Matthew Morrison was surrounded by music from a young age. “I grew up hearing my great aunts and mother sing in operatic styles within the Black AME [African Methodist Episcopal] tradition,” the violinist recalls of his childhood in Charlotte, North Carolina. “From gospel choir at my home church to chamber choir, school, and then the Morehouse Glee Club in college, I was perpetually playing in orchestras and chamber ensembles.” Upon completing his violin and conducting studies at Morehouse, Morrison began teaching middle school and high school orchestra students in Dekalb County, Atlanta.
His love of teaching led him to pursue a PhD in musicology at Columbia University, culminating in a dissertation which informs his new book Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States. “I took incredibly revelatory courses with brilliant women,” he says, referring to scholars including Saidiya Hartman, Daphne Brooks, and Ellie Hisama. “They helped me think critically about the relationship between identity, performance, sound, race, slavery, and so much more.” Launching this month, his book follows the roots of the popular music and entertainment industries back to blackface and slavery.
“It got me thinking about the legacies of slavery and minstrelsy, as well as the intangible and ephemeral aspects of performance like sound and movement,” he says, tying these ideas back to how we consume and understand music today. Researching the relationship between identity, performance, property, copyright law, and inequities in the world of American popular music, Morrison is preparing the music industry’s next generation at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.
By training students to unpack, contextualize, and critically assess popular music, Morrison provides much needed context for those who will ultimately run the business. His courses span from the study of queer popular music to Motown’s connection with the Civil Rights Movement. “I want my students to make informed decisions and help them navigate and help change this exploitative model,” he says. “After you leave my class, you won’t be able to ignore the facts.”
Professor Morrison's Dream Syllabus
“‘Blacksound’ [a new concept coined and developed by Morrison], traces the history of how specific aesthetics and sounds of commercial popular music are based on real and imagined performances of Black people. This is where the question of property and ownership in the history of popular music comes in. When blackface begins in minstrel shows, during slavery, primarily white men darken their faces to perform Irish, English, and Scottish folk tunes with racialized sounds and movements based on their observations of Black performers.
This pre-existing structure serves as the foundation of the US’s contemporary commercial music industry. At the turn of the 19th century, the phonograph emerged and copyright laws came into play. Black sounds [the myriad sounds created by Black people] were co-opted, repackaged, patented and now a source of profit for the American music industry. Even today, this multibillion-dollar industry is rooted in innovations in Black musical practice. It’s based on genres created and nurtured by Black performers. In writing ‘Blacksound’, I had to sit with the complexity of exploitation and liberation [depending on who is performing and who is listening] happening at the same time.”
“There would be no rock and roll without Sister Rosetta Tharpe. In 2018, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Every rock and roller from Elvis Presley to Chuck Berry to Little Richard has mentioned learning directly from her. She was a queer Black woman and a gospel musician from the Pentecostal Holiness tradition, which is all about ecstatic expressions of veneration towards God. She brought heavy distortion on the electric guitar into her music, which was revolutionary. She also created the aesthetics of rock and roll from the growls and hollers in her performances to her tour bus, which was a new idea. And you see it in this clip of her performing ‘Didn’t It Rain’.”
“This is just a gorgeous, devastating, haunting book. Patrick Chamoiseau is known for his exquisite literary style. I read this book as I was writing ‘Blacksound’. It's important to understand the context of slavery in the Americas to understand my book. Chamoiseau's work forces you to viscerally sit with the experiences of enslaved people without the possibility of ever actually being able to do that. There's also a lot of description of sound in the book. Whether it's a spiritual [a type of religious folk song], or listening out for dogs, or listening out for the enslaver, sound is really important.”
“Tanisha Ford is a scholar of fashion and a history professor at CUNY Graduate Center. In this book, she maps out the life of Mollie Moon, who was an organizer and really one of the first influencers of the civil rights movement. To understand the major events of this era, you have to read about Mollie Moon. How did the 1963 March on Washington happen in the first place? Well, there were numerous fundraisers through the National Urban League Guild, many of which were led by Mollie Moon and her Beaux Arts Ball. She and her cohort of Black women socialites were even able to bring the Rockefellers into the movement and events, alongside working-class Black Americans. ‘Our Secret Society’ is a great example of how to use extensive archival research to tell a story that has largely been erased because of sexism, racism, and misogyny.”
“I took one of Saidiya Hartman’s classes at Columbia called Haunted Visualities: the Sight and Senses of Race. She taught me that even if we think we know what happened in a given time period, we really don't. You can have a piece of sheet music from the 1920s, but that doesn’t tell us what any one performance was like. There were many factors involved in that live performance—most of them ephemeral.
Saidiya Hartman developed the concept of critical fabulation, a historical literary method backed by deep archival research. This methodology allows one to make critical propositions about what a particular event, a setting, or a person's life may have been like. We have lost so much information about what Black life was like because we don’t have that ephemera. That’s a result of racism that precludes minorities from being included in archives in the first place.
We know that Gladys Bentley—a queer blues performer in the book—is a real person. We know from photos and other sources that Bentley challenged gender norms and expectations [she was known to wear ‘men's clothing’—suits, top hats, etc.]. Saidiya creates an unfolding that allows us to imagine figures like her even if we don’t have extensive documentation for them.”