Sound Expertise

Well, it's our final episode, and we have the exact right guest to help say goodbye to a podcast that focuses on music scholarship, and why it matters: William Cheng, whose work fundamentally reconsiders what musicology can be, by laying out a philosophy of care and repair. This conversation covers a large swath of Dr. Cheng's scholarship, including his foundational writing on music and...

Well, we're almost done: this is the penultimate episode of our fourth and final season. In our final weeks, host Will and producer Eddie take some time to reflect back on what it's meant: the origins of the podcast, the community we've built, and the legacy of Sound Expertise. Show notes and more over at soundexpertise.org ! Questions? Thoughts? Email soundexpertise00@gmail.com or...

Musicology today could not exist without feminist musicology, and feminist musicology could not exist without Suzanne Cusick. Dr. Cusick's revolutionary work has scrutinized gender and sexuality in musical life for decades, and is foundational to musicology as we know it today. In this profound conversation, she reflects on her arc through the field, and what still needs to change. Show notes...

From its beginnings, the eugenics movement has looked to music: for foundational figures like Francis Galton and contemporaries like Charles Murray, the child-prodigy composer or violinist could serve to demonstrate that talent was innate and inherited, and thus could be bred. The horrendously racist implications of such a vision have long been understood, but the relationship between music and eu...

We did it! Sound Expertise recorded its first-ever live episode at the American Musicological Society conference in Chicago. It was a super-fun event with a raucous crowd. Please enjoy this thoughtful conversation with Jonathan Bailey Holland, dean of Northwestern's Bienen School of Music, about his path as a composer and what it means to oversee a music school at a transformative moment. Sho...

Naomi André is one of the most important scholars of opera today, best known for her landmark 2018 book Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement . But the study of opera and race is not where Professor Andre’s career began: her path through musicology has been incredibly fraught, because of who she is, and what she wanted to do as a scholar. This week's conversation is difficult but necessary,...

Everybody's studying Taylor Swift these days, from Swifties decoding her vault to YouTubers decoding her harmonies to right-wing conspiracists decoding her plot against America. But what does it mean to study Taylor Swift as a musicologist ? Christa Bentley, Kate Galloway, and Paula Harper know: they're co-editing Taylor Swift: The Star, the Songs, the Fans , a book of essays out next ye...

Election Day is approaching, and both presidential candidates have been foregrounding music, from Kamala Harris walking out Beyoncé's "Freedom" to Donald Trump...dancing for 30 minutes to "Memory" from Cats . It's been a weird, and terrifying, campaign season. But music can help us make sense of it, according to musicologist Dana Gorzelany-Mostak, who runs the project...

Florence Price was exceptional, but she was not singular. In the fascinating new book "South Side Impresarios," musicologist Samantha Ege situates Price amidst multiple generations of Black women who transformed Chicago into a Black classical metropolis. In this conversation, we discuss the city and community that built Price, including the pivotal figures Nora Holt and Maude Roberts Geo...

Welcome to Season 4 of Sound Expertise! Opera is a four-hundred-year-old genre, and it often looks and sounds that way: despite opera's revolutionary merging of artistic disciplines, its administrators and musicians are often stuck in the past. But in his visionary productions, the director Yuval Sharon has imagined many potential futures for the art form; this conversation, about his new boo...

WE'RE SO BACK. Our fourth and final season begins October 15. Seeya then! soundexpertise.org 

Philip Ewell has, in recent years, become the most controversial music scholar on the planet. After his incisive work on music theory's white racial frame was unfairly attacked by fellow academics, he was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight, as right-wing news outlets targeted him as part of a broader backlash. A discussion about what it means to be caught up in the Culture Wars, raci...

Do we hear silence? John Cage certainly thought so, and so does Chaz Firestone, a scientist whose laboratory's recent study revealed that yes, we do hear silence. In this conversation, we discuss his new findings, what they mean for the fields of perception studies and philosophy, and how science and the humanities can work together to provide new answers to longstanding questions. Chaz Fires...

In curating music and the performing arts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Dwandalyn Reece has one of the most important jobs one can have as a music scholar: providing a framework for the public to understand African-American culture, at a moment in which Black history is under a nationwide assault. In this conversation, Dr. Reece discusses her work at...

Mark Katz is John P. Barker Distinguished Professor of Music at UNC Chapel Hill;  Alim Braxton is a rapper on death row, who has been incarcerated in Central Prison in North Carolina since 1993. In 2019, they struck up a correspondence, and then a friendship, and are now writing a book. This is their story. Show notes and more over at soundexpertise.org ! Questions? Thoughts? Email soundexpertise0...

The revival of Julius Eastman's work has transformed the world of avant-garde music, and in many ways can be attributed to a single individual. Since the late 1990s, the composer and performer Mary Jane Leach has collected manuscripts and recordings of Eastman's music, and helped bring about the current wave of "Eastmania." But the politics of Eastmania have become increasingly...

In 2018, Douglas Shadle tweeted about systemic discrimination in American orchestral programming. His thread went viral, and he soon found himself doing what became known, around then, as public musicology. In this conversation, he talks about presenting his work outside the academy through advocating for marginalized composers, and what the Florence Price revival has meant for his scholarship (an...

In his long career as a scholar and conductor, Joshua Rifkin has done a lot: arranged for Judy Collins, performed in the first-ever marathon of "Vexations," helped lead the ragtime revival and, perhaps most importantly, totally upended the conventional wisdom about Bach's choral music. This is a conversation about all of that, and more: rich, insightful, and scandalous stories about...

Bossa nova is everywhere –– from a dance craze in the '60s to elevator music today -- but it's also from somewhere . Kaleb Goldschmitt studies how bossa nova moved from a specific musical tradition grounded in Brazilian culture to an international phenomenon, and what that means for how we understand jazz history. A conversation about all that and more, including how queer and trans musi...

When classical composers incorporate indigenous music into their work, it's more than just cultural appropriation, because indigenous songs are more than just songs: they serve as medicine, law, and history. So what would it mean to redress such misuses, and to bring an indigenous worldview into Western art music? A conversation with Dylan Robinson about appropriation, repatriation, and his p...

"Music and philosophy" is often about Nietzsche and Wagner, or Kant and Mozart. But, in Robin James's work, it can also be about pop, and feminist theory, and Peloton playlists. A conversation about Dr. James's approach towards philosophy, with a focus on her new project on the musical and cultural implications of our contemporary focus on "vibes." Robin James is Edit...

There are approximately one bajillion biographies of Beethoven: do we need really another one? In fact, we do, because Laura Tunbridge has written an engrossing, provocative, and genuinely fresh book about Beethoven's life and times. A conversation about what it means to write about one of the most well-trodden composers in music history, and the rich new perspectives that Dr. Tunbridge bring...

What does it mean to search for music-making in the archives of slavery?  Maria Ryan studies African-descended musicians and listeners in the colonial Caribbean, and her research is fraught with ethical and logistical challenges. A conversation about fully imagining the lives of enslaved musicians, when the evidence of those lives is   documented almost entirely by their oppressors. Maria Ryan is...

What does it mean to be a scholar when the culture you study is under attack? Maria Sonevytsky and Oksana Nesterenko work on Ukrainian music, and their lives have changed profoundly in the last year. A conversation about the Ukrainian avant-garde and pop worlds, how wartime changes research agendas, and much more. Maria Sonevytsky is Associate Professor of Anthropology & Music at Bard College;...

The story of music  in the Soviet Union isn't just about Shostakovich and Stalin -- sometimes, it's not about composers at all. Gabrielle Cornish writes about a different kind of socialist sound: noise abatement policy, pop music, and even an aborted plan  to put a synthesizer in every Soviet home. A conversation about socialist noise, studying abroad in Siberia, what the war in Ukraine...