Faculty

Matthew Evan Taylor

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor (1980) has been hailed as a “risk taker” (Neil De La Flor, Huffington Post), who has “…wrestled with the societal boundaries of Black artistry only to blast them apart…” (Dr. Kori Hill, I Care if You Listen) by making music that is “insistent and defiant…envelopingly hypnotic” (Alan Young, Lucid Culture). His work includes concert music, such as okussa: for Damascus (2023, commissioned by the Next Festival for Emerging Artists)...

Ken Ueno

A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer, vocalist, improviser, sound artist, and scholar.

Ueno's music celebrates artistic possibilities which are liberated through a Whitmanesque consideration of the embodied practice of unique musical personalities. Much of Ueno’s music is “person-specific” wherein the intricacies of performance practice is brought into focus in the technical achievements of a specific individual fused, inextricably, with that performer’s aura. His artistic mission is to champion sounds that have been overlooked or denied so...

Lester Hu

A historian of music and music theory, I focus my research on music and state-building—empire-building, to be more specific. Empires are by default players and products of transregional processes encompassing diverse peoples, territories, and traditions. Hence the other throughline of my work: a comparative perspective, informed by my current expertise in early modern Europe and late-imperial China (16th to 18th centuries) and by my new pivot to ancient and early imperial China (8...

Marié Abe

I am a scholar of music and sound with ongoing ethnographic commitments in Japan, Okinawa, Ethiopia, and the US. Broadly speaking, my research explores the political and affective affordances of (musical) sounds in contexts ranging from everyday life to social movements, primarily in contemporary Japan. My scholarship is driven by my interest in exploring how auditory culture produces social space, and how sound’s materiality and ephemerality are entangled with affect and sociality. In other words, I investigate how the culturally particular ways in which people listen to and make (musical...

Faculty