Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Institutionen för kulturvetenskaperhttps://hdl.handle.net/2077/195212024-03-28T09:14:10Z2024-03-28T09:14:10ZMänniskorna, musiken och de mekaniska instrumenten i Norge cirka 1480-1890Krouthén, Matshttps://hdl.handle.net/2077/795062024-01-30T21:11:55Z2024-01-30T00:00:00ZMänniskorna, musiken och de mekaniska instrumenten i Norge cirka 1480-1890
Krouthén, Mats
An international history of mechanical musical instruments is well documented from a
technological perspective (innovation, patents etc.), for instance musical clocks, barrel organs,
musical box and organettes. The purpose of this study is to elucidate the specific
region of Norway from a sociocultural narrative, by analyzing the emergence, distribution,
and reception of these instruments. The hitherto unexplored Norwegian milieu is compared
with the canonized European. The study is enabled by the rich sources of digitalized
newspapers, domestic literature as well as well-registered extant mechanical instruments in
museums. Four articles enlighten the mechanical instruments from various organological
perspectives by: 1) examining musical clocks through a sound study analysis, 2) recanonizing
the repertory in the Norwegian clocks, 3) analyzing changes of concepts, examining
the slow establishment of barrel organs, and 4) exploring idiomatic adjustments of arrangements
of disc music boxes and comparing them with the original score. The study
shows how mechanical instruments in Norway were established with a delay in time in
comparison to the international scene. Also, a distinctive hymnal repertory can be noted
in musical clocks. Later, the initial import of music boxes by non-music specialists shifted
during the 1800s to an effective distribution by direct import from the producers, retailers
in general or by the specialized music trade, when also the term «mechanical instruments»
was established. Central uses over the years include the imitation of nature (during the
Enlightenment period), to show good taste, to use as a tool of power for rationality (time
discipline) as well as stressing the magic perspective (look, no hands) and to give consolation.
They also played an important part in the emerging entertainment and consumer
market In the thesis I juxtapose technical and social perspectives on the music box discs &
cylinders as on the phonograph. This opens for a new understanding of the distribution of
tangible, portable, repeatable, and temporal musical objects, and in the long term, of the
process of mediatization and musicalization of society. Finally, a discussion on the Ogden
& Richards theory of symbol-thought-referent can serve as a tool for museum use in terminology
and taxonomy matters.
2024-01-30T00:00:00ZEtt tjejligt rum. Tidningen Starlet 1966-1996Öhman, Kristinahttps://hdl.handle.net/2077/760142023-10-16T20:00:25Z2023-10-16T00:00:00ZEtt tjejligt rum. Tidningen Starlet 1966-1996
Öhman, Kristina
This dissertation examines the Swedish girls’ magazine Starlet (1966–96), with the primary aim of exploring it as a girls’ product and experience and to understand what practices and spatial constructions are made visible in the magazine as well as in previous editors’ and readers’ recollections of it. The main research question is how bedroom culture appears in Starlet and what space is established in this magazine produced for, by, and with girls for 30 years. This is explored through multiple methods and materials, taking both the consumption and production aspects into consideration. The empirical material consists of 150 issues of Starlet from its entire era of publication, interviews with former editors and contributors to Starlet, and written recollections and reflections from previous readers of the magazine. The analytical entry points are three-folded: girl culture and girls’ culture, regarding products created for girls or by girls, respectively. The pursuit of happiness regards the labour the reader puts into the quest for a fulfilling life and what aspects of life are described as generating happiness. The combined consumption and production of the readers are central to the understanding of Starlet as a cultural product. Consumers were given space to participate and produce material for publication, and Starlet therefore spoke to girls while allowing readers to communicate with each other, making the magazine a social medium before the impact of the internet in the 1990s. Starlet became an extension of the girl's bedroom, with and in which readers could relax and have fun, but also ask for and offer support, ponder new topics and experiences, and share both joys and problems with each other. Through a narrative analysis of the material, this study argues that Starlet enables plenty of alternative readings of its content and offers its readers a plastic popular material. Starlet exemplifies the potential of popular media by providing creative and communicative material to use for an array of wants and needs, always with the reader’s individual and current happiness and desires in focus.
2023-10-16T00:00:00ZSpiritual transcendence and androgyny within Swedish and Finnish transnational SymbolismBruchmüller, Birtehttps://hdl.handle.net/2077/720332023-10-06T13:47:48Z2022-10-13T00:00:00ZSpiritual transcendence and androgyny within Swedish and Finnish transnational Symbolism
Bruchmüller, Birte
This Doctoral thesis is an examination of a group of Swedish and Finnish artists and their role as important and active participants in a transnational Symbolist movement. It deals with the depiction of the spiritually enhanced human body in the work of the Swedish artists Olof Sager-Nelson and Tyra Kleen, and the Finnish artists Magnus Enckell, Ellen Thesleff and Beda Stjernschantz, as one central topic within the European Symbolist art movement. During their different Parisian sojourns at the turn of the twentieth century, these artists came in contact with the Symbolist and occult Rose+Croix-order, its Salons de la
Rose+Croix and its transnational and androgynous art programme, which revolved around the exploration of the human being’s immateriality and spirituality. This study makes an investigation of the interrelations between the art by these five artists and, primarily, the Parisian Salons de la Rose+Croix, but also their interrelationship with other sources for a transnational Symbolist visual language.
Thematically structured into three analyses chapters on portraiture, classical Greco-Roman themes and scenes of interpersonal intimate encounters, this research considers how the total of the fifteen studied artworks can be understood not only thematically, but also theoretically, aesthetically, and stylistically as active contributions to the transnational Symbolist movement. It makes use of the theoretical frame of a horizontal European art history and conducts art historical hermeneutical analyses. The project examines how the selected artists positioned themselves towards the Symbolist conception of spiritual transcendence
as something exclusively male-defined, which both comprised the neo-platonic and theosophical notion of a powerful androgynous mental state of the male and an androgynous, i.e. feminised, ‘fashioning’ of the male human body. Particular focus is laid on the performance of gender and sexuality within the selected works, as well as on the role of transgressions
of gender binary norms.
Thereby, this project sheds light on a relatively unexplored and important Symbolist strand in contrast to the dominating art historical accounts of Swedish and Finnish National Romanticist art as the Swedish and Finnish variety of Symbolism, and generates also important knowledge on the role of Swedish and Finnish Symbolist art within the overall European art history.
2022-10-13T00:00:00ZInvoking the modal nymph: The emergence and dissemination of the concept of modality in Swedish folk musicHuebscher, Nettahttps://hdl.handle.net/2077/734652023-10-06T11:47:10Z2022-09-02T00:00:00ZInvoking the modal nymph: The emergence and dissemination of the concept of modality in Swedish folk music
Huebscher, Netta
Since the emergence of a concept of folk music, the study and practice of certain Western European musical traditions has been informed by notions of the music’s modality. Specifically, the idea that older or more indigenous layers of traditional repertoires manifest an underlying, pre-tonal structure of their own has been significant in scholarship, musical education, and performance. This study seeks to shed light on this idea through the particular case of the conceptualisation of modality in relation to Swedish folk music. It asks what music-theoretical ideas on modality have risen through various scholarly and editorial endeavours, how these ideas have emerged, and in what shape they have been further disseminated in contemporary research and education. It addresses these questions by tracing the history of the modal discourse about Swedish folk music at two of its main stages: its inception and formation throughout the 19th century, and the establishment of a consensus around it from the late 1970s onwards. Through close readings of a wide selection of sources, the study offers an analysis of the ensuing concept of modality from a critical, historically informed, music-theoretical perspective. Looking at modality as an open concept, it proposes that the concept of modality that has been attributed to Swedish folk music concurs with a specific type of romanticist, neo-modal construction, in which scale-degree theory gives rise to dichotomous, evolutionist and organological definitions of mode as a marker of “musical otherness”. The study further explores the emergent aspect of this construction, as well as its projective and regulative force on the analysis and assessment of traditional repertoires.
2022-09-02T00:00:00Z