Sound Expertise

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>WE'RE SO BACK. Our fourth and final season begins October 15. Seeya then!<br/><br/>soundexpertise.org </p>

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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...