Department of Music

Many past and present members of our Critical and Comparative Studies Ph.D. program attended and participated in the 2018 joint meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory. Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Aldona Dye discussed the fundamental importance of women’s labor to American folklore projects in the early twentieth century, while seventh-year Ph.D. candidate Stephanie Gunst demonstrated the ways that opera critics in the mid-nineteenth century US invoked the music box as a metaphor for women’s singing voices. 

(left: Stephanie Gunst, right: Aldona Dye)                                                                                               

CCS alumni who took part in the four-day affair included Amy Coddington (Amherst College), Shana Goldin-Perschbacher (Temple), Matthew Jones (Miami University), Mary Simonson (Colgate), and Victor Szabo (Hampden-Sydney). Amy teased out the issues surrounding the classification of hip-hop, Mary presented on synchronization in music and dance performances in American silent film exhibition of the 1920s, and Vic discussed the various connections between “atmospheric” minimalism and notions of intoxication. Shana explored how out transgender and queer country musicians navigate paradigms of sincerity, authenticity, and irony in that genre, while Matthew delivered a paper that used feminist and affect theories to challenge senior scholars and administrators to take concrete action to end exploitative labor hiring practices in their departments. 

Among faculty participants, Bonnie Gordon served on the AMS Board and participated on a panel about creating inclusive classrooms and curricula. Most importantly, she gave the AMS Committee on Women and Gender Endowed Lecture, which was attended by hundreds of conference attendees. In her talk, she used the fieldwork of Zora Neale Hurston as a point of departure for meditations on how feminist noise can resonate in the academy. Karl Hagstrom Miller gave the keynote address for the AMS Popular Music Study Group, surveying some of the ways that amateur musicians shaped the sound and the business of pop music in the US from the mid-nineteenth century until today. Fred Maus was on a three-person panel invited by the SMT Philosophy Interest Group. The panelists read 10-minute papers and participated in a discussion about relations between music theory and philosophy. Richard Will chaired a panel about representation in the eighteenth century. Michael Puri represented the department at two Graduate Education Committee events and delivered his final report on the work that he and CCS graduate student Justin Mueller have done over the past few years in editing book reviews for the Journal of the AMS.