Microphone check…One, Two…What Is This? Is this thing still on?
With fall beginning and school back in session, we’re getting back into the swing of things at MusiQology.com and working to continue our mission to share the academic study of music in an accessible but relevant and educational way here on the blog.
It seems like graduation day was just here, but we’re thrilled to be back. The start of the semester is a time for a renewal of focus—which for us has meant a re-emphasis on our pedagogical teaching mission as educators. We still want to be covering the news and mass-media goings-on, but we are also going to devote more of our digital column inches to the nitty gritty of scholarship and the academic life.
This past year was one of our most productive ever, headlined by the launch of Dr. Guy’s MusiQology Podcast, curated conversations between Dr. Ramsey and musicians, journalists, and collaborators. These recordings represent a new mode of intervention for us in the domain of public scholarship, and the podcast is just one of a number of projects in the works oriented towards our mission of keeping Philly and the world around us musical! If you haven’t subscribed yet, why not? All seven episodes are streaming free on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud.
With the academic year still new, we thought it appropriate to do a run-down of all the different types of recurring content you should expect in the coming weeks and months. If you are a new reader, this is an opportunity to see the kind of offerings the site can provide. For the old heads, it is a chance to catch something you might have missed.
What’s Going On
What’s Going On is our traditional, semi-regular news aggregator. While we are not in the business of reporting all the news or breaking stories, we think it’s useful to keep our readers updated on relevant music business goings-on, trying to add our big-picture conceptual frame in most cases. The news never happens in a vacuum; our hope is to continue to bring perspective and context to enrich your experience of the news. CLICK HERE FOR A RECENT WHAT’S GOING ON.
#16 Bars
One of the most important aspects of writing about music and popular culture from an academic perspective is the existence of discourse, which to academics might be defined as the social process of constructing knowledge. Social consensus emerges and powerfully holds, often bringing with it the kinds of power relations that our intellectual project seeks to upend or challenge. #16Bars helps readers get a sense of what the discourse around a particular event is by sourcing a diverse collection of reports on the same topic. From there, we can see what is coalescing and what type of responsive work we might need to do next. CLICK HERE FOR A RECENT #16BARS.
Trading Fours
In some ways, Trading Fours is the quintessence of the MusiQology project. The goal here is to reduce the often-overwrought prose of academic speaking and writing, distilling it into a conversation accessible to all. The way it works is simple—each participant can speak no more than four sentences at a time, which leads to readable conversation that forces academics to be judicious and specific with their words. CLICK HERE FOR A RECENT TRADING FOURS.
A Live Supreme
One of the important holdovers from music criticism that we want to continue to emphasize at MusiQology is the live concert review. While the experience of listening to a record through a great pair of speakers (or headphones) is undeniably essential, the collective experience of the live concert offers an altogether different and essential encounter with the cultural and social way music impacts us all. A Live Supreme is a tough genre to master (who wants to take notes during a great jam?), but it is an essential way to think through what music does and a crucial site to ask, in the words of Christopher Small, “Why are these people making this music at this time and in this place?” CLICK HERE FOR A RECENT A LIVE SUPREME.
Fresh Wax
Fresh Wax is our platform for new and emerging writers. The scholarly life is genealogical in function: Senior scholars reproduce and create academic family trees and the next scholarly generation is always looming to improve upon the work of the elders. We want to use MusiQology as a platform for our work but also as a hub for young scholars looking to make their mark. CLICK HERE FOR A RECENT FRESH WAX.
Extended Play Series
Sometimes, a contributor comes to us with a theme or concept that deserves more than a single-article treatment. Giving our contributors the space to explore and develop this type of work is important because the proliferation and justification of concepts is an important skill for academic writing. Like the EP for musicians, these give us, our writers, and our readers the chance to explore themes and concepts, testing them out before delivering the full album. We are always looking for pitches (DM us on Twitter) for new content; the Extended Play Series is a great way to test out case studies for developing an academic journal article. CLICK HERE FOR A RECENT EXTENDED PLAY SERIES.
Visual Goods
Visual Goods is MusiQology’s mixed-media wing, where we use photojournalism and art to explore the relationship between photography and live music. We hope to bring readers into live music venues, rehearsal and performance spaces, and other soundscapes to celebrate and explore the compelling nature of multimedia art. CLICK HERE FOR A RECENT VISUAL GOODS.
Syllabi
A recent addition to our content has been a window into syllabus design. After the popularity and success of projects like the Lemonade Syllabus and the Black Lives Matter Syllabus, more scholars than ever are looking for new and creative approaches to the classroom. Dr. Guy has always tried to bring a novel approach to course design, and we want to make MusiQology a home for creative classroom planning for this semester and beyond. CLICK HERE FOR A RECENT SYLLABUS.
Curated Media Content
Among our many responsibilities, we take seriously the role of curation and supervision of music. A well-designed playlist can speak volumes about a subject, genre, or era, and MusiQology has to be a multi-media enterprise to remain vital and vibrant (more on that later this year). All of our playlists can be found on Spotify and streamed for free; we also post recordings from talks and lectures on our SoundCloud. Usually, the playlists accompany a written piece. CLICK HERE FOR A RECENT CURATED PLAYLIST.
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