“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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