Portfolio of original musical compositions with written commentary

The nation, as a symbolic and bounded entity is maintained and reproduced as an expression of power. Music, as a medium of cultural power, is productive of sociality; the organisation (or disorganisation) of the sonic capable of producing (or resisting) the intangible bonds of collectivity. This study seeks to explore the power of music to symbolise, perform and potently communicate the imagined communion attributed to the experience of nation-ness. It asks specific questions about the practice of composition and its role in the construction and negotiation of national identity, furthermore, examining music's potential as a means of resistance. The nation, as a hegemonic construct, produces a system of organisation which reproduces the dominant frameworks of power and marks the symbolic boundaries of belonging. To critically examine the processes of meaning-making found in the cultural construction of the nation in music, composition is positioned as both the subject and principal methodology of the work. A symbiotic approach to practice and theory was taken in an attempt to develop an interrelated and intertextual study, constructing a multimodal practice of research which has wider implications in the production of knowledge and the mapping of meaning, providing a practical explication of these processes in action. The study considers the ways in which the individual is produced in creative imaginings of community, examining the practices involved in negotiating the multidimensional hierarchies of gendered, racialised, geographical framings of collectivity.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo