#COMBAconference26
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Matthew D. Morrison
Keynote speaking engagements at the conference
Keynote Address
When: March 6th at 7:30pm
Where: Opperman Music Hall
Panel Discussion
When: March 7th at 1:00pm
Where: Dohnányi Recital Hall
Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is an Associate Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He is a musicologist whose research focuses on the relationship between music, identity, performance, as well as property and politics in and beyond American popular culture, with a particular focus on the analysis of race. His published work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, American Music, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, Oxford Handbooks was well as in art forums and publications. He is the author of the book, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (UC Press, 2024), which has been received several accolades, the Woody Guthrie Prize from the Society of American music, awards from the Association of Recorded Sound Collection and the Prose Award for Excellence in the Humanities from the Association of American Publishers, an honorable mention from the Royal Music Association’s Cambridge University Book Prize, was a finalist for the Museum of African-American History Stone Book Award, and was named a “Best Music Book of 2024) by Rolling Stone Magazine. His current research explores the ethics of AI and Intellectual Property in music.
From Blacksoundbook.com
Dr. Morrison's book Blacksound, "explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century".
Dr. Morrison goes further to describe his book saying, "With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake—for creators and audiences alike—in revisiting the long history of American popular music."
For more information please click the link below for the accompanying video description.
