Anxiety Muted
American Film Music in a Suburban Age
Edited by Stanley C. Pelkey and Anthony Bushard
Author Information
Stanley C. Pelkey II is Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Roberts Wesleyan College. A musicologist and cultural historian, he co-edited Music and History: Bridging the Disciplines (2005).
Anthony Bushard is Associate Professor of Music History in the Glenn Korff School of Music at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He is the author of Leonard Bernstein's On the Waterfront: A Film Score Guide (2013).
Contributors:
Stanley C. Pelkey II completed his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Musicology and his M.A. in History at the University of Rochester. Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Roberts Wesleyan College (Rochester, New York), he was previously an Associate Professor at Western Michigan University (2005-2012) where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses on music history and theory, film music, and non-western music.
Co-editor of Music and History: Bridging the Disciplines (University Press of Mississippi, 2005), Pelkey has also published articles on British composers and musical culture in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Catholic Encyclopedia 2011 Supplement, and The Early Keyboard Journal. His work on film and television music has appeared in Buffy, Ballads, and Bad Guys Who Sing: Music in the Worlds of Joss Whedon (Scarecrow Press, 2010) and Movies in American History: An Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2011).
Anthony Bushard earned M.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Musicology from the University of Kansas. He is currently an Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he teaches courses in film music history/analysis, jazz history, and world music, and an introduction to undergraduate studies for first-year students. His work on film music and socio-political undercurrents of the 1950s has been featured in the Journal of Film Music, Studies in Musical Theatre, and the College Music Symposium, and he has published a monograph for the Scarecrow Film Score Guide Series on Leonard Bernstein's score for On the Waterfront (2013). He also contributed the chapter on "Film Music" to Craig Wright's Listening to Music, 6th ed., and has published reviews in Notes, the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and American Music.
<1> Contributors
Christina Gier completed her Ph.D. in Musicology from Duke University and is currently an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Alberta. She researches gender and music through the lens of identity and subjectivity and focuses on different aspects of European and American early twentieth-century music, including film music. She is currently working on a book about the musical practices of American civilians and soldiers during the First World War and how songs shaped ideas of identity, gender, and race. She has also published articles on the modernist aesthetics of Alban Berg.
Samantha London is a graduate student in the Arts Journalism program at the University of Southern California and a recipient of the University's Annenberg Fellowship. Prior to beginning her studies at USC, she completed her B.M. in Piano Performance from the University of Michigan and her M.M. at Western Michigan University. In her current work, London examines classical music from a writer's perspective, assessing how it functions today and seeking paths it might pursue in the future.
Joshua Neumann is a Ph.D. student in the Musicology program and a College of Fine Arts Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Florida. Neumann's research focuses on the evolution of performance practices in Puccini's Turandot, although he is also interested in the interface of operatic and film music, society, and politics. Before matriculating to the University of Florida, he taught high school music, served as the assistant conductor and chorus master with Center City Opera Theater in Philadelphia, and completed his M.M. in Music History from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Jesse Schlotterbeck is an Assistant Professor of Cinema at Denison University. He received his Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Iowa, where he wrote a dissertation that surveys the musical biopic from the 1960s to the present. In addition to work on American cinema and film genre, he studies documentary and the relationship between film and other media. His work has been published in Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, M/C-A Journal of Media and Culture, and The Journal of Popular Film and Television.
Meghan Schrader completed her M.A. in Music at the University of New Hampshire. She has presented papers at annual conferences of The Society for Disability Studies, as well as at the 2011 Mid-Atlantic American and Popular Culture Association Conference and the 2012 Society for American Music Conference. Her research explores the intersection of music, cultural representations and attitudes toward disability, particularly in film, and social justice.
Linda K. Schubert writes about film scores, particularly those for history films made in Hollywood. Working frequently with archival material, she studies the original contexts of these scores, the circumstances under which they were composed, and the shifting layers of meaning they accrue over time. Her articles have appeared in German, Canadian, and U.S. publications; she is a member of the editorial board for The Journal of Film Music and a former editor for The Polish Music Journal. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan; a former lecturer at the University of Southern California, she currently teaches in the University of Wisconsin system and for Anderson University (Indiana).
Joanna Smolko has taught at Athens Technical College (Athens, Georgia) and the University of Georgia. She completed her Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of Pittsburgh, where she worked in the Center for American Music. She was coeditor of Stephen Collins Foster: Sixty Favorite Songs (Mel Bay, 2009), and has served as a contributing editor for the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Tim Smolko completed his M.L.S. at the University of Pittsburgh and his M.A. in Musicology from the University of Georgia and currently works as a Monographs Original Cataloger in the Main Library at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play (Indiana University Press, 2013).
Christopher D. Stone received his Ph.D. from Indiana University and is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Manitowoc. He has published essays and reviews in Film & History, OAH Magazine of History, Indiana Magazine of History, and the Southwest Historical Quarterly. He is currently writing on representations of the Sixties in American cinema.
Mariana Whitmer directs special projects at the Center for American Music at the University of Pittsburgh, where she also teaches a course on music and film, and is Executive Director of the Society for American Music. Whitmer completed a Scarecrow Film Score Guide on Jerome Moross's score for The Big Country (2012) and contributed an essay to Music in the Western (Routledge, 2010). She co-edited a special issue of American Music on Stephen Foster, including her article "Josiah Kirby Lilly and the Foster Hall Collection," and is currently working on a monograph about the classic Hollywood Western film score.
Reba Wissner completed her M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Musicology at Brandeis University, where she wrote a dissertation on Francesco Cavalli's opera, Elena. She is the author of several articles, has presented papers at conferences throughout the United States and Europe, and was the recipient of a dissertation research grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her book, A Dimension of Sound: Music in The Twilight Zone (2013), was recently published by Pendragon Press.