ACTOR Speaker Series:
Afrological Perpectives on Timbre & Orchestration
Matthew D. Morrison
The Timbre of Early Blackface in the Making of (Black) Americana
This talk will consider how the timbre of string band music has been racialized through the legacy of blackface, while recovering some of the performed histories (past and present) of Black string band musicians.
Matthew D. Morrison is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, and is an Assistant Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Matthew received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in musicology, has held the Susan McClary and Robert Walser American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, as well as fellowships at institutions such as Harvard, the Library of Congress, The University of Edinburgh, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame/Center for Popular Music Studies. His book, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States, is forthcoming with the University of California Press. His work has appeared in numerous publications, such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Oxford Handbook of Music and Philosophy, American Music, and he contributes creatively as a dramaturg and artistic consultant within the arts.
