Community in the Academy

This thesis explores values, identities, and practices found within community organizations and academic institutions that are mediated and made manifest in old-time ensembles and their surrounding music communities. The multi-site study includes primary ethnography from the author’s six years of participation and musicianship in the old-time ensembles at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Florida State University, as well as the surrounding communities of Greensboro and Tallahassee. The complex workings of these ensembles are contrasted with more established and performance-based programs, both in community folk music settings and in traditional university music schools. These old-time ensembles catalyze issues of individual and group identity, institutionalism and administration, invented and historical tradition, and folk music practice.