Is Country Music Quintessentially American? Or White?
The phrase “quintessentially American” arises frequently with reference to country music. In Ken Burns’s 2019 Country Music documentary series and many other instances,… Read More
Articles
Ukraine’s Avantgarde: A Short History of a Long Tradition
By Leah Batstone
The international attention Ukraine has received in the 270 days since Russia’s full-scale invasion of its sovereign neighbor is unprecedented. The world has never… Read More
More Troubling Failure(s): Situating Bodies and Research in Art
By Tomie Hahn
Ed. note: This essay is an offshoot from a lecture originally presented as the AMS Committee on Women and Gender Annual Endowed Lecture. Fred… Read More
The Dickinson Collection: Adventures in Musicological Research
By Ralph P. Locke, Jürgen Thym
We are perhaps the only musicologists to have made it onto the front page of the National Enquirer, a newspaper that was the nation’s… Read More
Anti-Asian Hate: It’s Time To Stop Playing “Chinatown, My Chinatown”
By Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Three days after the July 4th mass shooting in Chicago I woke up to a piece of news on the homepage of the World… Read More
Kyiv’s New Music Scene Today: Composing and Listening in the Time of War
By Oksana Nesterenko
On February 24, 2022, after Russian forces attacked the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, award-winning curator Sasha Andrusyk posted on social media: “I’ve lived a very happy,… Read More
Sin perreo no hay revolución: The Day Reggaeton Became Puerto Rico’s National Music?
By Jaime O. Bofill Calero
Protesters chanting “Ricky Renuncia” outside the Governor’s Mansion during summer protests of 2019 in Puerto Rico. Photo courtesy of Ricardo Alcaraz. On… Read More
Ukraine’s War-Time Pianos and the Sounds of Resistance
By Adriana Helbig
On May 14, 2017, while waiting to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin was filmed playing two Soviet-era popular tunes… Read More
After the Sheng Fiasco, Music and Arts Education Can No Longer Profess Colorblindness
By Loren Kajikawa, Daniel Martinez HoSang
The story has become so familiar it can now write itself: Professor shares racially charged material in class. Some of the most vocal and… Read More
Music from Ukraine: A Collaborative Portrait Gallery in March 2022
By The Collective on Music from Ukraine
What of music in the time of war? It is not a new question, but a question whose answers unfold along complex and specific… Read More
Unsettling Peter Pan
By Victoria Lindsay Levine
I have this theory about Indians. Actually, the theory is not really about Indians, it’s about… Read More
The Eloquence of Noise: The Cacerolazo in Colombia Since 2019
By Juan Fernando Velásquez
For some readers, the word “protest” and the sounds of banging pots might call to mind Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, the… Read More
The Pathbreaker and the Mapmaker, or, Harry T. Burleigh and Me
By Louis Epstein
This is a story about ambition and struggle, success and failure, hubris and humility. It’s a story about the way a new pedagogy can… Read More
Speaking and Singing in Beauty: Marianne Faithfull’s Vocal Authority
By Alexandra Apolloni
What makes a voice sound beautiful, or meaningful, or authoritative? And what is at stake for singers when the vocal sounds associated with authority… Read More
Sounding the Path to Dignity: Chile after October 2019
By Natalia Bieletto-Bueno
This essay is a contribution to the Musicology Now Roundtable, “Protest in Latin America: 2019 and Beyond.” “Si el río suena es porque agua… Read More
Pandemic Piece
By Samantha Hark, Elizabeth Vargas, Benjamin Tausig
A note about Pandemic Piece (2020): Ethnography is a research method that involves deep human contact—studied, immersed involvement with communities over months, years,… Read More
The Language of The Coding
By Yvette Janine Jackson, Neil Verma
This recorded conversation is an audio contribution to Musicology Now’s Sounds of Social Justice Roundtable. Neil Verma speaks with Yvette Janine Jackson… Read More
Be Heard: Acoustic Hailers as Technologies of Not Listening
By María Edurne Zuazu
Acoustic hailing devices (AHDs) are high-intensity directional sound systems that produce narrow sound beams with very loud, high sound pressure levels that can be… Read More
Melodyne’s Nature
By Catherine Provenzano
When the German software company Celemony premiered the first market-ready version of Melodyne at the North American Music Merchants (NAMM) conference in Anaheim, California,… Read More
Race and the American Musicological Society: Founding the Committee on Cultural Diversity
By Carol J. Oja
This essay began as part of a panel sponsored by the Committee on Cultural Diversity at the American Musicological Society’s 2019 conference in Boston,… Read More