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In Toronto and Montreal, Brazilian popular music performances constitute a context for intercultural encounter. Performances offer Brazilians the opportunity to present their culture of origin while emphasising their identification with it. The issue of representation is quite complex, however, due to the involvement of a majority of non-Brazilian musicians, audience members, artistic directors, producers, promoters, and journalists. This dissertation focuses on music reception and cultural representation and how these may influence each other after music has been decontextualised and recontextualised. I look closely at local non-Brazilian audiences possessing different degrees of familiarity with Brazilian music, and I demonstrate how cultural stereotypes influence their conceptions and expectations of Brazilian music, culture, and people. I argue that a desire for cultural difference and the exotic, encouraged by discourses of cultural diversity, influences the reception of performances. I suggest that, through the privileged gaze of non-Brazilian attendees, performances may be adjusted to correspond to audience fantasies of Brazil. Some non-Brazilians would like to become knowledgeable of, and even intimate with Brazilian culture, which would satisfy their desire to be cosmopolitan. However, pleasure frequently matters more to them than a nuanced understanding of Brazilian culture; this explains, I contend, why some Torontonians and Montrealers have become comfortable with essentialist and stereotypical representations. I examine how some non-Brazilian musicians, promoters, and band agents reinforce mythologies of Brazil to meet audience demands and sometimes to satisfy their own fantasies. I analyse the reproduction of similarly problematic discourses on Brazil in the presentations of Brazilian artists as both a form of autoexoticism and a particular type of tactical or strategic essentialism. Rather than to represent and understand Brazilian culture, I argue that, through local music performances, Brazilians and non-Brazilians in Toronto and Montreal interpret Brazilianness.
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In this thesis I argue that the relationship between the increasing ubiquity of digital audio technologies and the transformation of aesthetic hierarchies in electroacoustic and sound art traditions is not deterministic, but negotiated by producers and policy-makers in specific historical and cultural contexts. Interviews, observations, and historical data were gathered during sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Canadian city of Montreal between 2011 and 2012. Research was conducted and analysed in collaboration with a transnational group of researchers on a programme of comparative research that tracked global changes to music and musical practice associated with digital technologies. The introduction presents Montreal as a rich ecology in which to track struggles for aesthetic authority, detailing its history as a key site of electroacoustic and sound art production, and its local positioning as a politically strategic 'hub' for the Canadian culture industry. Core chapters examine the specific role of digital mediation in the negotiation of electroacoustic and sound art aesthetics from multiple interlocking perspectives: the recursive relationship between technological affordances and theories of mediation; the mobilisation of digital technologies in the delineation of cultural, professional and generational territories; the political contestation of digital literacies and pedagogies; the articulation of the digital's opposition with analogue in the construction of instruments and recording formats; and the effects of the digital on the dynamics of genre and genre hierarchies. The concluding chapter offers a critique of the notion that digital mediation has shifted the balance between the normative and the generative dimensions of genrefication in the scenes in question, and closes by suggesting how a better understanding of this shift at an empirical level can inform an ongoing rethinking of the interaction between technology and aesthetics among scholars, policy makers, and musicians.
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In this dissertation I explore how Indigenous methodologies that foreground cultural advocacy, revitalization, and education can be articulated using Indigenous language and cultural metaphor in research on North American Indian composers. Toward this end, I apply the Kanienkéha (Mohawk) concept of "non:wa" or "now" that also refers to three modes of perception--the now of the past, the present, and the future--toward understanding the intersection of innovation and tradition in classical Native music. This research joins the existing discourse that critiques binary oppositions separating Indigenous tradition (as past) and innovation (as present and future). Through interviews, fieldwork, and musical analysis, I illustrate Native values of interconnectedness, relationality, continuity, politics, and soundscapes in the processes of Native composition as well as the resultant works, I explore how these, in turn, may be understood through the application of Indigenous research techniques. In collaboration with a cohort of contemporary musicians, I look primarily at two Navajo composers--Raven Chacon and Juantio Becenti--and examine my own work as a composer, performer, and ethnomusicologist of Kanienkéha descent to explore the following questions: How can the topic of classical Native music best be served by using Indigenous methodologies in fieldwork, research, and representation and What is classical Native Music and is it different from other contemporary classical music styles? Drawing on the teachings of Indigenous dotahs (elders/teachers), the scholarship of ethnomusicologists, and examining oral and written tradition while using language and cosmology as cultural metaphors, I present a variety of possibilities for looking at Indigenous music through Indigenous eyes. Rather than offering a set of conclusions, I offer a set of tools for discussion and reflection: 1) how we might understand a definition of classical Native music; 2) how we are part