role of mobility—of queens, performers, repertoires, and ideas—in shaping cultural life across early modern Europe. Focusing on seventeenth-century queens of Habsburg origin, whether residing within Habsburg domains or integrated into the French court, it argues that these women and their entourages were central agents of political expression and cultural production. Their movements activated networks of performance and diplomacy, where artistic practice functioned not only as entertainment but as a language of negotiation, allegiance, and identity. The concept of cultural baggage, which gives the dissertation its title, refers to the visible and invisible content carried by these figures: songs, gestures, musical forms, theatrical traditions, courtly protocols, and embodied habits. Rather than viewing culture as something rooted and stable, the project highlights circulation, translation, and adaptability as defining features of court life. Queens did not travel alone—they brought with them singers, comediantes, instrumentalists, and playwrights who reshaped local practices and contributed to new hybrid aesthetics at the courts they entered. The dissertation is organized in two interrelated parts. The first focuses on the royal bridal journey as a theatrical and political phenomenon. It interrogates how these transnational ceremonial itineraries—from Madrid to Vienna or Paris, and vice versa—functioned as extended spectacles of dynastic identity. Drawing on chronicles, letters, and visual records, the chapters examine how queens became protagonists of a mobile, ritualized performance across cities and borders. At the same time, they explore how the queens’ own presence and preferences shaped artistic programming, revealing moments of female agency within these meticulously scripted events. The royal journey emerges not merely as a diplomatic protocol, but as a trans-European stage for enacting political alliances and performing contested national identities. The second part shifts from movement to residence, following what happened once the journey ended and court life began. It traces how performers who traveled with queens—musicians, comediantes, ladies-in-waiting—settled and participated in the cultural life of Paris, Vienna, and Madrid. These figures not only adapted to their new settings but helped redefine them, particularly in France, where the continued presence of Spanish theater companies complicated local aesthetics and institutions. The performance of “Spanishness” became a recurring trope in court spectacle, at times stylized, at times challenged by the reality of Spanish performers onstage. These dynamics offer insight into how national identities were constructed, embodied, and contested through court entertainment. This study is based on archival research across Spain, France, Italy, and Austria, drawing on diplomatic correspondence, performance records, payment books, and private letters. While these documents rarely narrate the lives of women or performers directly, they offer glimpses—often fragmentary—into the systems of representation and exchange at work. The methodological challenge lies in reading these materials not only for what they record, but also for how they reflect power, omission, and perspective. Finally, this research foregrounds the feminist and historiographical stakes of re-centering queens and female spaces. It challenges narratives that marginalize women's courts and treats queens not as symbolic adjuncts but as cultural interlocutors. Their movements and preferences shaped repertoires, influenced ceremonial forms, and contributed to the political and aesthetic vocabularies of their time. By recovering their presence, the dissertation also recovers the labor of those who moved with them: performers, servants, chroniclers, and musicians—voices often faint in the archive, but fundamental to the spectacle of power.

This dissertation demonstrates how a wide variety of musical and sound-making practices contributed to political thought and revolutionary struggle in Chile in the years leading up to and during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970-73). Over the course of this period, Chile embarked on an innovative experiment in democratic socialism, and, in turn, Chilean musicians radically reimagined music and musical culture. Drawing on extensive archival research and original interviews, I uncover transnational networks of exchange that have not yet been recognized in previous historical accounts of the Popular Unity period. I show that by tracing these transnational musical networks, a more globalized history of the Popular Unity period emerges, one that views Chile not in isolation, but rather as deeply interconnected with many actors and interests.

First, I reveal efforts to democratize the performance culture of European classical music in Chile. I show how these efforts involved the signing of formal cultural exchange agreements between Chile, Cuba, and several Warsaw Pact countries, and thus the establishment of an East-South network for musical exchange. Drawing on the literary critic and theorist Ángel Rama’s notion of the Lettered City, I reveal how Chileans attempted to leverage European traditional musical repertoire and performance for power on the global stage. Next, I show how a regional, Latin American musical network between avant-garde composers and folk musicians coalesced around the ideology of Latin American revolutionary unity, as well as around solidarity with Allende’s Chile. To do so, I trace Chilean composers and musicians as they traveled beyond national borders to participate in the inaugural meetings of politically engaged, avant-garde music festivals held for the first time around Latin America. Furthermore, I reveal how the ideological underpinnings of this transnational network were strengthened and critiqued through the practice of musical commemoration. Lastly, I mobilize the theorist and activist Franz Fanon’s theory of revolutionary radio listening to show how everyday Chileans fabricated collectives and entered into a new form of political engagement through the use of sound, popular song, and radio in street protests and counterprotests. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that music and sound were sites of negotiation, where new social worlds were imagined. Furthermore, this dissertation proposes what call a “music history of possibilities,” an approach to musicology accounts not only for what occurred, but also for possible futures that have been arrested, unrealized, and lost.

In this dissertation, I read with open ears the witness testimonies of the seventeenth-century idolatry trials filed under the section "Visitas de Hechicerías e Idolatrías" at the Archive of the Archbishopric of Lima, attending to the vibrant traces murmuring between the lines, engaging in exercises of reconstruction that build sound from silence.

I offer the earliest reconstruction of a non-notated Quechua song, overviews of funerary sound practices, rethatching ceremonies, dancing rituals, sacred landscapes and ancestral journeys, as well as the first known historical documentation of the usage of whistling bottles.

I reflect on the impossibility of communicating vibrancy through the written word, on the foolery of trusting archival sources as pillars of truth, and on the fruits of engaging with the fiction of the native perspective—a naïve intention of understanding history outside of colonial agendas and systems of signification, embracing instead questions and worldviews I perceive as relevant in the long history of Andean ritual.

I construct historical narratives using a variety of vocabularies, materials, and approaches to the archive, seeking to challenge the seeming transparency and authority of archival constructs of truth and disciplinary objects of study. I mold clay to study history, circumventing the colonialist silence imposed by the symbolic systems of signification in which archival sources are inscribed. My listening rests on a site of impossibility, which I challenge by foolishly opening my ears to the ancestral voices that enlightened faculties of truth deem impossible and colonial powers sought to demonize and silence.

As a global artform, opera has always been on the move. Yet contemporary opera today has expanded our understanding of global flows in unprecedented ways. The COVID-19 pandemic serves as a powerful testament to how immobility can galvanize unexpected mobilities, as the creative innovations of 2020-2021 continue to generate seismic changes in our operatic ecology today. This unpredictable shift reveals a crucial insight about twenty-first century global flows: mobility is neither preordained nor stable but exists in dynamic tension with immobility, producing evolving and often unforeseen artistic possibilities. This dissertation examines the alternative mobilities shaping contemporary operatic sensibility. I investigate what it means for opera to be performed in a particular city, locale, or even cyberspace. Furthermore, in light of the pervasive racial reckoning unfolding in the performing arts, I interrogate how opera is moving beyond Western epistemes and what this shift signifies for the future of the art form.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, I analyze cross-cultural operas that illustrate how the pandemic and decolonial thought have ushered in a watershed moment for the genre. What we could call a hypermobility turn has emerged—operas predicated on breaking barriers and hierarchies, but far beyond more conventional strategies of unsettling, beyond swapping out musical or vocal styles, adapting contemporary news as plot material, foregrounding social issues, or choosing an unexpected performance venue. The change is more deep seated. Hypermobility, as I define it, resists the frameworks of conventional mobility studies by decentering geographical specificity. Rather than tracing movement from one fixed location to another, hypermobility captures the spontaneous diffusion of innovations in opera today, demanding new modes of engagement. Through transgressive movements, media, and mechanisms, contemporary opera opens up a spectrum of artistic and political possibilities.

Chapter 1 examines Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber, which exemplifies Sheng’s musico-diasporic aesthetic through its interweaving of Chinese music, poetry, and stylistic allusions to Béla Bartók, a synthesis that propelled its transnational success across the US, China, and Hong Kong. Chapter 2 focuses on The Industry’s Sweet Land, a site-specific, collaboratively produced opera staged at Los Angeles at the State Historic Park. I argue that the alternative site generates ephemeral and unexpected experiential orders emerging in the here-and-now, which forge a new political sensibility in opera. Chapter 3 analyzes Yuval Sharon’s Twilight: Gods, two site-specific reimaginations of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung staged in urban multi-storied garages in Detroit and Chicago. I argue that this production serves as a critical site for investigating how alternative stagings reveal underlying ideologies of canonic operas while raising complex questions about localization and reinterpretation. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on White Snake Projects’ The Pandemic Trilogy, a set of three live virtual operas produced during COVID-19. While proponents of cyber-stage view transmedia storytelling as a promising avenue of operatic engagement, I posit that the trilogy raised new questions about the challenges transmedia aesthetics have introduced into opera performance, asking us to put pressure on the idea that live virtual opera heralds a paradigm shift for the future of opera.