Biography:
I studied at the University of Cambridge (PhD 2015, King’s College), the University of York (MRes 2010), and the University of Oxford (BA 2009, Christ Church), where I received the Gibbs Prize.
My interests extend from the late 19th century up to the present, with a particular focus on popular culture and experimentalism. I've published essays in leading journals on a wide range of topics from the early work of Steve Reich to folk and blues revivalism, as well as shorter pieces on populism, higher education, and fascism. More recently I’ve become interested in digital culture, principally vaporwave and AI composition (you can find my recent interview with vaporwave producer Strawberry Illuminati here). Forthcoming projects include an edited volume entitled Remixing Music Studies: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Cook and a monograph on folk song and the political imagination.
Before taking up a four-year Junior Research Fellowship in January 2017 I spent a year as a Temporary Lecturer at Cambridge and received the Faculty of Music’s Teaching Prize for courses on 1960s countercultures and popular music of the black Atlantic.
Full pdfs of most of my essays are available on my website, but do email me (rgc30@cam.ac.uk) if you’d like copies of anything.
Colleges, Departments and Institutes
Teaching
- MPhil, Musicology and its Debates
- IB / II, Dissertation
Key Publications
Books
- The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (University of California Press, under review).
- Remixing Music Studies: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Cook, ed. Ross Cole, Matthew Pritchard, Ananay Aguilar, and Eric Clarke (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming).
Journal Articles
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'Popular Song and the Poetics of Experience.' Journal of the Royal Musical Association (forthcoming).
- 'Vaporwave a e s t h e t i c s: Internet Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse.' ASAP/Journal (forthcoming).
- ‘The Problem with AI Music: Song and Cyborg Creativity in the Digital Age.' Popular Music (forthcoming).
- 'On the Politics of Folk Song Theory in Edwardian England.' Ethnomusicology, 63/1 (2019): 19–42.
- 'Vernacular Song and the Folkloric Imagination at the Fin de Siècle.' 19th-Century Music, 42/2 (2018): 73–95.
- 'Notes on Troubling "the Popular".' Popular Music, 37/3 (2018): 392–414.
- 'Mastery and Masquerade in the Transatlantic Blues Revival.' Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 143/1 (2018): 173–210.
- 'Industrial Balladry, Mass Culture, and the Politics of Realism in Cold War Britain.' Journal of Musicology, 34/3 (2017): 354–390.
- '"Sound Effects (O.K., Music)": Steve Reich and the Visual Arts in New York City, 1966–68.' Twentieth-Century Music, 11/2 (2014): 217–244.
- '"Fun, Yes, but Music?" Steve Reich and the San Francisco Bay Area’s Cultural Nexus, 1962–65.' Journal of the Society for American Music, 6/3 (2012): 315–348.
Book Chapters
- 'Towards an Ecological History of Music.' In Remixing Music Studies, ed. Ross Cole, Matthew Pritchard, Ananay Aguilar, and Eric Clarke (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), forthcoming.
- 'Traversing the Great Divide? Stravinsky, Modernism, and Mass Culture.' In Stravinsky in Context, ed. Graham Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), forthcoming.
- '"Join that Troubled Chorus": Nick Cave, the Bad Seeds, and the Blues.' In Mute Records: Artists, Business, History, ed. Zuleika Beaven, Marcus O’Dair, and Richard Osborne (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
Other
- Book review: 'Rethinking Reich edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn.' Music & Letters (forthcoming).
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‘Turning Trash into Mantras: An Interview with Vaporwave Producer Strawberry Illuminati.’ ASAP/J online open-access Feature, 9 January 2020.
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‘Folk Music and Fascism: A Divisive History.’ Musicology Now, 19 February 2019.
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‘Who are the General Rippers of Higher Education?’ Times Higher Education, 19 November 2018.
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‘The Threat of the Popular.’ Faculty of Music Research Blog, University of Cambridge, 19 October 2018.
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Book review: ‘Popular Music Matters: Essays in Honour of Simon Frith edited by Lee Marshall and Dave Laing.’ Music & Letters, 97/3 (2016): 532–34.
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Book review: ‘Pioneers of the Blues Revival by Steve Cushing.’ Music & Letters, 96/4 (2015): 679–81.
