April 7, 2023 | 3:30PM
Fulton Recital Hall, Goodspeed Hall 4th floor
(The Racialization of) Sound and Intellectual Property within Commercial Popular Music
Matthew D. Morrison
Assistant Professor, The Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
This talk will consider how sound emerges as a source of property to be contained, manipulated, racialized, and distributed within American popular music. The ontology of Intellectual Property and its manifestation within copyright law will be discussed, as well as significant music case studies that demonstrate the ways that race, sound, and CR/IP are tethered within the history of commercial music and its industry.
About Matthew D. Morrison
Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is an Assistant Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University, an. M.A. in Musicology from The Catholic University of America, and was a Presidential music scholar at Morehouse College. He was a Susan McClary and Robert Walser Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies Fellow (2021-2022), where he held residencies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, and the Dahlem Humanities Center at the Freie Universität, Berlin. His published work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, Oxford Handbooks, art forums/publications, and on Oxford University Press's online music blog. Matthew has held fellowships with the American Council of Learned Societies, Harvard University, the American Musicological Society, Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the Center for Popular Music Studies/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Matthew’s book, Blacksound: Making Race in Popular Music in the United States will be available in Spring 2024 with the University of California Press. This book traces the aesthetic and political legacy of blackface minstrelsy in an effort to uncover the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property in the making of global popular music and its industry from the early nineteenth century into the present.