American Music Review
Vol. XLIX, Issue 1, Fall 2019
Max Alper is a composer, music technologist, writer, and educator living in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is Professor of Audio Production and Sound Studies at Atlantic University College in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, as well as founder of Sonic Arts For All!, a 501c3 non-profit whose mission is to provide access to music technology education to K-12 and special needs students throughout the country. He is a graduate of the first class of the Sonic Arts MFA program at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, where he studied with David Grubbs, Marina Rosenfeld, and Ben Vida, among others. He has a dog named Bronxy and a couple of cats named Jojo and Pluto.
Mark Burford is Associate Professor of Music and chair of the American Studies program at Reed College. His research and teaching focuses on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German concert music and twentieth-century popular music in the United States, with particular focus on African American music after World War II. He is the author of Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field, released in 2019 by Oxford University Press, and editor of the forthcoming Mahalia Jackson Reader, an anthology of writings on Jackson for Oxford’s Readers on American Musicians series.
Composer, performer, and scholar David Grubbs is professor of music at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and co-director of the former’s M.F.A. programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). His writings on modern American music include Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press, 2014), Now That the Audience is Assembled (Duke University Press, 2018), and the forthcoming The Voice in the Headphones (Duke University Press, 2020).
Alison Walls is a Ph.D. candidate in theatre at The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York. An actor and director from New Zealand, she holds an MA in French from Victoria University of Wellington and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Herpublications include a monograph on nineteenth-century French literature with Peter Lang, articles in The New Zealand Journal of French Studies, Language and Literature, Studies in Musical Theatre, and The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, as well as a chapter in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performances. Her current project examines the “surrogate mother” character in U.S. popular theatre and film from 1939 to 1963.
