Pop Conference 2016

John Rockwell is an arts critic. At The New York Times he worked as classical music critic, reporter and editor; chief rock critic; European cultural correspondent; editor of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section; arts columnist; and chief dance critic. He also directed the Lincoln Center Festival for its first four years. A prolific freelancer, he has published books on 20th century American composition in all genres, Frank Sinatra and Lars... Read More →

Kate Heidemann is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She researches vocal timbre in popular music, and the relationship between musical sound and social categories like gender, race, and class. Her work includes studies of music by Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and Björk, and she has publications forthcoming in Music Theory Online and Country Boys and... Read More →

Mark C. Samples is Assistant Professor of Music and Coordinator of Music History at Central Washington University. He currently researches the role of commercialism in music, with an emphasis on the branding of music and musicians after 1800, from Jenny Lind to Joan Baez, Tom Waits, and Sufjan Stevens. His essay, “Timbre and Legal Likeness: The Case of Tom Waits,” is forthcoming in the book The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre and... Read More →

Maria Sonevytsky is Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She has published on the racialized accordion in the U.S., post-nuclear folklore in Ukraine, and on doing ethnography in post-Soviet rural Ukraine. She is presently at work on a book tentatively titled, Wild Music: Sound, Sovereignty, and the Ukrainian State. She is also a singer and instrumentalist who has played experimental chamber music, cabaret... Read More →