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]

Documentary about concert spirituals categorized by song theme, from sorrow songs to songs of transcendence. Each category is followed by a recording: –
“I Cannot Stay Here by Myself” (Hall Johnson, composer; A. Grace Lee Mims, soprano)
– “Who’ll Be a Witness for My Lord” (John Rosamond Johnson, composer; Kenneth Spencer, baritone)
– “Steal…[Read more]

This is the 2020 update of a comprehensive open-access annotated bibliography listing carillon scores by African American composers and/or based on African American music. While most of the items are published, a few are unpublished but in informal circulation, or are pending publication. Carillonists are invited to use this resource to identify…[Read more]

This open-access international bibliography lists published and unpublished original carillon works by over a hundred women, transgender, and nonbinary composers. The composers’ birth years range from 1858 to the twenty-first century, the musical styles range from lyrical to avant-garde, and the formats range from solo to ensemble to e…[Read more]

This article strives to examine the historical narrative of music recording in its acoustic era (from 1877 to the late 1920s), at a time when competing technologies for capturing and registering sound and music were being incorporated into everyday life. Moreover, it examines the overlap of continuous and discontinuous media and processes of…[Read more]

The period following the end of Getúlio Vargas’s second government (1951-1954) saw a massive expansion of the media industries with popular music in particular becoming an important cultural touchstone. Some salient trends in the post-War period include the politicization of music and other media (radio, television, social media), the in…[Read more]

A book project with the goal of documenting commercially produced recordings of Negro spirituals composed for solo concert vocalists. Portions of this information is currently available on the online site, The Spirituals Database (http://spirituals-database.com).

Over 5,600 entries cover more than a century of recordings on compact discs,…[Read more]

This co-authored piece introduces our co-edited volume ‘Dreams of Germany’. It explores how, where and by whom notions of ‘musical Germanness’ have been constituted in the modern era, and to what effect. Picking up on ideas first explored systematically by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter in their 2002 collection ‘Music and German National…[Read more]