Richard and Lillian Ives Faculty Fellow
About
"The Way We Play: Sounding Black American History and Musical Identity"
During my time at the institute for the Humanities, I will be completing final work on my book project tentatively titled The Way We Play: Sounding Black American History and Musical Identity. This book offers a significant methodological intervention into Black music studies by employing detailed music analysis as a way of identifying and theorizing how Blackness is manifested in musical sound. As a transhistorical study of Black American music-making across genre, time period, and location—beginning in the early twentieth century and concluding in the present—I provide a new understanding how Black Americans represent themselves in musical sound. Case studies include: vocalist/composer Alberta Hunter (1895-1984), vocalist/composer/arranger Luther Vandross (1951-2005), composer/pianist/vocalist Patrice Rushen (b. 1954), and trumpeter/composer Marquis Hill (b. 1987). Throughout, I develop and employ interdisciplinary frameworks synthesizing academic music studies, the multidisciplinary field of Black studies, and Peircean semiotics as it has been developed in the field of linguistic anthropology for a new approach to music analytical work in Black music studies.
Jonathan A. Gómez is Assistant Professor of Musicology.
