About the Contributors
Music Research Annual, Volume 1, 2020
Stephen Davies teaches philosophy at the University of Auckland. His books include Definitions of Art (1991), Musical Meaning and Expression (1994), Musical Works and Performances (2001), The Artful Species (2012), The Philosophy of Art (second edition, 2016), and Adornment: What Self-decoration Tells Us about Who We Are (2020), as well as three volumes of papers published by Oxford University Press (2003, 2007, 2011). He is co-editor of Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to Aesthetics (2009) and of the aesthetics entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Davies is a former President of the American Society for Aesthetics, President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy (New Zealand Division), inaugural Fellow of the New Zealand Academy of the Humanities, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Blake Howe is Paula G. Manship Associate Professor of Music at Louisiana State University. His research interests include music and disability studies, nineteenth-century German song, and film music. He has published on these and other topics in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of Musicology, the Musical Quarterly, and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy. He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, co-author of “Disability and Music” in Oxford Bibliographies Online, and co-convener of the colloquy “On the Disability Aesthetics of Music,” which appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. From 2012 to 2015, he served as co-chair of the Music and Disability Study Group of the American Musicological Society.
Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and co-editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is author of three books, including The Sonic Episteme (2019) and Resilience & Melancholy (2015), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Electronic Dance Music. Her work in popular music, sound studies, feminist theory, and the critical philosophy of race has appeared in The Guardian, LARB, differences, Hypatia, Sounding Out!, and many other publications.
Martin Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at King’s College London. He is an ethnomusicologist who has written extensively on music in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Europe, with a particular emphasis on Turkey and Egypt. Stokes is the author of The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (1992) and The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy and Popular Music in Turkey (2010), and the editor of various edited collections including Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (1992), Islam and Popular Culture (with Karin van Nieuwkerk and Mark LeVine, 2016), and Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World (with Rachel Harris, 2019). He has taught at the Queen’s University of Belfast, the University of Chicago, and the University of Oxford. In 2013, he was the Bloch Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, and in 2017 he gave the IMR Distinguished Lectures at Senate House in London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Hollis Taylor is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. A violinist and composer, zoömusicologist, and ornithologist, she previously held research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, and the University of Technology Sydney. Taylor has an abiding interest in animal aesthetics, and her work confronts and revises the study of birdsong, adding the novel reference point of a musician’s trained ear. She spends months each year in the outback recording Australian songbirds, including the pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis), to whom she has devoted herself since 2005. Taylor performs her (re)compositions of avian songs on violin, and she also rethinks the pied butcherbird repertoire for other human instruments and voices. Supported by a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, her concerto for recorder virtuoso Genevieve Lacey premiered with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in 2017 and was performed by the London Sinfonia in 2019. Her double CD, Absolute Bird, and her monograph, Is Birdsong Music? Outback Encounters with an Australian Songbird, were both released in 2017. Taylor’s practice also takes in sound and radiophonic arts. She is the author of Post Impressions: A Travel Book for Tragic Intellectuals,in which she used text, audio, and video to document Jon Rose and herself using bows to perform music on fences throughout Australia.