The Relentless Pursuit of Tone
Timbre in Popular Music
Edited by Robert Fink, Melinda Latour, and Zachary Wallmark
Author Information
Edited by Robert Fink, Professor of Musicology, University of California Los Angeles, Edited by Melinda Latour, Rumsey Family Assistant Professor of Musicology, Tufts University, and Edited by Zachary Wallmark, Assistant Professor and Chair of Musicology, Southern Methodist University Meadows School of the Arts
Robert Fink is Professor of Musicology at UCLA and a past President of IASPM-US. He focuses on music after 1965, with special interests in minimalism, popular music, and the intersection of cultural and music-analytical theory. He has published widely in musicological journals, and is the author of Repeating Ourselves (2005), a book-length study of the minimal music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and others as a cultural reflection of American consumer society in the mass-media age. Melinda Latour is Rumsey Family Assistant Professor of Musicology at Tufts University. She has received numerous awards, including the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and the Newberry Library École nationale des chartes Exchange Fellowship. Her work appears in the Journal of Musicology (2015), the Revue de musicologie (2016), and the Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music (forthcoming). Zachary Wallmark is Assistant Professor of Musicology at SMU Meadows School of the Arts.
His research explores the contribution of timbre to affective response, aesthetic judgment, and empathy in popular music and jazz, using methods from musicology and the cognitive sciences. He is currently at work on a monograph tentatively titled Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge (Oxford). Wallmark is the recipient of an NEH Fellowship (2017-18).
Contributors:
Jan Butler is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Oxford Brookes University. She studied at Nottingham University, where she completed her thesis entitled "Record Production and the Construction of Authenticity in the Beach Boys and late-60s American rock" under the supervision of Adam Krims. She has previously published on the Beach Boys, recorded musical works and cover versions, and psychedelic rock and the development of album art in the 1960s. Her other research interests include popular music in film, music production, and exploration of the institutional structures that interact with the creation and reception of recorded music.
Nina Sun Eidsheim is Professor of Musicology and Associate Dean for Academic Mentoring and Opportunity at UCLA. She is the author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Duke, 2015) and the forthcoming Measuring Race: The Micropolitics of Listening to Vocal Timbre and Vocality in African-American Popular Music (Duke). She is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and a special issue on voice and materiality for the journal, Postmodern Culture. She is the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson National Career Enhancement Fellowship (2011-12), Cornell University Society of the Humanities Fellowship (2011-12), the UC President's Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities (2015-16) and the ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship (2015-18).
Cornelia Fales is a Research Associate in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. She was previously a psychoacoustics researcher at the Institut de Recherche Acoustique Musique (IRCAM) and a faculty member at UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine. Her publications include "The Paradox of Timbre" (Ethnomusicology, 2002) and "Acoustic Intuition of Complex Auditory Phenomena by Whispered Inanga Musicians of Burundi" (The World of Music, 1995).
Robert Fink teaches in the Department of Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, where he is also Chair of the Music Industry program. He focuses on music after 1965, with interests in minimalism, cultural history, dance music, and musical analysis. He is the author of Repeating Ourselves, a study of American minimal music as a cultural practice (University of California, 2005). He is a past president of the U.S. branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.
Simon Frith is Tovey Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of numerous books on popular music, including Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll (Pantheon, 1981), Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Harvard, 1996), and Taking Popular Music Seriously (Ashgate, 2007).
John Howland is Professor of Music History at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, and lives in Lund, Sweden. His research examines the interrelations among class hierarchy discourse and arranging, production, and entertainment aesthetics in popular music and jazz-related orchestral idioms. He is the author of "Ellington Uptown": Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Michigan, 2009), among other writings, former editor and co-founder of the journal, Jazz Perspectives, and editor of both the forthcoming Ellington Studies (Cambridge) and an Ellington-focused double issue of Musical Quarterly (2013). His current monograph project, Luxe Pop, explores orchestral popular music from 1920s symphonic jazz to orchestrated indie rock and hip-hop of the present day.
Melinda Latour is Rumsey Family Assistant Professor of Musicology at Tufts University. Her research centers on Renaissance moral song; music and ethics; popular music; and Mexican music cultures. Her work has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the AMS Wolf Travel Award, and the Newberry Library École nationale des chartes Exchange Fellowship. She has published in the Journal of Musicology (2015), the Revue de musicologie (2016), and the Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music (forthcoming).
Catherine Provenzano is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at New York University. Her research is on vocal production in contemporary North American Top 40 and Pop Country, and she conducts ethnographic work in New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville recording studios and with software developers around the world. She focuses particularly on tuning plug-ins, the ways they inform performance, production, and listening practices, how they participate and are enrolled in affective economies, and the ways the voice is parametrized in software. She is also a singer and songwriter under the name KENNISTON.
Jocelyn R. Neal is Professor of Music and Adjunct Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research addresses American popular music, focusing especially on analysis, music and dance, and country music. She is the author of The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Legacy in Country Music (Indiana, 2009) and Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History (Oxford, 2012).
Mark C. Samples is Assistant Professor of Music and Coordinator of Music History at Central Washington University. His current research examines how branding strategies have shaped the relationships between musicians and audiences since 1850, from Jenny Lind to Joan Baez, Tom Waits, and Sufjan Stevens. He has presented his research at national meetings of the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, and at Seattle's Experience Music Project, Yale University, Boston University, and the International Musicological Colloquium in Brno, Czech Republic.
Paul Théberge is a Canada Research Professor cross-appointed to the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, and the School for Studies in Art and Culture (Music) at Carleton University, Ottawa. He has published widely on issues concerning music, technology, and culture and is the author of Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music / Consuming Technology (Wesleyan, 1997) and co-editor of Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). In 2012, he produced and engineered Glenn Gould: The Acoustic Orchestrations, a two-disc set for Sony Classical.
Steve Waksman is Professor of Music and Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor of American Studies at Smith College, where he also chairs the music department. His publications include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999), and This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009). With Reebee Garofalo, he is co-author of the sixth edition of the popular rock history textbook, Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A., with Andy Bennett, he co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Popular Music. Currently, he is writing a new book on the cultural history of live music and performance in the U.S., tentatively titled, "Live Music in America: A History, 1850-2000."
Zachary Wallmark is Assistant Professor of Musicology at SMU Meadows School of the Arts. His current research explores the contribution of timbre to affective response, aesthetic judgment, and empathy in popular music and jazz, using methods from musicology and the cognitive sciences. His work appears in The Dutch Journal of Music Theory, Ethnomusicology Review, Music Perception, Music Research Forum, and Psychology of Music, as well as the Oxford Handbook of Timbre (2018) and the collection Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity (Duke, 2016). He is currently at work on a monograph tentatively titled Nothing but Noise: Timbre and Musical Meaning at the Edge.
Griffin Woodworth is an Assistant Professor of Music in the Commercial Music program at the University of South Carolina Upstate, where he teaches courses on popular music and music technology. Woodworth is currently working on a monograph on the music of the popular recording artist Prince, an artist whose career he avidly followed during his decade-plus residence in Minneapolis before coming to teach at USC Upstate. In addition to his work as a music educator, Griffin plays cello and bass professionally and works as a consultant in the music software industry. In a previous life, Griffin played bass and guitar in the pit-orchestra for the national touring production of "Schoolhouse Rock Live!" the musical. He currently lives in Spartanburg, SC with his wife and their two children.
Simon Zagorski-Thomas is Professor at the London College of Music (University of West London) and co-chairman of the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production. He worked for 25 years as a composer, sound engineer, and producer and is presently conducting research on 21st-century musical practices. His books include The Art of Record Production (Ashgate, 2016), which he co-edited with Simon Frith, and The Musicology of Record Production (Cambridge, 2014; winner of the 2015 IASPM Book Prize).
Albin Zak is a composer, songwriter, record producer, and musicologist. He holds degrees in composition and performance from the New England Conservatory and in musicology from the City University of New York. He is the author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (California, 2001) and I Don't Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America (Michigan, 2010). His recordings include the albums An Average Day, Waywardness and Inspiration, and Villa Maria Road. He is currently Professor of Music at the University at Albany (SUNY).
