Music in Extreme and Non-Traditional Places and Spaces
Even before the widespread adoption of the Internet, musicians in remote and extreme locations organized themselves to share and support each other’s music-making. Now, technology has made these music-making processes easier in some cases and harder in others. I use ethnographic techniques (interviews, fieldwork, observation, and participation) to try to uncover how musicians make music and localize industrial organization processes to fit the particularities of where they live.
Arts Entrepreneurship and Arts Career Pedagogy
Focused training on aesthetic concerns, artistic interpretation, theoretical fundamentals, and historical context are no longer enough to support a professional artist. I am interested in the potential of academic training in the creative and cultural industries to build more resilient artists.
Historical Approaches to the Study of Popular Music
Using archival resources, semiotics, and oral histories, I am interested in the intersection of Business History and Cultural History as they pertain to the way musicians and the people who work with them build markets for fans to consume recorded music. These processes fundamentally changed how listeners understood how music could be heard while also changing the music itself temporally (the classic ‘single’ length being the length of a 45 RPM 7” record with early recording techniques) and aesthetically.
Entrepreneurship and Organization Studies in the Creative and Cultural Industries
Artists and creators are employers, employees, clients, and consumers, just like those we traditionally associate with studying these ideas in ‘traditional’ businesses. I am interested in the places where the creative and cultural industries (CCI) nudge, transform, negate, confirm, or restructure thinking in business scholarship. At the same time, I am interested in how the study of entrepreneurship and organization theory transforms the study of the humanities.