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 …
Category Archives: Sociology
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: …
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 …
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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. The image of Zulu men dancing, singing and drumming carries heavy symbolic weight. …
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. 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 …
What is culture?
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels All of my social science professors have asked the class to define “culture” and no one is ever able to give a concise or satisfying answer. If a culture is discretely bounded and object-like, how do we understand the culture of people in borderlands, or migrants, …
Ethnomusicology and the voice
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels Kane (2014) critiques Schaeffer’s notion of “reduced listening,” which ignores a sound’s referential properties and considers it independently of its causes or its meaning. Bracketing the question of whether this is even possible, is it desirable to restrict musical discourse so much by neglecting sound’s signifying …
Ethnomusicology and the body
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels It is such a strange artifact of Cartesian dualism that we have to specify experiences as being “bodily,” as if there were some other kind. It’s like specifying that a place is in the universe. Blacking (1977) observes that we can understand the convention of the …
Toward a Methodological Stance
Final paper for Approaches To Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson Section 1: Reflections on Received View of Research I was raised by two medical researchers and a former astrophysicist, surrounded by stacks of quantitative journals. I rarely questioned the assumption that quantitative empirical research is the gold standard of truth, and that while subjective accounts …
Research proposal – Hip-Hop Pedagogy
Final paper for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides Research questions Jamie Ehrenfeld is a colleague of mine in the NYU Music Experience Design Lab. She graduated from NYU’s music education program, and now teaches music at Eagle Academy in Brownsville. Like many members of the lab, she straddles musical worlds, bringing her training in …