Music Professor Publishes Article in Jazz Perspectives

Dr. Kelsey Klotz, lecturer in the Department of Music, has published an article in the journal Jazz Perspectives. “On Musical Value: John Lewis, Structural Listening, and the Politics of Respectability” appears in Volume 11 2018 of the journal, published in October.

A jazz scholar, Dr. Klotz is currently working on a book manuscript titled Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness. The project examines white cool jazz pianist Dave Brubeck’s career, music, and reception in the 1950s and 1960s. By analyzing fan letters, unreleased outtakes, private recordings, business documents, reviews, articles, and interviews, Dr. Klotz uncovers the modes of whiteness inherent in critics’, audiences’, and Brubeck’s mid-century constructions of whiteness. She has articles forthcoming in Dædalus, the Journal of Jazz Studies, and Jazz Perspectives.

This month, she presents her research at two national conferences: She will present “Dave Brubeck in the Living Room: Race, Gender, and Respectability in the Conversation of a ‘New’ Jazz Audition” at the American Musicological Society national conference and “Dave Brubeck, Whiteness, and Cold War Racial Politics” at the Society for Ethnomusicology’s national conference.