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, but what’s… Read More
Relatively recently, in a galaxy quite close to home, literary scholar Gerry Canavan vividly captured the ambiguity that shrouded the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). The second Star Wars feature film to be produced after Disney’s well-publicized acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, Rogue One was also… Read More
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. A … Read More
In this conversation, the first of a multi-part interview series with performers, scholars, and pedagogues of early music, historically informed performance, and related topics, David Miller spoke with conductor, instrumentalist, and musicologist Joshua Rifkin. A transcript is provided for increased accessibility. As a conductor and performer on various keyboard… Read More
The phrase “quintessentially American” arises frequently with reference to country music. In Ken Burns’s 2019 Country Music documentary series and many other instances, it reiterates an established truism—but is there any truth to it? In what sense might country, long known as white music, be quintessentially American music? … Read More
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, in 2000, music software buyers and enthusiasts responded to the product tepidly, and with a bit of confusion. Melodyne’s engineering team had envisioned and designed the… Read More
by Robert Fink Nothing puts musicology in the headlines like a big, juicy verdict in a musical copyright case. And they don’t come much juicier than the 7.4 million dollar judgment handed down last week by a federal jury which, enabled by extensive musicological expert testimony, decided that Robin Thicke… Read More
In this recent video, musicologist W. Anthony Sheppard (editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and department chair at Williams College) investigates how the musical, poetic, and cinematic elements work together to create the powerful impact of “Let It Go” in the Oscar-winning movie Frozen. The song was… Read More