Raymond Knapp
Professor
Chair
Ph.D., Duke University
knapp@humnet.ucla.edu

Raymond Knapp came to UCLA in 1989, with degrees from Harvard (BA cum laude in music), Radford (MA in composition), and Duke (PhD in musicology). He has authored four books: Brahms and the Challenge of the Symphony (1997), Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler’s Re-Cycled Songs (2003), The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (2005; winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism), and The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (2006). His published essays address a wide range of additional interests, including Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, nationalism, musical allusion, music and identity, and film music, and he is completing a book that considers Haydn and American popular music in the context of German Idealism. He has originated courses on Mozart and on the American Musical, and has recently given seminars on nationalism, Mahler, Haydn, Mozart, absolute music, allusion, and the American musical.

Both in his courses and in his publications, Knapp has led the way in providing internet-based supporting resources. Several years ago, with the support of the UCLA Library, he devised online scrolling analyses for his Beethoven course, and more recently developed a website to deliver streaming audio examples for his two books on the musical (see http://epub.library.ucla.edu/knapp/americanmusical/). A recent essay in Nineteenth-Century Music marked the first time that journal has provided similar support for an article, providing not only audio examples online, but also video clips (see http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/suppl/10.1525/ncm.2005.29.2.142).

Knapp has led many campus-wide committees at UCLA, including the Undergraduate Council’s Curriculum Committee (co-chair, 1999-2001), Undergraduate Council (chair, 2001-03), General Education Governance (chair, 2004-present), the College’s Faculty Executive Committee (Vice Chair, 2004-present), and the steering committee to prepare for UCLA’s reaccreditation (2004-06). He also composes (mostly tonal) music and plays second violin in the Santa Monica Symphony with some skill and great enthusiasm.

Timothy Taylor
Professor
Vice Chair for Graduate Studies
Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
tdtaylor@ucla.edu

Timothy D. Taylor is the author of Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (Routledge, 1997), Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (Routledge, 2001), and numerous articles on various popular and classical musics. His interests include globalization, technology, race, ethnicity, consumption, tourism, and gender. He has received a fellowship from the National Humanities Center, as well as a junior fellowship and the Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. His Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, a book on western representations and appropriations of musics from other cultures will be published early in 2007 by Duke University Press. He is also working on a historical reader of music and technology before World War II; and a history of music used in advertising from early radio to the present.

Olivia Bloechl
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
bloechl@humnet.ucla.edu

Olivia Bloechl completed her Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. Before joining the faculty at UCLA she taught at Bucknell University. She specializes in the early modern music cultures of France, England, and colonial North America, and her research is generally concerned with identity and difference as expressed in music, especially colonial difference. Her work has appeared in the Musical Quarterly, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Journal of Musicology, and is forthcoming in Women and Music (review article) and the Cahiers du Dix-septième. Her forthcoming book, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge, 2007), traces the influence of European colonial representation of Amerindian music on Europe’s own music cultures. She is currently working on a new study of political meanings in French Baroque music. Bloechl is also a pianist and an amateur harpsichordist.

Robert Fink
Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
rfink@humnet.ucla.edu

Robert Fink focuses on music after 1965, with special interests in minimalism, popular music, post-modernism and the canon, and the intersection of cultural and music-analytical theory. Repeating Ourselves, a study of American minimal music as a cultural practice, appeared in 2005 under the imprint of the University of California. Other interests include groove-based popular music, music and technology, psychoanalysis and the hermeneutics of absolute music, and the music of Stravinsky. His work appears in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, American Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Popular Music, Nineteenth-Century Music, ECHO: a music-centered journal, and the collections Beyond Structural Listening and Rethinking Music. Before coming to UCLA, he taught at the Eastman School of Music (1992 - 1997). He was the recipient of an AMS 50 dissertation grant (1990), and, as an outstanding Assistant Professor, the UCLA Dean's Marshall Award in the Humanities (2001). His next major project will be an upbeat book on the death (and transmigration) of classical music in a post-classical world. Recent and unpublished work can be found here.

Professor Fink’s UCLA lecture course on “The History and Practice of Electronic Dance Music” was the first of its kind at a major university; it was named the “Best College Pop Music Class” of 2002 by Spin Magazine. He also lectures on subjects as diverse as 1960s soul music and 19th-century romantic opera. Professor Fink is a frequent public speaker on contemporary art music in Los Angeles, presenting lectures in recent seasons at Disney Hall, the Getty Center, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In Fall 2006 he will be a visiting professor of Music at Yale University in New Haven, CT.

Elisabeth Le Guin
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
leguin@humnet.ucla.edu

Tamara Levitz
Associate Professor
Ph.D., Eastman School of Music
tlevitz@humnet.ucla.edu

Tamara Levitz specializes in musical modernism in Europe and the Americas, and has taught and published in the past on the Weimar Republic, American experimentalism, Cuban modernism, Avant-Garde music after 1945, modern dance, Stravinsky, John Cage, Kurt Weill, and popular music of the 1960s. Her articles have appeared in journals such as ECHO: a music-centered journal and the South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as in collections such as Beyond Structural Listening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing ( California, 2004), Impossible to Hold: Women, Culture and the Sixties ( New York University, 2004), and Amerikanismus/Americanism: Die Suche nach kultureller Identität in der Moderne (Schliengen 2003). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the Humboldt Foundation. She is currently in the final stages of completing a book entitled Haunted Melodies: Transnational Encounters in Paris in the Early 1930s, which retells the story of musical modernism from the perspective of transnational black culture and the theories of bodily expressivity it inspired. This book takes her in the new direction of studying modernism in the Other Atlantic, from Cuba to West Africa.

Susan McClary
Professor
Ph.D., Harvard University
mcclary@humnet.ucla.edu

Susan McClary (Professor of Musicology, UCLA; Ph.D. Harvard, 1976) specializes in the cultural criticism of music, both the European canon and contemporary popular genres. In contrast with an aesthetic tradition that treats music as ineffable and transcendent, her work engages with the signifying dimensions of musical procedures and deals with this elusive medium as a set of social practices. She is best known for her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), which examines cultural constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body in various musical repertories, ranging from early seventeenth-century opera to the songs of Madonna.

McClary is also author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (University of California Press, 2000), Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge University Press, 1992), and coeditor with Richard Leppert of Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge University Press, 1987). In her more recent publications, she explores the many ways in which subjectivities have been construed in music from the sixteenth-century onward. Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (University of California Press, 2004) won the Otto Kinkeldey Prize from the American Musicological Society in 2005, and she is now working on Power and Desire in Seventeenth-Century Music (UC Press).

Before arriving to teach at UCLA in 1994, McClary taught at the University of Minnesota (1977-91) and McGill University (1991-94). She won university-wide teaching awards at University of Minnesota (1987) and UCLA (1997). Since 1993 she has delivered the Bloch Lectures at Berkeley, the Grout Lecture at Cornell, the Hooker Lectures at McMaster, the Rayson Huang Lecture in Hong Kong, the Alfred Hook Lecture at University of Sydney, the Centre CATH Lectures in Leeds, and the Faculty Research Lecture at UCLA; she held residencies throughout the United States as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 1999-2000, and she served as UCLA’s Clark Professor in 2005. Her work has been translated into at least twelve languages.

McClary has chaired the Board of Directors for the American Council of Learned Societies and served on the editorial boards of Signs, Perspectives of New Music, Black Music Research Journal, Women and Music, ECHO, and Music and the Moving Image. While living in Minneapolis, she wrote and produced a music-theater piece, Susanna Does the Elders (1987). McClary received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1995.

Selected Bibliography

Mitchell Morris
Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
mmorris@humnet.ucla.edu

Mitchell Morris specializes in music at the fin-de-siècle, Russian and Soviet music, 20th century American music, opera, rock and soul, and gay/lesbian studies. He has published essays on gay men and opera, disco and progressive rock, musical ethics, and contemporary music in journals such as repercussions and American Music as well as in collections such as Beyond Structural Hearing?, Musicology and Difference, En travesti, and Audible Traces. He is currently preparing a book entitled The Persistence of Sentiment: Essays on Pop Music in the 70s and at work on a project entitled Echo of Wilderness: Music, Nature, and Nation in the United States, 1880–1945.
 

Elizabeth Randell Upton
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
eupton@humnet.ucla.edu

Elizabeth Randell Upton studies medieval music, both in its own time and as rediscovered and revived in succeeding centuries.  Her work focuses primarily on song and the peculiar alchemy produced by combining words and music, particularly the cultural meaning song manufactures and encodes for both historical and modern listeners.  Her Ph.D. dissertation (Chapel Hill, 2001) discussed the Chantilly codex (F-CH 564), the most important collection of late fourteenth-century chansons, and several of her essays on Chantilly topics are in press.  She also has begun work on a new book about the chansons of Guillaume Dufay and 15th century fan culture.  Her other major research interest is film music.  Her recent work on music and Disney animation stems from her undergraduate class “Getting Medieval:  Medievalism and Music in Popular Culture,” in which Walt Disney and J. R. R. Tolkien stand together as the most influential figures interpreting and re-imagining European medieval material in the 20th century.

Robert Walser
Professor
Ph.D., D.M.A., University of Minnesota
walser@humnet.ucla.edu

Robert Walser specializes in jazz and other American popular music. Chair of the Musicology Department from 1998 to 2006, he has also served on the Faculty Executive Committee of the College (2002-04), the Editorial Board of the University of California Press (2001-06), as President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U. S. Branch (2002-04), and as Editor of the journal American Music (1997-2001). In 2002 Walser was the Class of 1960 Fellow at Williams College; a year before that he was the H. Lyman Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor at McMaster University. A recipient of NEH and ACLS Fellowships, he has twice won the Irving Lowens Award for Distinguished Scholarship in American Music. He contributed 28 entries to the New Grove, including the main entry on North American popular music.  His other publications include Running with the Devil:  Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (1993) and Keeping Time:  Readings in Jazz History (1999). 

Selected Bibliography