Billy Murray Is My Homeboy

Hi, I'm Jane. It is likely that, if you're reading this and thinking of joining this project, you know me or have known me at some point in the past. For the purposes of introduction, I'm going to give a little blurb about me and my research, where I am in this process, and whatnot, in order to model how we might introduce ourselves.

*cough* you guys do this too, k? *cough*

I fancy myself a historical musicologist, now in my fifth year of grad school, newly ABD'd in July. For those of you not familiar with the discipline, it is a fun little mash-up of music history, music theory, aesthetics, critical theory and, frequently, "area" studies (gender, geographical, etc.). One of the best things about the field, from my perspective, is the increasingly frequent choose-your-own-adventure spin of discipline. For what was initially a very conservative, stodgy field, the variety of methodology and subjects has diversified quite a bit in the last 15-20 years. It's an exciting time to be a music scholar. :) I give you this disciplinary introduction as a way to segue into my own academic perspective. My particular specialization is in twentieth-century American music, with a secondary focus on popular music and technology. I’ve always envisioned my work as interdisciplinary and chose my academic institution IN LARGE PART because of the very open, collegial and interdisciplinary bent of the program. After four years of course work and mentorship from ethnomusicology, music theory, American studies and history faculty, I hope my work displays an awareness and response to these disciplines while being firmly grounded in contemporary musicological practice.

My dissertation is an exploration of Tin Pan Alley between 1890 and 1920, using the construction of the popular music industry and its culture as allegory and model for the processes of assembling an American collective identity at the turn of the twentieth century. In order to do so, my dissertation hopes to ultimately expand and reorient our definition of Tin Pan Alley to include the individuals active within it, their associations with one another and the musical sounds and products they created together. I'm also really interested in addressing the complex web of race, class, gender, and ethnic identities that were (and are) discursively separated, marked, and then collapsed into one another and into a singular "American" identity at the turn of the last century. If this description reeks of post-structuralism and Actor-Network-Theory, well then, bingo. I like Latour. I like Foucault. I don't like Adorno but, I'll be damned if he's not right a bunch of the time.

I'm working on my prospectus right now, and by "working" I mean, I haven't figured out how to turn my seven-page proposal that doesn't really pose the question the way I want to ask it into a fifteen page THIS IS WHAT I'M DOING, K? prospectus. I'd like to have a good first draft by Thanksgiving and a solid document by mid-December, when fellowship applications are due.

HALP?