Abstract: Musical meter is often described as an objective grid-like system of time-points that is created by musical sounds. I define meter instead as any pattern of felt beats an individual listener chooses to hear, a physical and cognitive interpretation of the music that is (re-) created in the moment of listening. We construe meter through embodied metering practices: dance gestures, patterns of counting, or epistemologies of rhythmic motion. Many metering practices have conventional metering constructions, specific associations between sounding features, patterns of felt beats, and paths of motion through these beats. Drawing on concepts from cognitive science and performance studies, I explore how this embodied knowledge is constituted and applied in both planning of musical phrases by a performer, and in-time perception and cognition of musical rhythms by any listener or participant.
Metering constructions and practices are often performed by and associated with certain communities and identities. I take a culturally-situated approach to meter and felt motion, studying traditions of embodied movement and bodily discipline including headbanging in heavy metal (Chapter 1), characteristic dance rhythm topics in non-dance concert music of the eighteenth century (Chapter 2), motivic manipulation and developing variation in late Romantic chamber music (Chapters 3 and 4), and prosody and speech gestures in operatic recitative (Chapter 5). Contrary to many existing theories of meter, I argue that our feelings of beat are not necessarily organized in cyclical grids, but are improvised on the spot by stitching together familiar motions. I also explore how movements often embody and perform aesthetic ideologies and cultural meanings, with these hermeneutic frameworks often shaping listeners’ choice of movements, their proprioception of their own movements, and their perception of the qualities of rhythm and motion in the music they are listening to.

Abstract: Heavy Metal in El Salvador has been a driving force of the underground culture since the Civil War in the 1980s. Over time, it has grown into a large movement that encompasses musicians, producers, promoters, media outlets and the international exchange of music, ideas and live shows. As a music based around discontent with society at large, Heavy Metal attempts to question the status quo through an intellectual exploration of taboo subjects and the presentation of controversial live shows. As an international discourse, Heavy Metal speaks to ideas of both socio-political and individual power based around a Philosophy of Life that exalts personal freedoms and personal responsibility to oneself and their society. As a community, it represents a ‘rage’ group, as defined by Peter Sloterdijk, that questions Western epistemologies and the doctrines of Christian Philosophy. This is done in different ways, by different genres, but at the heart is the changing of macro- (international) discourses into micro- (local) discourses that focus on those issues important to the geographic specificity of the region.
In the case of Black Metal, born in Norway, it is interpreted in El Salvador through the similarities between the doctrines of Hitler and those of the most famous dictator in the country’s history – General Maximiliano Hernandez – and then applied, ironically, to the local phenomena of the Salvadoran Street Gangs (MS-13 and 18s) and their desired extermination. It is also done through the re-interpreting of folk metal in the local phenomenon of tribal metal that reinterprets the indigenous through the lens of modern society and heavy metal’s ideas of power. Finally, the Salvadoran metalhead adapts the genre’s vulgarity and dark humor to fuel their own systems of dealing with harsh repression and existing within a society that seems to have no place for them. At the bottom though, much more than a community, Heavy Metal in El Salvador is a source of fraternalismo that utilizes the Philosophy of Life to bind its members together and to provide them a means by which to express their personal freedoms within a society that would happily see them limited.

Abstract: Historians have long overlooked and misunderstood the Parents Music Resource Center, an activist group formed in 1985 to correct perceived excesses in heavy metal music. Scholars have focused their analyses almost exclusively on the First Amendment implications of the group’s actions, largely dismissing the PMRC in the process. This thesis argues that by expanding the historical analysis of the group to include the social and political climate of previous generations and of the 1980s, the self-stated goals of the PMRC, and a musicological discussion of heavy metal and why the group specifically targeted this genre, we can see that the PMRC was in fact an incredibly influential sociopolitical activist group that is representative of the political shift in the United States in the 1980s.

Abstract: Rock and roll music was a national youth obsession for more than ten years before the first rock critics began writing seriously about the form. Rock was dismissed by adult cultural authorities as empty, degraded, and even dangerous. However, to its fans, rock was an important form of personal expression, a source of group identity, and a mode of political discourse. Rock critics understood its cultural and political power. In their work, they explained its importance to the American public.
In 1966, the first rock critic, Richard Goldstein, began writing about rock and roll in a weekly column in the Village Voice called “Pop Eye.” In it, he asserted that rock and roll was an art that deserved the same recognition and protections afforded to other art forms. By 1967, The New Yorker hired Ellen Willis to write about rock in a regular column called “Rock, Etc.” She brought an intellectual sophistication to the genre that would resound long after her career as a rock critic ended. Later in 1967, Rolling Stone debuted; it would become the most visible and influential source of rock criticism for the next fifty years. Editor Jann Wenner’s tastes and approach would affect the way rock was perceived in his own time and for decades after. Finally, in 1968, Lester Bangs debuted onto the scene, writing artful reviews for publications like Creem and Rolling Stone, explaining the changes that were taking place as rock music splintered into subgenres like punk and heavy metal.
The quality of these rock critics’ thought and the influence of their writing makes rock criticism an important and under-studied branch of Sixties literature. Each of the rock critics addressed in this dissertation explained to the public what rock music meant and why it mattered. By placing rock in its social, political, and cultural context, they demonstrated that it was far from the empty form cultural authorities thought it was. Their work permanently changed perceptions of popular music, proving that it was substantial enough to stand up to the same kind of critical treatment as other art forms.

Abstract: What kind of rock culture would grow out of an exam-oriented educational system? In the western rock world, self-learning has been characterized as most popular musicians’ principal learning pattern, closely intertwined with the “DIY” ethos and the counter school culture. This research aims to present a different case, that of the “schooled” rock music in Taiwan. Over the last three decades, rock music in Taiwan has grown in popularity, while Taipei has gradually earned the reputation of being the “Mandarin pop/indie capital.” In its developmental process, a few characteristics are worthy of the attention of both the Sociology of Education and youth cultural studies.
Firstly, learning rock instruments in regular high school is the main route for teenagers to gain access to rock culture. Secondly, where elite students tend to devote more time to rock music activities than other students, their musical repertoire is characterized by producing covers of heavy metal tunes instead of song-writing. This thesis will probe the rationale behind this phenomenon by answering the following questions: What can best explain the appeal of heavy rock to Taiwanese elite high school students? Why do they not write their own songs?
Drawing upon data collected through a school ethnography, it is revealed that the ways Taiwanese elite high school students participate in musical activities can be best understood to be part of a subcultural milieu marked by the collective pursuit of “dual excellence in both study and play”. In this symbolic space, the demanding technical requirements for acquiring several playing techniques allow rock to become a rankable sphere of activity in which elite students struggle for subcultural superiority according to measurable musical standards. The emphasis on instrumental virtuosity conforms to students’ competitive disposition manufactured through academic exams. With these features, rock music becomes a particular form of subcultural activity which allows elite students to not only resist educational control, but also exert symbolic violence over peers of lower-ranked high schools by showing technical superiority.
This thesis extends the CCCS’s subcultural solution to the analysis of “subcultural distinction”. In distinction to the “internal perspective” of Sarah Thornton’s conception of subcultural capital (1995), a more holistic framework is developed to explore the relationship between the wider patterns of social division, young people’s subcultural participation, and the shaping of the value hierarchy both within and outside the subcultural sphere. Further, the thesis explores the educational system’s active role in shaping youth subcultures. I demonstrate how education in Taiwan is institutionally mediated by the exam regime to be a powerful logic of social differentiation, and the ways young people’s subcultural choices are constrained by their educational career advance from high school to university. The study also has important implications for the educational policy making in Taiwan. By looking at how students “play,” I propose a new exploratory route to illuminate the widespread impact of the exam-oriented educational system on students’ creativity and identity formation.