“Y Volver, Volver~, Volver!” (And Come Back, Come Back~, Come Back!): as the explosive chorus of his signature song still mourns, Vicente Fernández Gómez, known as Chente, died on 12 December 2021 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, after 60 prolific years as a singer, actor, and film producer. The… Read More
Reflections on the Errant Voices Conference, April 2022 Consider the adjective “errant.” The word might describe a misbehaving child careening through the galleries of the Uffizi in Florence, Italy, or a knight cresting the peak of a mountain in search of his dragon. An errant traveler might be pursuing a… Read More
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 comings and… 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
Three days after the July 4th mass shooting in Chicago I woke up to a piece of news on the homepage of the World Journal, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the United States. An elderly Korean American man in Flushing, Queens, was approached and shoved at a gas station by… Read More
The story has become so familiar it can now write itself: Professor shares racially charged material in class. Some of the most vocal and outraged students testify to their injuries and offer their indictments. Viral stories on conservative websites follow, mourning the death of free speech and the… Read More
I have this theory about Indians. Actually, the theory is not really about Indians, it’s about everyone else. Here’s the thing: although I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, generally speaking white people who are interested in Indians are not very bright. Generally speaking white… Read More
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 1917 arrangement… Read More
This recorded conversation is an audio contribution to Musicology Now’s Sounds of Social Justice Roundtable. Neil Verma speaks with Yvette Janine Jackson about her recent piece, The Coding (2021), and how it engages with problems of language, race, colonial thinking, and two phenomena that have a strange overlap… Read More
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, which marked the committee’s thirtieth anniversary. Chaired by Michael Figueroa (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), the panel also included Johann Buis (Wheaton College), Imani… Read More