Abstract: This dissertation chronicles the cultural, musical and performative fronts during two centuries of struggle and negotiation between Mapuche and Chilean societies. The perspective is mainly ethnomusicological, including two years of fieldwork in the Araucanía region, concerning new genres of Mapuche fusion music such as rock and hip-hop. This writing demonstrates how Mapuche expressions and representations accrued various forms of value during Chile's modernization—including colonization, nation building, the emergence of modern social movements, and the implementation of neoliberal policies—and how artists contend with and subvert those values today.
The opening chapters are historical. Following the invasion of Araucanía in the 1880s, Mapuche political activism eventually gained traction by carefully managing a relationship with the Chilean political establishment, while also cultivating a unique approach to political processes that incorporated preexisting rituals. Concurrently, the Mapuche transitioned from adversaries to objects of study, while concepts such as folklore took root in Chilean society. As popular culture took note of Mapuche sounds and symbols toward the mid-twentieth century, non-Mapuche artists and activists codified their progressive ideologies through their embrace of indigeneity, exemplified in art music, and most famously, nueva canción.
Based directly on fieldwork, the second half of the thesis discusses how Mapuche cultural continuity has involved both the recovery of traditions and the incorporation of non-traditional elements. I describe the conversion of a mingako ritual into a festival of music and poetry in the Mapuche comunidad of Saltapura. This transfer from agriculture to expressive culture demonstrates the diminishing value of Mapuche lands, parallel with the increasing value of their expressions, under neoliberal multiculturalism. Meanwhile, Mapuche heavy metal and hip-hop groups such as Pewmayén and Weichafe Newen build their music around ancestral principles of sound, ritual and language, raising the question as to whether Mapuche musical elements thus become ingredients of popular music, or whether popular music becomes Mapuche for incorporating these elements. Through detailed discussions of this music and its broader contexts, this dissertation issues a critique of the culture concept underpinning neoliberal multiculturalism, inherited from the investigations of the Mapuche during the early republican period.

Abstract: Program Notes: Intricate Machines was composed for the 2016 Saarbrücken Somermusik festival in Germany. The festival theme was “travel to foreign lands” and this piece, in some sense, represents a larger journey from the chaos of the outside world into a more peaceful sphere of inner reflection. Each of the five movements is connected together and played without pause. Beginning with dense and rhythmic outbursts, the first movement (“Heavy-Metal Viola”) imagines a musical offspring of Bartok and Metallica somehow fused together by string quartet. The second movement (“Bump in the Night”) focuses on juxtaposition: a lone, delicate, solo violin hums quietly, only to face jarring interruptions from the ensemble underneath. Ending with an introspective chorale, the second movement gives way to movement three (“Churning Gears”) in which fast and repetitive ostinatos create a dense interlocking musical machine. The fourth movement (“Constellations”) begins with an eruption of heavy, sustaining, chords that are played freely, out of time. These vibrating orbs of sound gradually recede into distant and ethereal harmonics. Suggesting a celestial atmosphere, the solo cello gently sings a muted melody, leaving us in a place of transformation relative to the earlier movements. Movement five, a playful folk-dance, completes the total journey as an overt contrast to the tense opening movements. Amidst its quirky and bizarre groove, elements of rock, funk, folk-fiddling, and pedal-tone drone music, are assimilated into what composer Steven Mackey describes as “a vernacular music from a culture that doesn’t really exist”—or as I phrase it here, a “Martian Jukebox Hoe-down.”