Toward a Postmodern Avant-Garde: Labour, Virtuosity, and Aesthetics in an American New Music Ensemble

This dissertation examines the aesthetic beliefs and labour practices of the American new music ensemble eighth blackbird (lower-case intentional). Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with the ensemble for the past six years, I show how the ensemble responds to specific cultural pressures endemic to the classical music scene, its new music vanguard, and to the contemporary United States. eighth blackbird, I argue, has created an ensemble identity and performance style designed to satisfy numerous audience positions, from experts well-versed in the intricacies of musical techniques to lay-persons unacquainted with the values and practices of new or classical music. This attempt to satisfy such a range of perspectives has lead to an oscillation between modernist values traditionally associated with art music culture and postmodern values typically found within more profit-driven musical practices. Modernism—partially defined here as a belief in a linear and stable history, structural listening, musical virtuosity, and restrained performer movement—is foundational to eighth blackbird’s work. At the same time, ensemble members embrace postmodern values including a celebratory mix of musical styles, attempts to provide accessible concerts, and an adoption of post-Fordist branding wherein personality and the display of labour figures as part of a marketing strategy. By examining the specific rationalizations of and objections to eighth blackbird’s practices, I theorize the existence of a “postmodern avant-garde,” a subculture of musicians and arts workers who attempt to remake avant-garde music into a more accessible and profitable enterprise

Sound Scenes: Performativity, Politics, and Capital in New Music Ensembles

This thesis examines classical music as a cultural practice and centers on my ethnographies of three musical ensembles in the United States: Alarm Will Sound, eighth blackbird, and Yarn/Wire. Each group is a non-profit performing arts organization formed by conservatory-trained members and each performs and promotes new classical music, or new music as it is commonly called. I draw also on my own experience performing and interacting in new music communities. From these mixed domains, I demonstrate new music ensembles as dynamic and complex entities in which individuals negotiate between the elitist conventions of classical music and populist ideals. In particular, I argue that aesthetic differences correspond to political struggles for recognition. Groups perform musical works in certain styles that reflect their respective aesthetics. With such activities, new music ensembles endeavor to make a name for themselves and gain prominence in new music culture. They thus embody a struggle for prestige. The mechanism for these pursuits entails a circulation of symbolic capital and its conversion into real capital. I frame the activities of the three ensembles within an established history of practice and examine the documented tensions between classical composers and commercial musics, and between internal struggles of modernist and postmodern composers and performers. Finally, I problematize evolutionary concepts of modern and postmodern by portraying the older groups, Alarm Will Sound and eighth blackbird as postmodern, and the younger group, Yarn/Wire, as comparatively modernist

Cannabis use is associated with potentially heritable widespread changes in autism candidate gene DLGAP2 DNA methylation in sperm

Parental cannabis use has been associated with adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in offspring, but how such phenotypes are transmitted is largely unknown. Using reduced representation bisulphite sequencing (RRBS), we recently demonstrated that cannabis use is associated with widespread DNA methylation changes in human and rat sperm. Discs-Large Associated Protein 2 (DLGAP2), involved in synapse organization, neuronal signaling, and strongly implicated in autism, exhibited significant hypomethylation (p < 0.05) at 17 CpG sites in human sperm. We successfully validated the differential methylation present in DLGAP2 for nine CpG sites located in intron seven (p < 0.05) using quantitative bisulphite pyrosequencing. Intron 7 DNA methylation and DLGAP2 expression in human conceptal brain tissue were inversely correlated (p < 0.01). Adult male rats exposed to delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) showed differential DNA methylation at Dlgap2 in sperm (p < 0.03), as did the nucleus accumbens of rats whose fathers were exposed to THC prior to conception (p < 0.05). Altogether, these results warrant further investigation into the effects of preconception cannabis use in males and the potential effects on subsequent generations