“Should I Perform This Music?”

Abstract: This essay addresses cultural appropriation in music not as a problem to be solved through fixed rules or binary judgments, but as an ongoing ethical practice grounded in intent, relationship, and accountability. Centered on a decision-making chart designed for use rather than theoretical mastery, the article situates musical engagement within dynamic communities shaped by difference, power, and mutual indebtedness. Drawing on critical scholarship, classroom experience, and responses from multiple scholars and artists, the essay reframes appropriation away from simple distinctions between appreciation and theft, emphasizing instead how musical meaning emerges through lived interaction, affective experience, and social consequence.

Through dialogic reflection and critique, the essay foregrounds the limits of critique alone and argues for generative, process-oriented approaches to ethical music-making. Contributors highlight how questions of freedom, empathy, identity, labor, and privilege intersect in musical encounters, particularly for students and musicians navigating activist fatigue, creative desire, and fear of harm. Rather than offering definitive answers, the essay insists on ambiguity, refusal, and responsibility as necessary components of ethical musical practice. Ultimately, it proposes that cultivating relationships, acknowledging indebtedness, and remaining open to discomfort are central to making music that aspires toward justice, mutuality, and shared futures.

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Dangerous Undertakings: Judicial Copyright Opinions as Music Criticism

Abstract: This article argues that judicial opinions in US federal music copyright cases can be productively read as a form of music criticism. Although copyright law has formally limited the role of aesthetic judgment since the Supreme Court’s 1903 decision in Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co., over a century of judicial writing demonstrates that judges routinely evaluate musical quality, originality, and genre in ways that exceed purely legal reasoning. By situating judicial opinions within their historical, cultural, and musical contexts, this essay reveals how judges’ word choices, metaphors, and dicta function as aesthetic critiques that shape interpretations of musical creativity, similarity, and value.

Drawing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century copyright cases involving early jazz, Tin Pan Alley songs, and hip-hop sampling, the article traces patterns of judicial ambivalence toward aesthetic neutrality and persistent elitism toward commercial popular music. These opinions frequently reveal implicit racial, cultural, and moral judgments that influence legal outcomes and the scope of copyright protection. Framing judicial opinions as an understudied archive of music criticism, the article calls for sustained cross-disciplinary dialogue between musicology, law, and forensic musicology to better understand—and mitigate—the “dangerous undertaking” of judicial aesthetic evaluation in music copyright litigation.

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Music and/as Work

Abstract: This essay examines music through the lens of work, arguing that musicology has been inconsistent (and often evasive) in its engagement with labor as a conceptual and material category. Drawing on the author’s experiences as a trained musician and scholar, the essay begins by addressing the contradiction between the immense value placed on music as an aesthetic object and the frequent disparagement of music-making as legitimate work. Treating “work” as a contested discursive concept rather than a stable definition, the article situates debates about musical labor alongside broader discussions of gender, capitalism, and social reproduction. Building on feminist and Marxist scholarship, it emphasizes how capitalist social relations shape what counts as work, how labor is valued, and how musical activities are positioned as leisure, vocation, or profession.

The essay then develops a historical framework for understanding music at work and music as work. First, it traces how music has structured labor in preindustrial settings, how industrial capitalism separated music from work, and how music was later reintegrated into workplaces as a tool for productivity and control. Second, it examines three major forms of musical labor relations—patronage, guilds (and later unions), and independent musicianship—demonstrating how each reflects shifting social hierarchies, power relations, and definitions of artistic autonomy. Rather than resolving tensions between music as art and music as labor, the essay argues that these contradictions are central to understanding musical life under capitalism. Ultimately, the article contends that recognizing music as work clarifies how musicians navigate compulsion, pleasure, creativity, and precarity, and provides a framework for interrogating how value is assigned to music, musicians, and cultural labor more broadly.

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Thinking About Music History: An Introduction to Marxism

Abstract: This essay introduces Marxism as an analytical method for thinking about music history, arguing that musicology’s longstanding idealist orientation has limited its ability to grapple with capitalism, class, and material power. Beginning from the author’s own position as a disciplinary “outsider,” the essay situates Marxist analysis alongside familiar musicological engagements with gender, race, and sexuality, highlighting the field’s relative neglect of political economy. It outlines key Marxist concepts (such as the means of production, private property, labor, wage relations, ideology, and materialism) and explains how these ideas offer a framework for understanding music not as an abstract realm of ideas but as a set of practices embedded in historical relations of power, exploitation, and social reproduction.

The essay then demonstrates the usefulness of a Marxist approach through a case study of racism in U.S. classical music institutions, focusing on how idealist diversity initiatives obscure the material histories and ongoing functions of elite cultural spaces. Drawing on theories of racial capitalism and urban redevelopment, the essay shows how institutions like Lincoln Center have been implicated in displacement, wealth extraction, and racialized inequality, even as they position themselves as agents of cultural inclusion. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the article argues that Marxist analysis clarifies the structural limits of institutional reform and redirects attention toward broader material conditions that shape musical life. Ultimately, the essay positions Marxism as a flexible, evolving toolkit that enables music historians to ask new questions about labor, value, race, and power across musical repertoires and historical contexts.

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Marathi Kirtan Before and After “The Classical”

Abstract: This essay examines the shifting boundaries of “the classical” in Indian music through a historical study of Marathi naradiya kirtan, a devotional song–narrative genre that both sounded classical and resisted classicization. Situating kirtan within colonial and nationalist discourses of music classification, the essay traces how concepts of the classical were simultaneously constructed in Europe and India through Orientalist encounter, caste hierarchy, and cultural reform. Drawing on the Marathi biography of nineteenth-century kirtankar Govindbuva Hoshing, the article foregrounds the role of Brahmin performers who selectively absorbed Hindustani musical practices (raga, tala, and improvisation) while rejecting Hindustani music’s Islamicate associations and secular performance contexts. In doing so, the article reframes classicization as a boundary-making process rather than a stable set of sonic attributes.

Through close reading of Hoshing’s 1925 biography and analysis of naradiya kirtan’s performance practices, the article demonstrates how kirtan occupied a liminal position between court music, devotional ritual, and emerging nationalist imaginaries. Written after Hindustani music had been firmly established as “classical,” the biography retroactively recasts nineteenth-century musical fluidity as evidence of Brahmin moral and spiritual supremacy, subordinating classical music to Hindu devotional authority. The article argues that naradiya kirtan’s refusal of classicization allowed it to retain caste prestige, ritual centrality, and moral legitimacy, even as it appropriated the sonic resources of classical music. Ultimately, the essay shows how sound, caste, religion, and geography were reconfigured through colonial modernity, producing enduring distinctions between the classical and the devotional that continue to shape Indian musical life and nationalist discourse.

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Spontaneous Composition and Charles Mingus’s “Scenes in the City”

Abstract: This essay examines Charles Mingus’s concept of “spontaneous composition” through a close analysis of Scenes in the City (1957/1959), a hybrid work combining spoken narration and jazz performance. Situating the piece within the cultural landscape of late-1950s New York, the essay traces Mingus’s engagement with overlapping musical and literary scenes, including the jazz poetry boom associated with the Beat Generation and contemporaneous debates about composition within experimental music circles. Against a backdrop of racialized genre hierarchies and primitivist discourse in jazz criticism, Mingus’s approach to composition (grounded in orality, improvisation, and extended form) emerges as both an aesthetic and political intervention. By rejecting “pencil composition” while maintaining tight formal control, Mingus challenged prevailing assumptions about authorship, notation, and musical seriousness.

Through comparative listening and structural analysis of Scenes in the City and its earlier iteration A Colloquial Dream, the essay demonstrates how Mingus’s extended form creates responsive musical environments in which narration and improvisation unfold collaboratively. Rather than treating music as accompaniment to text, Mingus integrates the narrator into the ensemble, using sectional flexibility, cueing, and dynamic contrast to negotiate the temporal and semantic demands of spoken language. The essay argues that Scenes in the City represents a rare success within the jazz–poetry experiments of the period and serves as a key example of Mingus’s broader project of self-historization. Ultimately, the article suggests that attending to Mingus’s spontaneous composition requires listening across boundaries—between improvisation and composition, music and language, and the multiple cultural scenes that shaped jazz in midcentury America.

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Racializing Sound in Early Jazz: A Case Study on Fletcher Henderson (with help from Lil Nas X)

Abstract: This essay interrogates the racialization of sound in the U.S. music industry by examining how musical style, genre, and listening practices have been historically tethered to racial identity. Centering on early jazz bandleader Fletcher Henderson, the essay situates his career within the volatile racial, economic, and cultural landscape of the 1920s, when recording companies institutionalized racial difference through categories such as “race records” and stylistic labels like “hot” jazz. Drawing on scholarship in music theory, sound studies, and critical race studies, the article demonstrates how Henderson’s classically trained, arranged approach to jazz challenged prevailing assumptions about Black musical “primitivity” and enabled rare crossover success into white popular markets. At the same time, Henderson remained constrained by unequal access, exploitative labor practices, and industry gatekeeping that limited Black musicians’ creative freedom, financial gain, and historical recognition.

The essay places Henderson’s experience in dialogue with the contemporary case of Lil Nas X, whose chart-topping “Old Town Road” was briefly removed from Billboard’s country charts in 2019, revealing the persistence of racialized genre policing in popular music. By tracing continuities between early twentieth-century recording practices and twenty-first-century chart classification, the essay argues that the music industry continues to enforce a “sonic color line” that disciplines Black artists who transgress stylistic boundaries. In doing so, it illuminates how racialized listening practices not only shape markets and careers but also influence the historical narratives that define artistic legitimacy, authenticity, and value. Ultimately, the article contends that examining Henderson’s legacy alongside Lil Nas X offers a critical lens through which to understand the durability of anti-Black logic in American music culture and the ongoing struggle over who is permitted to sound (and be remembered) as universal.

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Racialized Ornament in the Exotic Musical Imagination: Reflections on Framing and Decoloniality

Abstract: This essay uses the idea of ornament to work towards re-imagining long standing biases in music teaching and scholarship. Focusing on issues of race and gender, Bhogal explores how Western philosophy has tended to marginalize ornamentation or decoration through negative descriptions that invoke an objectified exotic other. Drawing on both sonic and visual examples from Western classical music and Indian classical music, this essay challenges decorative gestures traditionally viewed as superficial and meaningless. The range of examples includes rare sound recordings by Ustad Imdad Khan, Coimbatore Thayi, and M. S. Subbulakshmi, as well as compositions by George Frideric Handel, Maurice Delage, and Maurice Ravel. Ornament serves as a catalyst for de-colonizing approaches where inter-cultural and inter-epistemological dynamics are privileged as models for teaching and research.

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Wagner on Conducting: The Aesthetics of Anti-Semitism in Performance

Abstract: Starting in high school, I became obsessed with such classical performers as Jacqueline du Pré and Glenn Gould, whose recordings I desperately collected. But whenever I tried to discuss these musicians in class or with professors, my passion for their interpretations was dismissed or even mocked as a superficial fetish. To them, only composers, their intentions, and the notes in the score mattered. Later, in graduate school, I studied with Philip Bohlman, whose groundbreaking article “Musicology as a Political Act” argued that to choose to ignore the social and political nature of music and focus only on “the music itself” was, itself, a political act.1 To deny the social nature of music only served to reinforce existing values that have long marginalized populations. Bohlman’s argument resonated with me, as it shed light on how and why musical disciplines and criticism have historically ignored performers and focused, instead, only on composers. In my research and teaching, I have sought to push back at the aesthetic values and descriptive/analytic language that we often use to describe music. Page 162 →This language has served to dismiss performers and their bodies as merely re-creative conduits between the composer and listener, rather than to celebrate them as the creative and embodied representations of music that they are.

And yet, so determined was I to promote historical recognition of performers that I initially remained closed off to how the political language described by Bohlman pertained to the critical language describing performers. I bought Wagner’s “On Conducting” early in my career, excited by the insight he could provide on performers in the 19th century and also delighted to learn different ways musicians of note talked about interpretation, the subject I was most interested in. I spent most of my time focused on the early parts of the book, the discussion of interpretation and the history of conductors. I may have noticed the anti-Semitism at the end and knew of Wagner’s anti-Semitism, but was more interested in the ways the author analyzed performance. Moreover, many discussions online, at conferences, and within certain professional organizations, allowed me to sweep the bigotry under the rug and focus on “just the music itself” or, rather, just the performances themselves.

This essay is a result of what happened when I took a step back and was pushed to reflect on how easy it was for musical obsessions and passions to obscure the implicit politics and bigotry that pervade the criticism and discussion of performers. I became increasingly aware of how my own analyses of individual performers uncritically drew upon the problematic language of nationalism or identity. This essay is an attempt to grapple with this issue, to offer some historical context, and to challenge us all to think more critically about how our descriptive language, even when celebratory, carries deeply rooted associations.

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Sixteenth-Century Polyphony and the Modal Paradigm

Abstract: We often assume that Renaissance music is shaped by the system of "modes"--the set of scales that functioned something like tonality for music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But Renaissance-era music theorists and composers didn't always agree on what the modes were, how they worked, and how they ought to be applied to composition. This essay explores whether mode is "real," when mode is meaningful (and interesting) for understanding Renaissance music, and what other kinds of tools we can use to explain why Renaissance music sounds the way it sounds.

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Musical Salons of the Enlightenment: Platforms for Women’s Musical Agency

Abstract: Musical institutions changed dramatically in eighteenth-century Europe, as well as in the British colonies and the early United States. With increased social fluidity came the widespread emergence of amateur music lessons, public concerts by professional musicians, musical encyclopedias, and journals featuring musical scholarship and criticism. While most of these institutions persist today, others have waned, and, as a result, their roles in eighteenth-century society and musical life are little understood. One among these is the musical salon—a regular gathering of artists, intellectuals, professional and amateur musicians, and listeners, usually presided over by a woman who acted as hostess, or salonnière, who was often also a musician herself. This essay considers three women who hosted salons with music at their center: Anne-Louise Boyvin d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy (1744–1824) in Paris, Marianna Martines (1744–1812) in Vienna, and Sara Levy (1761–1854) in Berlin. These cases show how individual salons reflected the artistic and social priorities of the women at their center. Through their musical salons, these three women found space for their own creativity and had profound impacts on the musical culture of the late eighteenth century. 

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Cracking the Code: What Notation Can Tell Us About Our Musical Values

Abstract: This essay presents a history of dominant Western notational systems in order to discover what aspects of music notation privileges and why. It then focuses on graphic notation in the 20th century to see how and why composers stretched and modified notations, how performers have responded to those changes, and what we learn about music through the process.

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Reimagining the Representation of Ethnographic Knowledge: The Philosophy and Methodology of a Digital Humanities Project

Abstract: In this essay, the authors--a faculty-student team--ask how ethnographers might harness the power of digital tools affiliated with the Digital Humanities to explore new ways to share ethnographic knowledge. Using the project, Song in the Sumatran Highlands, as a model, we help readers think through the possibilities of the digital, including the digital affordances that offer exciting and novel possibilities to re-envision the shape of ethnographic stories and expand potential audiences for them. For example, digital platforms let ethnographers move away from logocentrism and to play with the presentation of stories by exploring non-linear formats. They offer visualization tools that enable new ways of conceptualizing and seeing the data. They provide a series of interactive tools, like maps and timelines, that allow users to make discoveries for themselves. They enable the integration and annotation of multimedia, bringing users as close as possible to seeing, hearing and sensing the place, people, and sounds. They also allow for collaboration and polyvocality, addressing the issue of authority and voice. In short, using a digital platform offers a different way of hearing, seeing, experiencing, and ultimately understanding ethnographic research and offers one modality for ethical engagement in and dissemination of scholarship. 

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Latin America and the Decolonization of Classical Music

Abstract: This essay explores three related stories of classical music in Latin America that reveal the complexities, failures, and successes of decolonizing projects: the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), the Cursos Latinoamericanos de Música Contemporánea (CLAMC), and the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (OEIN). The essay prompts critical reflection, questioning if projects that emerge from strictly modernizing ethos can become a space of resistance against coloniality. As a provocation, this chapter suggests that decolonizing projects, while prone to frequent failure, remain productive and worth pursuing. It concludes by urging readers to form their interpretation from the evidence, emphasizing the importance of critical thinking and individual research in shaping historical narratives and fostering a deeper understanding of complex issues.

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Listening to Music History

Abstract: This essay argues that recordings have changed the ways that musicians construct music and the ways that listeners perceive it. Because of the ubiquity of recorded music, the assumptions that we make about “music history” are often at odds with the ways that we experience music’s history through recordings. Using the perspectives inspired by recordings and their distribution, this essay provides alternative methods for thinking about, organizing, or “listening to” music history.

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Jenny Lind and the Making of Mainstream American Popular Music

Abstract: This essay about Jenny Lind’s mid-nineteenth-century American concert tour is a case study for these ways of thinking about musics embedded in culture and the legacy of historical musical-cultural processes. Lind’s status as “ideal” grew from the cultural discourse about her singing voice as gendered, raced and classed. These aspects of identity help us gain a more complete picture of Jenny Lind’s embeddedness in mid-nineteenth century American culture, as well as her appeal as a musical celebrity.

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MacDowell’s Vanishing Indians

Abstract: This essay examines Edward Macdowell’s borrowing of Native American music in two piano miniatures, “Indian Idyl” from New England Idyls and “From an Indian Lodge” from Woodland Sketches. The composer’s passive treatment of the Native American subject aligns with a cultural shift at the turn-of-the-century, what historians call the “vanishing Indian.” With the violent defeat of Native American resistance at Wounded Knee and the assimilation of tribes under the Dawes Act, Native Americans became reimagined as historical figures that simply “vanished” long ago, and thus became nationalist symbols for an industrializing nation. Through close analysis, this essay suggests how MacDowell’s music was part of a broader cultural embrace of the “vanishing Indian.

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Instrumental Music in Early Seventeenth-Century Italy: Instruments as Vehicles of Discovery

Abstract: Early seventeenth-century Italy saw the rise of the first substantial body of publications of independent, idiomatic instrumental music. Composers embraced a rhetoric of invention and virtuosic rhapsody, creating new genres, styles, and forms. Taking account of developments in the history of science and the other arts, this essay shows that the emergence of this instrumental repertoire may be understood as a manifestation of a new conception of instruments of all sorts—scientific, artistic, musical, mechanical.

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An Intermedia Approach to Seventeenth-Century English Popular Song Culture

Abstract: This essay sets forth examples for multidisciplinary approaches to seventeenth-century English popular song and its presentations across media by tracing the contextual histories of popular tunes. Historical musicology and literary studies have given priority to notated works written by composers or authors supported by powerful institutions like the church, aristocratic patrons, or the crown. Yet, to truly understand English musical culture means engaging with not only canonical behemoths like the dramatic works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the poetry of John Milton, the Italian operas of G. F. Handel, John Dowland’s lute music, the English virginal school, and ballad opera, but also how these works draw on popular songs circulating in London’s theaters, streets, and homes. Seventeenth-century English popular music and its transmission, reception, and preservation defy the notion of discrete categories of elite and popular, oral and written, high and low, public and private. Our methodologies for studying it should acknowledge this circulation and transformation.

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Ancient Mesopotamian Music, the Politics of Reconstruction, and Extreme Early Music

Abstract: This essay explores the power and connections between performed and material reconstructions of “extreme” early music. Drawing on recent scholarship in archaeological preservation and conservation as well as performance studies, Dorf contextualizes and analyzes the music of singer/songwriter Stef Conner’s setting of the Gilgamesh narrative. The multiple reconstructions of Eastern Mediterranean culture discussed here not only provide a setting to test the limits of musical reconstructions, refabrications and reinventions, but also demonstrate ways musical reconstructions function as a form of history for general audiences. Such public performances sidestep scholarly questions of authenticity and allow us to see how, when, and to whom scholarship becomes “real.”

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