Friday, 10 November 2023
4:00-5:30 pm, Plaza Ballroom D
Sheraton Downtown Denver Hotel

Join us for a conversation between Reiland Rabaka and Loren Kajikawa. This fund-raising event will benefit the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship for Minority Scholars and the Eileen Southern Travel Fund for minority undergraduate and terminal master’s students to attend the AMS Annual Meeting.

Profs. Rabaka and Kajikawa will engage in a wide-ranging conversation based on their mutual interests in music, history, culture, and race in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. They may explore the nature of an intersectional musicology, innovation and tradition in the musicology of popular music, and the role of music in social movements. Questions from the audience will form an important part of the conversation.

This is a ticketed event.  The $5 minimum donation ($10 at the door) will be split between support for the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship* and the Eileen Southern Travel Grant Fund*.  Larger donations are of course encouraged.

This event is part of the American Musicological Society – Society for Music Theory Joint Annual Meeting but is also designated as a public event. Public events may be attended without registering for the conference. If you would like to attend this event without registering for the Annual Meeting, reserve your spot here.

Reiland Rabaka is the Founder and Director of the Center for African & African American Studies and Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a Research Fellow in the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Professor Rabaka has published 18 books and more than 100 scholarly articles, book chapters, and essays, including Civil Rights Music: The Soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement; Black Power Music!: Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement; Black Women’s Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas; The Hip Hop Movement; Hip Hop’s Amnesia; and Hip Hop’s Inheritance. He is also a poet and musician.

Loren Kajikawa is chair of the music program at The George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. His main area of research and teaching is American music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with special attention to the dynamics of race and politics. His book Sounding Race in Rap Songs (University of California Press, 2015) explores the relationship between rap music’s backing tracks and racial representation. In addition to his publications, Kajikawa is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Society for American Music (Vol. 12-13) and he currently serves as co-editor of “Tracking Pop,” the University of Michigan Press’s series of books about popular music.

*The Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship supports a year of graduate study in music scholarship for a member of a historically underrepresented group.  The Eileen Southern Travel Grants provide support to attend the AMS Annual Meeting to minority undergraduates and terminal master’s degree candidates interested in exploring careers in musicology.