SOUND EXPERTISE - THE PODCAST YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW

Op Culture

Oct 1

On July 21st, 2020, William Robin launched Sound Expertise, a deep-dive, nerd-tastic conversation podcast about contemporary scholarship in musicology/ethnomusicology/music-writ-large.

big personal subjective statement:

This is the best piece of long form audio content that has emerged in the pandemic.

Relevant fragments:

I’ve known and admired William since 2007 so, despite being completely saturated with the endless stream of digital content, I listened. Indeed, I pressed play on episode 1 about 10 minutes after arriving back to my New York City apartment after a five month pandemic absence. Life was weird and sweaty in New York City in mid-late July. This podcast helped.
In college, I made a rather under energized attempt at musicology, but never quite had the rigor or academic follow through to add anything meaningful to the department or discipline. Despite that fact, I retain a wonky love of esoteric topics in musicology, and damn does this podcast scratch the itch. However, most of these conversations aren’t esoteric. These conversations are, in fact, searingly relevant to contemporary existence.
To love classical music, western or otherwise, is a complicated matter. It’s a tradition struggling to reorient in a meaningful way to the contemporary moment. Even the best thoughts thought by the best thinkers rarely permeate the mainstream of the art form. Most people aren’t even aware that such radical and rigorous discussion is occurring within classical music. But good conversations are happening and they will find an audience.
Popular facing musicology is at the heart of this project, and that is a wonderful thing. Like, let’s figure out what musicologist actually do so we can start paying attention to them.
I wasn’t familiar with the music of D. Edward Davis previous to this podcast. His contributions both as producer and composer are subtle and excellent.

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I don’t pretend to know Will’s mind but, to me, this podcast exists in a lineage of other great podcasts such as Nadia Sirota’s Meet the Composer and the always interesting Conversations with Tyler from Tyler Cowen at George Mason University.

You should also read Will’s dissertation about Indie Classical Music here. It will make you smarter.

LISTEN!

Here are 3 podcasts to start with. All in season 1 are excellent. Enjoy!

IDENTITY POLITICS AND EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC with GEORGE E. LEWIS