The rapid fame of an AI-generated gospel tribute song titled “We Are Charlie Kirk” highlights strange new connections between American evangelicalism, political identity, and social media culture. Gospel here refers to both biblical-inflected language and a varied set of musical idioms that have circulated across Read More
https://doi.org/10.63473/XHWJ7854 In November 2024, Canadian rapper Drake filed to sue Universal Music Group and Spotify in the wake of an ongoing feud with American rapper Kendrick Lamar. This was unsurprising, given that Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us” implicated Drake as, among other things, a sexual… Read More
https://doi.org/10.63473/SESI2454 In January 2019, Warner Music Group signed a twenty-album contract with the artist Endel. And then in May 2023, Endel came to an agreement with Universal Music Group to collaborate with the label’s artists. These major record label deals would be impressive under any circumstances,… Read More
https://doi.org/10.63473/EDTJ7893 In this conversation, Allison Jerzak spoke with cultural anthropologist Nick Seaver, who studies the intersection of people, technology, and culture. His 2022 book, Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation, draws on several years of ethnographic fieldwork at music recommendation companies in the United States. Read More
https://doi.org/10.63473/WBQO6729 Conferences are inflection points: moments where energies come together and reflect outward in new directions. The following is a report of the May 2022 “Ruptures and Convergences” Conference, hosted by the Music Studies and the Anthropocene Research Network. In the following recap of conference proceedings, I frame the… Read More
https://doi.org/10.63473/HBTS7541 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 change the teacher as much as the students. It starts with a song. I can’t remember where I first encountered Harry T. Burleigh’s… Read More
by Christopher Reynolds Two years ago I published an article in Notes (69 [2013]: 671-87): “Documenting the Zenith of Women Song Composers: A Database of Songs Published in the United States and the British Commonwealth, ca. 1890-1930.” My intention was to call attention to my database of women song composers… Read More
Margot Fassler, Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy at the University of Notre Dame, presented the AMS President’s Endowed Plenary Lecture on 6 November 2014 at the American Musicological Society’s annual meeting in Milwaukee. The talk was entitled “Hildegard’s Cosmos and Its Music: Making a Digital Model for the… Read More
A Report from Britain by Carolin Rindfleisch As a three-year project funded under the British Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Digital Transformations scheme, Transforming Musicology is part of a broader effort to understand how digital technologies and digital… Read More
by Ryan Raul Bañagale This past March witnessed the debut of a new public musicology endeavor called the Critical Karaoke Radio Project. Founded at Colorado College by playwright and hip-hop professor Idris Goodwin, novelist and literary critic Steven… Read More