In this talk, presented at the Plenary Session of the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, I examine the relationship between time, embodiment, and affectivity in music. I argue that music is temporal not because it unfolds in time, or because it takes time as its vector, or even because it has the capacity to alter our sense of…[Read more]

A historical overview of college football’s participants exemplifies the diversification of mainstream American culture from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first. The same cannot be said for the sport’s audience, which remains largely white American. Gerald Gems maintains that football culture reinforces the construction of American…[Read more]

An introduction to music appreciation and history that emphasizes the political, cultural, and social influences on music from antiquity to the 20th century. Contents include sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental, and folk and art music from across the Western world, including modern popular song. No previous musical experience necessary. All…[Read more]

Continuation of documentary about concert spirituals categorized by song theme, from sorrow songs to songs of transcendence. Each category is followed by a recording:
– “Oh, Didn’t It Rain” (Ruby Elzy, soprano)
– “Every Time I Feel de Spirit” (Lawrence Brown, composer; Evelyn Dove, soprano)
– “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” (Florence…[Read more]

Documentary about concert spirituals categorized by song theme, from sorrow songs to songs of transcendence. Each category is followed by a recording: –
“I Cannot Stay Here by Myself” (Hall Johnson, composer; A. Grace Lee Mims, soprano)
– “Who’ll Be a Witness for My Lord” (John Rosamond Johnson, composer; Kenneth Spencer, baritone)
– “Steal…[Read more]

This is the 2020 update of a comprehensive open-access annotated bibliography listing carillon scores by African American composers and/or based on African American music. While most of the items are published, a few are unpublished but in informal circulation, or are pending publication. Carillonists are invited to use this resource to identify…[Read more]

This open-access international bibliography lists published and unpublished original carillon works by over a hundred women, transgender, and nonbinary composers. The composers’ birth years range from 1858 to the twenty-first century, the musical styles range from lyrical to avant-garde, and the formats range from solo to ensemble to e…[Read more]

This article strives to examine the historical narrative of music recording in its acoustic era (from 1877 to the late 1920s), at a time when competing technologies for capturing and registering sound and music were being incorporated into everyday life. Moreover, it examines the overlap of continuous and discontinuous media and processes of…[Read more]

The period following the end of Getúlio Vargas’s second government (1951-1954) saw a massive expansion of the media industries with popular music in particular becoming an important cultural touchstone. Some salient trends in the post-War period include the politicization of music and other media (radio, television, social media), the in…[Read more]

A book project with the goal of documenting commercially produced recordings of Negro spirituals composed for solo concert vocalists. Portions of this information is currently available on the online site, The Spirituals Database (http://spirituals-database.com).

Over 5,600 entries cover more than a century of recordings on compact discs,…[Read more]

This co-authored piece introduces our co-edited volume ‘Dreams of Germany’. It explores how, where and by whom notions of ‘musical Germanness’ have been constituted in the modern era, and to what effect. Picking up on ideas first explored systematically by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter in their 2002 collection ‘Music and German National…[Read more]

Reviewing How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration, by Ellen Winner (OUP 2019); The Aesthetic Animal, by Henrik Høgh-Olesen (OUP 2018); The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution, by Stephen Davies (OUP, 2012) (2019)

As Anne Sauvagnargues suggests, in Gilles Deleuze thought “every[-thing] is defined as an assemblage of movements and affective vibrations.” Interestingly, Sauvagnargues’ proposition aligns neatly with Tim Ingold’s idea of correspondence, where things perdure, “carry on together, and answer to one another,” and where the additive ‘and…and.…[Read more]

Évora tem sido um importante centro de culto mariano desde a Idade Média, com a dedicação do altar-mor da Catedral a Nossa Senhora da Assunção como ponto central. Foi também um importante centro musical e a antífona Recordare, Virgo Mater é uma das obras musicais associada à festa mariana conhecida como o Milagre da Cera. Um dos mestres de capela…[Read more]

A celebração de novenas, assim como de septenários e trezenas, constitui uma importante manifestação de devoção popular desde o século XVIII até à atualidade, funcionando de forma parela à liturgia regular. O repertório musical escrito para estas ocasiões percorria praticamente todas as camadas da sociedade, com graus de complexidade diferente, c…[Read more]

The author is examining the interplay between voice and sculpture, within the field of sound art. The term ‘sculpture’ has been appropriated by many artists to define their work with the voice. Exploring the sculpted voice, three main categories are here identified: the plastic dimension of voice as a sculptable material, the sculptural…[Read more]

Of the various hermeneutic approaches to the study of music developed in the last half century or so, narratological analysis has gone further than many in navigating a path that draws on both cultural and structural contexts. This overview of the development of narrative theory in music charts the course of three “waves” of narratological eng…[Read more]