Musical Visuality: Embodying Meter and Overcoming Noise in the Marching Arts.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation takes the marching arts as a venue for answering what it means for music to be visual. The marching arts are a category of fine arts-adjacent, movement-based youth activities that include marching band, drum corps, color guard, winter guard, and indoor percussion. North American marching arts ensembles program musically and choreographically challenging competitive performances in yearly cycles determined by time of year (e.g., fall, winter, summer) and governing circuit type (e.g., WGI, DCI, DCA). I leverage my dual habitation as a marching arts alumni and scholar to critically examine musicalized joint movement at the nexus of possibility, promise, and persistence that only the marching arts inhabit. In this dissertation, I show that the marching arts lexicon developed in the past ten years not only illuminates joint action in ensemble performance, but also offers a theory of musicality as visuality.In 2020, the Winter Guard International (WGI) general effect adjudication guidelines introduced the concept of "musical visuality." In moments of musical visuality, adjudicators assess the efficacy of performance when the design depends predominantly on visual elements, where music is only a background element or when silence is the designer's tool of choice. Foregrounding musical visuality disentangles visual and musical contributions to a group's design and performance, and the unlinking of compositional elements previously understood as isomorphic problematizes existing frameworks for assessing formal and semantic audiovisual congruence (Iwamiya 2013). Musical visuality may be deconstructed through the lens of embodiment and joint gesture. Music can be understood through its visuality.Musical Visuality contributes to a growing body of theoretical work on embodied meter by thinking through musicalized visual elements as a means for ensemble coordination and audience engagement. Marching arts performers receive extensive training centered around consistently replicating streamlined, intersubjective entrainment. Rehearsals and pedagogical approaches geared toward pulse maintenance uniquely affect performers' sensitivity to the triangulation of listening, hearing, and attention. Performers are trained to toggle between strategies for pulse maintenance (e.g., watching the conductor, watching battery performers' feet, listening for nearby vocalizations of the pulse, and relying on an established embodied meter at the 8-measure phrase level) using different bodily articulators (feet and hands). In the marching arts, embodied meter creates a framework for managing time. Drawing on theories of musical embodiment (Cox 2016, Simpson-Litke 2021, Hudson 2022), joint action (Matthews et al. 2018, Noble 2018), and choreographic musicality (Leaman 2022), I examine how visual design contributes a unique element that is not available in sound in the marching arts. Beyond the football field, this project provides new insights concerning the nature of joint musical and visual action.