Sound Expertise
Conversations with scholars about music, hosted by musicologist Will Robin and produced by D. Edward Davis
Episodes
51 episodes
The Future of Opera with Yuval Sharon
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 are often stuck in the past....
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Season 4
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Episode 1
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48:45
Season 4 Trailer!!
WE'RE SO BACK. Our fourth and final season begins October 15. Seeya then!soundexpertise.org
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Season 4
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2:37
Music Theory's Racism Problem with Philip Ewell
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 thrust into the national spotl...
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58:22
The Science of Silence with Chaz Firestone
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, what they mean for the fields ...
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Season 3
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Episode 15
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35:58
Curating Black Musical History with Dwandalyn Reece
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 framework for the public to ...
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Season 3
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Episode 14
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43:40
Hip-Hop and Friendship on Death Row with Alim Braxton and Mark Katz
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 up a correspondence, an...
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Season 3
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Episode 13
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55:12
Reviving Julius Eastman with Mary Jane Leach
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 collected manuscripts and recor...
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Season 3
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Episode 12
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38:53
Doing Public Musicology with Douglas Shadle
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 conversation, he talks about ...
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Season 3
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Episode 11
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51:13
Bach Scandals, Jug Bands, and Vexations with Joshua Rifkin
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 importantly, totally upended the conv...
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Season 3
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Episode 10
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1:16:24
What Bossa Nova Means with Kaleb Goldschmitt
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 Brazilian culture...
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Season 3
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Episode 9
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49:03
Appropriation and Indigenous Music with Dylan Robinson
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 would it mean to redress suc...
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Season 3
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Episode 8
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48:27
Philosophy and Vibes with Robin James
"Music and philosophy" is often about Nietzsche and Wagner, or Kant and Mozart. But, in Robin James's work, it can also be about pop, and feminist theory, and Peloton playlists. A conversation about Dr. James's approach towards philosophy, with...
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Season 3
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Episode 7
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43:53
Retelling Beethoven's Story with Laura Tunbridge
There are approximately one bajillion biographies of Beethoven: do we need really another one? In fact, we do, because Laura Tunbridge has written an engrossing, provocative, and genuinely fresh book about Beethoven's life and times. A conversa...
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Season 3
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Episode 6
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39:24
Music in Slavery's Archives with Maria Ryan
What does it mean to search for music-making in the archives of slavery? Maria Ryan studies African-descended musicians and listeners in the colonial Caribbean, and her research is fraught with ethical and logistical challenges. A convers...
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Season 3
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Episode 5
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49:49
Music, War, and Ukraine with Maria Sonevytsky and Oksana Nesterenko
What does it mean to be a scholar when the culture you study is under attack? Maria Sonevytsky and Oksana Nesterenko work on Ukrainian music, and their lives have changed profoundly in the last year. A conversation about the Ukrainian avant-gar...
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Season 3
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Episode 4
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56:43
Soviet Sounds (But Not Shostakovich) with Gabrielle Cornish
The story of music in the Soviet Union isn't just about Shostakovich and Stalin -- sometimes, it's not about composers at all. Gabrielle Cornish writes about a different kind of socialist sound: noise abatement policy, pop music, and even...
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Season 3
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Episode 3
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52:05
The Paradoxes of Black Classical Music with Kira Thurman
The African-American pianist Hazel Harrison played with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1904, and was promptly forgotten. But Kira Thurman remembers. Her incredible book Singing Like Germans tells the rich, textured stories of Black classic...
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Season 3
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Episode 2
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54:39
Approaching Joni Mitchell with Ann Powers
Writing a biography isn't easy, especially when it's of a living person, and especially when that living person is an epochal, oft-mythologized musician like Joni Mitchell. But Ann Powers, one of my absolute favorite music critics, has been doi...
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Season 3
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Episode 1
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59:37
Season 3 Trailer!!!
Finally, Sound Expertise returns! Season 3 begins on May 16, and it's our biggest and most ambitious to date: a full summer of interviews with music scholars about their research, and why it matters.Check out past episodes a...
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Season 3
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2:18
Talking Minimalism with Kerry O'Brien and Will Robin
We're almost back -- Season 3 will debut in just a few weeks! Before then, one final bonus episode: our great producer D. Edward Davis interviews Will and co-author Kerry O'Brien about their new book ...
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Season 3
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Episode 0
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51:30
The Impossibility of Opera with Matthew Aucoin
Another bonus episode! A conversation with composer Matthew Aucoin, whose opera Euridice had a run at the Met last month, and who just wrote a new book about the history and culture of opera,
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Season 2
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Episode 0
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41:59
R. Murray Schafer's Legacy with Phantom Power
Check out this episode of the great podcast Phantom Power, on the life and work of composer R. Murray Schafer. You can check out
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Season 2
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Episode 0
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36:19
Our Pandemic Year
Eighteen music scholars describe their experiences of the pandemic."On the Banks of the Wabash" was arranged and performed by D. Edward Davis.More over at soundexpertise.org!Questi...
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Season 2
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57:57
The Musicologist as Contrarian with Richard Taruskin
For our Season 2 finale, a wide-ranging conversation with the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin. We talk about his trajectory, from playing early music and studying Russian opera to writing the Oxford History of Western Music and penning po...
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Season 2
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Episode 14
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58:39
Cold War Money and New Music with Eduardo Herrera and Michael Uy
How did Cold War money shape the musical avant-garde? What were the roles of experts, elites, and the Rockefeller Foundation in shaping the cultural politics of new music––in the era of serial tyranny and Milton Babbitt's "Who Cares If You List...
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Season 2
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Episode 13
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1:00:37