I am a lecturer in music at the University of Washington, where I teaches courses in hip hop, rock and roll, and music theory. I am also active as a classical double bass player in the Seattle/Tacoma area. Prior to teaching at UW, I taught at Texas Tech University. I earned my Ph.D. in music theory from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and a master's degree in music theory and a bachelor of music in double bass performance from Temple University. When I'm not teaching or…
I propose dividing the history of rap scholarship into three eras (as musicologists are inclined to do!). The first era begins in the mid-1990s with works by Richard Shusterman, Tricia Rose, Russell Potter, Robert Walser, Cheryl Keyes, and their peers. Shusterman, Rose, Potter, and others were among the first to publish academic work on rap music. They approached the genre through philosophy,…
This is a slightly enlarged version of a public comment that I gave at the school board meeting tonight. As a teacher with over 20 years of experience, I have seen students thrive when they get to do work that is relevant to them. Good teachers get to know their students and craft these kinds of learning opportunities. Generative AI programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s…
While I was teaching the graduate seminar on being responsible rap scholars, two very different articles about rap crossed my desk at nearly the same time. The first article was “Notes on Trap” by Jesse McCarthy, published in 2018; the second was “Regional Variation in West and East Coast African-American English Prosody and Rap Flows,” by Steven Gilbers, Nienke Hoeksema, and Kees de Bot, and…
This is a response I just submitted for my MLL class in a unit on advocating for family and community engagement in math and science pedagogy. his module landed in my lap at exactly the right time. It felt a bit strange to me to read about the importance of engaging families, community resources, and creating public-facing opportunities because that all is fundamental to what we do in music…
I gave a talk to a music appreciation class at a nearby university the other day and I titled the talk “Rap histories and their consequences.” The talk helped break a log jam in what I was trying to articulate in one of the chapters of my forthcoming book on rap, whiteness, and post-racial America. I went home and hastily drafted this up (I know there are some holes—I’ll come back and plug ‘em…
The readings this week demonstrated that so-called Standard English (SE) is in fact a moving target, a concept that people in positions of power use to maintain their power by excluding those who do not know the rules (see, for example Christensen 1994, p. 143, and Lobeck 2005, p. 102). The notion of SE starts to break down pretty quickly when you consider that the United States, England, and…
I'm in a program to earn an MLL (multi-language learner) endorsement and thought I'd periodically share some of the things I'm learning. The class I'm taking now is about cultural contexts for emergent bilinguals (the term is preferable to deficit-based terms that center the English language). The goal of these programs is to set students up for success in school by improving their academic…
So after a few hours of work, heres’s what I’ve come up with: It’s important to think about who benefits from scholarship on rap music and how they benefit. Rap music emerged as a field of study in university music departments in the mid-1990s. Since then, an increasing number of scholars have devoted their careers to researching and teaching this uniquely American art form. Music departments are…
One thing that the reviewers noted about my proposed project is that there seems to be two distinct strands of thinking geared toward two different audiences, and they encouraged me to either lean into one or the other or to find a way to make the connection between the two more explicit. I’m convinced that there is a connection I’m just not entirely sure how to articulate it, which is kind of a…
I submitted a proposal for a new book about whiteness and rap music. Much of the material has appeared on this blog in some form or another—the Macklemore/Kendrick stuff, visualizing rap , the introduction , some of the rap on trial material , and pedagogical stuff —and the reviews were pretty positive. I’m also helping another colleague with a book proposal, and I’m working on submitting the…
I covered a ninth-grade English class the other day and they were reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet . The students were on Act 2, scene 4, and I asked for volunteers to read the different parts. Now it’s been a minute since I’ve read Shakespeare—it’s really not my thing—but I was interested to see how this went, especially since I’m thinking about getting an ELA endorsement and working on a…
I’ve had this thing on my mind that someone—alas I can’t remember who—said to me to the effect of “a good administrator will build the master schedule around specialists.” Maybe it’s because it’s registration season and I’m trying to get my assignment down from four schools to a mere three. I teach one section of junior high orchestra (grades 7, 8, and 9 combined; 42 students), one section of high…
This is the text of a talk that I gave at a conference that the Seattle Symphony hosted in March 2014. More to come… In an interview with Vera Lukomsky, Sofia Gubaidulina scolds people like me: “Musicologists do not know how to describe my style and just attach inaccurate labels to my music! I think this is theoretical piracy! And I protest against the label ‘eclectic,’ which musicologists pin on…
Gubaidulina’s experience with Astraea broadened her musical horizons in many ways. According to Kurtz, Gubaidulina remembers that the members of the ensemble tuned their zithers according to four different collections: the pentatonic, the diatonic, the twelve-note, and the quarter-tone system. [1] Her work with the ANS synthesizer gave her the means to experiment with not only new timbres, but…
Even within a single work we can find different points along this continuum, and this is the case with The hour of the soul . Gubaidulina’s concerto for percussion and orchestra provides a compendium of her aleatory techniques. Example 1 contains the first measure of the work, which is performed by the percussion soloist on the timpani. Example 1: The determination of many of the musical…
Once upon a time I wrote an awful lot about Sofia Gubaidulina’s music. I tried very hard to put it together into a book—and I still might—but it just never quite came together in a cohesive way. I wrote about her serial music here . The next part of the chapter was on her movement away from serialism and toward more indeterminate techniques. Here is some of that writing. Indeterminacy: From…
[Uh… I’m not sure where these footnotes went. I’ll try to find them…] In the early 1960s—around the time that his son became sick—Rochberg’s style began to evolve. In letters written during the second half of the decade, he refers to his use of material either borrowed directly from other composers or modeled on styles or works of other composers. His works Nacb Bach (1966), Music for the Magic…
In 1961, Rochberg’s 17-year-old son Paul was diagnosed with a brain tumor. George wrote to fellow composer Istvan Anhalt, “Things are not as good here as we would like. Paul’s condition remains only poor to fair and new complex developments keep arising. Perhaps we are too impatient but it seems like a long time for him to remain this way without the assurance of better days ahead.” [1] Paul…
In his book Twelve-Tone Music in America , Joseph Straus cites a number of potentially damning studies that suggest the average listener is in fact unable to perceive the row and its transformations in the abstract (as presented in the examples above) or in musical context. He responds to these studies by arguing that 1) they are testing the wrong things; and 2) they are testing the wrong people.…
I did my master’s thesis on George Rochberg and have continued to be fascinated by his music. As part of a longer project on music and trauma, I revisited his life and music in that context. Here is part 1 of some work I did to that end. It is very much work in progress but I’m not sure I have the time/resources/energy to complete it. If you’re down to collaborate on something like this, let me…