Research statement

I am finishing my dissertation soon and am applying for full-time academic jobs. Here’s my research statement. Also see my teaching statement.

I have three main areas of research interest: the teaching and learning of rhythm and groove; the challenges of hip-hop pedagogy; and expanding the teaching of harmony to include groove-based musics, particularly the blues. I address each of these areas in turn.

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Toni Blackman on the wisdom of the cypher

Toni Blackman is one of the three hip-hop educators I’m studying for my dissertation. She teaches freestyle rap as a way to build authentic confidence, and she gave a talk and a workshop on the subject at Ableton’s 2018 Loop Summit.

Toni Blackman at Ableton Loop 2018

Ableton recently posted the video of Toni’s talk. She concludes it with a freestyle, as she does all of her talks. This is the level of authentic confidence that I aspire to.

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Toni Blackman’s hip-hop meditation

Toni Blackman‘s hip-hop education practice resembles music therapy as much as it does traditional music teaching, so it makes perfect sense that she would release a hip-hop meditation album. I did a remix of my favorite parts for my dissertation mixtape:

Toni argues that freestyling builds authentic confidence that comes from the soul, and that it you access to vulnerability and creativity. I’m not a rapper, but I’ve played enough jazz and other improvised music to know what she’s talking about. Improvisation might be the most valuable personal and professional skill that I possess. Continue reading

Teaching whiteness in music class

Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem.

Further update: the online alt-right has some feelings about this post.

Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer, 2009, p. 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music teaches the competencies of European-descended classical music: performing acoustic instruments in ensembles, reading notation, and following a conductor. Youth culture, meanwhile, values recorded music descending from the vernacular traditions of the African diaspora, substantially produced using computers. Hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States (Nielsen, 2018), and by some measures, in the world (Hooton, 2015). Yet it is vanishingly unusual for hip-hop to be addressed in an American music classroom. Even when educators want to do so, they rarely have the necessary experience or knowledge. Meanwhile, musicians with a hip-hop background find their skills and knowledge to be of little value to institutional gatekeepers. Kendrick Lamar is a good enough musician to merit a Pulitzer Prize, but he would not be accepted into most undergraduate music education programs (Kruse, 2018).

Biz

Why is it so important that music education embrace hip-hop when students are already immersed in it outside of school? There are three main reasons. First, if music educators wish to foster students’ own musical creativity, then students must be free to create in the styles that are meaningful to them. Second, while many young people enjoy listening to hip-hop, few know how to produce it. Third, and most important, music is a site where social and political values are contested, symbolically or directly. The Eurocentrism of school music sends a clear message about whose cultural expression we value. While the white mainstream loves hip-hop, America showers the people who created it with contempt (Perry, 2004, p. 27), and sometimes violence. By affording Afrodiasporic musics the respect they deserve, we will teach students to similarly value the creators of those musics.  Continue reading

Gender in science

Final paper in History of Science and Technology with Myles Jackson – see also the presentation version

When we ask what the field of gender studies has contributed to understanding the relationship between science and society, we must separate two classes of feminist critique: discussions of equity, and discussions of content. The equity critique is straightforward: women are underrepresented in the sciences, in terms of employment and academic admissions, public recognition, and prestige. The remedies are equally straightforward, at least in theory: enforce anti-discrimination rules, actively recruit female candidates, and work to create more equitable workplace and school environments. The execution of these remedies is challenging, but there is little controversy about whether or not we should pursue them.

How It Works

If we examine gender theorists’ critiques of the content of science, the issues become more complex and contentious. Such content critiques include: what if science is excluding not just women, but femininity? Beyond the harm to women who wish to be scientists, does this exclusion also harm science itself? Why should gender bear on the gathering of objective facts about nature? If we argue that science is socially constructed, do we then have to let go of the idea that there can be any truly objective facts? If there are objective facts independent of the observer’s social context, is there a value to a ”feminist science” that is distinct from just doing better science?  Continue reading

Duke Ellington, Percy Grainger, and the status of jazz in the music academy

On October 25, 1932, Percy Grainger invited Duke Ellington and his orchestra to perform “Creole Love Call” as part of a music lecture at New York University. It was the first time any university had invited a jazz musician to perform in an academic context. I will argue that the meeting of Grainger and Ellington is a prism refracting the broader story of the music academy’s slow and reluctant embrace of jazz. This story is, in turn, a cultural reflection of the broader African-American freedom struggle.

Percy Grainger and Duke Ellington, 1935

Ellington has come to embody the cultural prestige now enjoyed by jazz. He appears on Washington DC’s state quarter, and his statue stands at the northeast corner of Central Park in New York City. In 1932, however, Ellington was known to official music culture only as the leader of a popular dance band and the writer of a few catchy tunes. Although he was already a celebrity, few white people outside of jazz fandom considered Ellington to be a serious artist. That year, he received his first favorable review from a classical critic, followed by endorsements from Percy Grainger and a few other figures from the music establishment. This praise was unusual at the time. Most cultural authorities of the era held jazz in low regard, assigning the same value that hip-hop holds in academic circles today: undeniably popular, vibrant perhaps, but deficient in musical quality, and even, according to some critics, a threat to the nation’s morals.

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Ngoma aesthetics after apartheid

Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels

Louise Meintjes (2017) Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics After Apartheid. Durham: Duke University Press.

Brian Larkin (2008) Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Dust of the Zulu

The image of Zulu men dancing, singing and drumming carries heavy symbolic weight. For black South Africans and white outsiders alike, this image represents “real” African culture, evoking a glorious warrior culture. Cultural brokers (entrepreneurs, musicians, and politicians) “wager on the warrior” (Meintjes 2017, 241) to evoke this romantic past. However, colonizers have appropriated this same image to justify the dehumanization and exploitation of African bodies for labor. Ngoma dancers themselves use the “long past” to relieve the painful burden of the immediate past, and to reach for an “undetermined future” (255), in the face of the risk of playing into colonizers’ fetishistic stereotypes. This risk is magnified when ngoma moves onto the world stage, losing its context.

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Aurality

Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels

Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier (2014) Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press.

Aurality

The nineteenth-century Colombian writing discussed by Ochoa Gautier, like Western convention generally, opposes “art” and “folk” musics. “Art” music is comprised of works created by named authors, transmitted visually via scores, and speaking to transcendent experience beyond mundane reality. The work is an autonomous object that can be considered free of context. “Folk” music is a mass of common property, transmitted orally/aurally, and is of a part with daily life. Indeed, the folk object only makes sense in its social and cultural context. The folkloric voice is authorless, and therefore lacks authority. While the aesthesis of folklore may represent an ideal of “heightened sensorial perception and emotional expressivity” (172), its anonymity and adherence to tradition limits its potential for creativity.

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Theorizing sound writing

Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels

Theorizing Sound Writing

Deborah Kapchan, editor (2017) Theorizing Sound Writing. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

My doctoral advisor Alex Ruthmann, when evaluating some piece of technology used for music education or creation, asks: what does the technology conceal or reveal? Writing is what Foucault called a “technology of the self,” and as such, conceals and reveals as well. Sound writing is a way to transduce the ephemeral bodily experience of listening to the timelessness of the page. What does this transduction conceal? What does it reveal?

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White nationalist music in Sweden

Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels

Benjamin Teitelbaum’s study of Nordic nationalist music could not be any more timely.

Lions of the North

Gramsci diverged from classic Marxism when he argued that shifts in the cultural sphere create the conditions for political or economic change, rather than the other way around. Since Swedish nationalists do not have enough majority appeal for electoral politics, they see better prospects in the social diffusion of ideas and cultural values, i.e. “metapolitics.”

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