This chapter examines the revolutin in media within music based on Friedrich Kittler’s work. It highlights Kittler’s musical preferences, from Richard Wagner to Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. For Kittler this music exemplified an “other music” that was based on a cutout from the totality of “worldwide noise” as it was theorized after Arthur Schopen…[Read more]

The age-old search for an understanding of “consonance” has been hobbled from the beginning by the expectation that a silver bullet can be found. In this section from a book-in-progress, the historical searches are analyzed for their failings and a new approach is suggested based on observing the effects of tonal sounds within the context of…[Read more]

In this paper, presented at the 2022 H-Net Teaching Conference, I describe how I teach undergraduate students about disability in music through what I call disclosure-oriented pedagogy. This practice involves demonstrating cross-historical comparisons between my lived experiences of disability and the representations of disability in 19th-century…[Read more]

This document is a companion document to the paper with similar title, located online at
Humanities Commons: https://doi.org/10.17613/xhqa-dk29. This companion document is comprised primarily of illustrative graphics and is an outgrowth of presentation materials gathered with the parent document as topic.

In Mumbai the sonic dimensions of place‐making and religious life are deeply connected to the right to the city. For Twelver Shi‘i Muslims, who are marginal to both the city and the nation, public religious rituals and processions have long played very important roles in staging claims to the city. Investigating the sonic aspects of urban pla…[Read more]

Pirate radio still flourishes in dense, multiethnic cities such as Brooklyn, New York, despite the rise of Web radio. For immigrants in particular, radio sounds mark identity and community and (re)claim social spaces of work, commutes, and the home. It is not only lack of access to digital technologies or broadband that shapes radio’s relevance, b…[Read more]

This study explores Jamaican popular music’s changing engagement with globally networked media technologies. It combines ethnographic analysis of the street dance as a site of urban poor and Black resistance to colonial institutions with an analysis of song lyrics about video cameras at street dances. Newly networked technologies for circulating…[Read more]

Dance music is a medium and social practice that has in some cases functioned as a site of refuge for people and communities whom mainstream society marks “deviant” or “uncivilized. Foundational movements in dance music emerge from particular spaces and times where communities are able to center bodies and practices that subvert or contradict…[Read more]

(First paragraph): “Any DJ could tell you that you don’t know what music really means until you see it in people’s bodies. A DJ establishes a relationship between audio recordings and the crowd, responding to the speed and intensity of their movements, the symbolism of physical attitudes and gestures, their vocalizations, and the simple pre…[Read more]

This research investigates the practice of resounding the archival material of voice, when translating the sound object from analogue to digital. The author is focussing on the voice as spoken word, when the archival voice has been temporarily overlooked but preserved. Since technological progress allowed us to record, we have been accumulating…[Read more]

In this chapter, I make two interconnected observations. I first consider how musicals inhabit and promote a ‘post-truth’ worldview similar to those reflected in current populist resurgences throughout the West. I argue that it is musical theater’s penchant for the unreal that in recent decades has given it traction within both secular,…[Read more]

The project ‘The Sculptor Speaks’ takes its source from a 1961 tape by British sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Unearthed at the British Library, the tape’s initial purpose was for a pre-recorded talk with slides for the British Council. Every recording is a priori an archival object, which can potentially resound anew through a contemporary carrier, p…[Read more]

In this talk, presented at the Plenary Session of the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, I examine the relationship between time, embodiment, and affectivity in music. I argue that music is temporal not because it unfolds in time, or because it takes time as its vector, or even because it has the capacity to alter our sense of…[Read more]

A historical overview of college football’s participants exemplifies the diversification of mainstream American culture from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first. The same cannot be said for the sport’s audience, which remains largely white American. Gerald Gems maintains that football culture reinforces the construction of American…[Read more]

An introduction to music appreciation and history that emphasizes the political, cultural, and social influences on music from antiquity to the 20th century. Contents include sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental, and folk and art music from across the Western world, including modern popular song. No previous musical experience necessary. All…[Read more]

Continuation of documentary about concert spirituals categorized by song theme, from sorrow songs to songs of transcendence. Each category is followed by a recording:
– “Oh, Didn’t It Rain” (Ruby Elzy, soprano)
– “Every Time I Feel de Spirit” (Lawrence Brown, composer; Evelyn Dove, soprano)
– “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” (Florence…[Read more]