PhD, Ethnomusicology – Columbia University (1991)
MPhil, Ethnomusicology – Columbia University (1989)
MM, Music Theory – University of North Texas (1980)
BM, Music Theory – University of North Texas (1976)

Books

• Rhythmic Nation: African American Music and Danish Identity. In progress.
  • This book engages broader dialogues within ethnomusicology concerning music’s significance as tied to global flows of people, ideas, technologies, and commodification practices, especially explorations of how global music features in the construction and maintenance of contemporary, local cultural identities. My research focuses on an important case of such a “localization” of Black music within the Northern European country of Denmark. I address Denmark’s incorporation of African American jazz and other diasporic musics as Danish, under their concept of rytmisk musik as driven by a group of public intellectuals known as the cultural radicals. To frame this research, I draw on the work of Paul Gilroy (1993) and his notion of diasporic culture, which I find to be seminal and corrective in acknowledging the multifarious contributions of Black cultures to regions traditionally understood as “European” in a sense that conveys whiteness.  I demonstrate how the Danish cultural radicals effectively bracketed Black and popular musics within the broad aesthetic-political category of rytmisk musik.  Further, I underscore the importance of African American music as a key component of Danish modernity, at the time of its emergence after World War I, through the present day. Overall, I argue that the continued pervasiveness of multiple African diasporic forms in Denmark today subvert overly simplified approaches to race, nationality, and received notions of European modernity.

• Music and Technoculture. Coedited by Leslie C. Gay Jr. and René T.A. Lysloff. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
  • Inspired by the concept of technoculture, this book locates technology squarely in the middle of expressive culture, musical creativity, and local practice. The constituent essays range from the Victorian parlor to the 21^st-century shopping mall, and are concerned with how technology culturally informs and infuses aspects of everyday life and musical experience.  The book argues that this merger does not necessarily result in a “cultural grayout,” but instead often produces exciting new possibilities.  Further, the volume offers evidence of musical practices and ways of knowing music that are informed and significantly transformed by new technologies, yet remain profoundly local in style and meaning.
• See https://www.weslpress.org/9780819565143/music-and-technoculture/

Representative Articles and Essays

• “Shadows of Black and White: Materialities and Medialities in May Irwin’s ‘Frog Song.’” In Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media, edited by Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, 178-205. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
• “Ensemble.” In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, edited by Janet Sturman, 807-812. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2019.
• “Acting Up, Talking Tech: New York Rock Musicians and their Rhetoric of Technology.” In Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader, edited by Jennifer C. Post, 209-22. New York: Routledge, 2006.
• “Before the Deluge: The Technoculture of Song Sheet Publishing Viewed from Late 19th-Century Galveston.” American Music 17, no. 4 (1999): 396-421. Physical publication Summer 2000
• “Hearing is Seeing: Listening for New York Rock Musicians.” The World of Music 41, no. 1 (1999): 9-17.
• “Acting Up, Talking Tech: New York Rock Musicians and their Metaphors of Technology.” Ethnomusicology 42, no. 1 (1998): 81-98.
• “Lullaby.” In Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art. Thomas A. Green, 2:514-15. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997.
• “Musical Instrument.” In Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art. Ed. Thomas A. Green, 2:570-74. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997.
• “Rockin’ the Imagined Local: New York Rock in a Reterritorialized World.” In Popular Music — Style and Identity, edited by Will Straw, et al., 123-126. Montreal: Centre for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions, 1995.