📅&Բ;Date: Friday, October 3, 2025
🕒&Բ;Start Time: 4:00 PM
📍&Բ;Location: Harkness Chapel, Classroom
👥&Բ;Who: Free | Open to the public
Our weekly Friday colloquia showcase current research by distinguished visiting scholars alongside our own faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education. All are welcome!
A brief reception follows each talk to keep the conversation going.
About The Talk
“Reproducing Inequality in Pop Music Scholarship”
Many music scholars have openly embraced ideas about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Pop music scholars, in particular, are uniquely positioned to do so because our canons often include more women, queer and gender-diverse people, and people of color. Even still, such measures have focused on representation of marginalized identities at the expense of pursuing transformative justice. Pop music studies has turned away from its more Marxist roots to increasingly center the music of extremely successful (and therefore, extremely wealthy) Black, Indigenous, and queer musicians and musicians of color. This is no small part due to the marginalization of pop music scholarship in higher education. Poptimism–the desire to legitimize more commercial music–was a necessary reaction against rockism and the stronghold of Western classical music in college curriculum. However, as the scholarship of Timothy Taylor, Elena Razlogova, Eric Drott, Matt Stahl, and Andrew DeWaard has made abundantly clear, the popular music industry replicates economic structures that make it virtually impossible to make a living as a musician. Instead a select few reach and stay at the top, accruing massive amounts of wealth. With this in mind, I question the celebration of what Olúfémi O. Táíwaò calls the “advantaged few” as symbols of DEI, even (and perhaps especially) when their performances are critical of racism, misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia. Their recordings and media visibility might offer small representational victories, but they ultimately reinforce the continued economic injustices of capitalism.
About The Speaker
Steph Doktor is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Temple University, and her research and teaching ask, “How can we hear inequality?” Her current book project, Reconstructing Whiteness: Race in the Early Jazz Marketplace (under contract with University of California Press), examines how white Americans used jazz to rehearse racial privilege. Doktor’s research has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, Jazz & Culture, and American Music, and her article, “Finding Florence Mills” received the 2022 Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society of American Music. She is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Jazz Studies and co-author of Norton’s textbooks, Jazz and Jazz Essentials (forthcoming).
Venue
Harkness Classroom, located inside Harkness Chapel, serves as both a lecture hall for large classes and a backstage area during events. It is also the meeting location for the CWRU Music Colloquium Series.
Health + Safety
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