Studying U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century

From the vantage point of 2011, much about the United States and its place in the world feels in flux, whether in the realm of economic power, international standing, demographic profile, or climate change. Instability has also become the norm with respect to the cultural status of American education, the position of the arts and humanities in universities and the culture at large, and the budget forecasts of academic employers. The bottom line, perhaps, is that time will need to pass before we can assess the impact on our professional lives and research choices of such recent events as the “War on Terror,” the economic downturn in 2008, and the digital revolution. A sense of destabilization—of living in a fundamentally different world, the dimensions and implications of which have yet to be discerned—is palpable. Our students arrive multimusical, performing their daily activities against the backdrop of playlists unfixed by national borders or genre boundaries, and their fluid and diverse identities prompt continually refreshed sets of expectations. The way we work has revolutionized as well. Just as digital clouds have vaporized our LP and CD collections so too they deliver an ever-increasing abundance of research and teaching material to our laptops. Ten years ago, few of us had launched PowerPoint, issued a Google search, or felt the necessity of warning our students about the perils of Wikipedia. Indeed, this colloquy was conducted almost exclusively by electronic means, and this sentence was co-written online using a Web-based word processor.