This dissertation develops a framework to approach musical hybridity by considering style and genre interactions as an analytical layer of combinations of identities. It engages with the structural, contextual, and perceptual aspects of music by mixing perspectives from music studies with postcolonial studies, situated cognition, and genre studies. Hybridity is treated as a common communication tool and, as such, goes beyond the expected repertories of polystylism and musical collage from the 1960s and 1970s. In this way, this study approaches diverse works ranging from seventeenth- to twenty-first-century Western music, embracing concert and popular traditions within the same framework. In this dissertation, I engage first with perspectives on hybridity from the field of postcolonial studies, and trace a brief summary of their different general stances before moving to iterations of hybridity in a wide musical repertory. Next, I investigate the literature on the notions of style and genre, and define them as the main articulations of musical hybridity, mediating between individual, textual, and contextual perspectives in a dynamic and fluid way. The proposed analytical framework treats moments of hybridity in music—chimeric environments—as formed by four distinct mixture strategies: clash, coexistence, distortion, and trajectory. These mixture strategies are perceptible processes, given the familiarity with a shared knowledge within a musical community; they can be interpreted—even if with different characteristics, purposes, and realizations—in J. S. Bach, Alfred Schnittke, Thomas Adès, David Bowie, and Daft Punk, for instance. Mixture strategies are, then, lenses for interpretation of hybridity in music, which I discuss in detail, with definition and exemplification of their characteristics, changing values, and reception, affording comparisons between different ways of combining musical identities in pluralist music.

Last modified

• 01/25/2019

Creator

• Bruno Moschini Alcalde

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2RN0W

Subject

• Music

Keyword

• Hybridity
• Analysis
• Style and Genre
• Music Theory
• Mixture

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright