Michael Berry's Blog - Michael Berry

I propose dividing the history of rap scholarship into three eras (as musicologists are inclined to do!).

This is a slightly enlarged version of a public comment that I gave at the school board meeting tonight.

While I was teaching the graduate seminar on being responsible rap scholars, two very different articles about rap crossed my desk at nearly the same time.

This is a response I just submitted for my MLL class in a unit on advocating for family and community engagement in math and science pedagogy. his module landed in my lap at exactly the right time.

I gave a talk to a music appreciation class at a nearby university the other day and I titled the talk “Rap histories and their consequences.”

The readings this week demonstrated that so-called Standard English (SE) is in fact a moving target, a concept that people in positions of power use to maintain their power by excluding those who do not know the rules (see, for example Christensen 1994, p.

I'm in a program to earn an MLL (multi-language learner) endorsement and thought I'd periodically share some of the things I'm learning.

So after a few hours of work, heres’s what I’ve come up with: It’s important to think about who benefits from scholarship on rap music and how they benefit.

One thing that the reviewers noted about my proposed project is that there seems to be two distinct strands of thinking geared toward two different audiences, and they encouraged me to either lean into one or the other or to find a way to make the connect…

I submitted a proposal for a new book about whiteness and rap music.

I covered a ninth-grade English class the other day and they were reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

I’ve had this thing on my mind that someone—alas I can’t remember who—said to me to the effect of “a good administrator will build the master schedule around specialists.”

This is the text of a talk that I gave at a conference that the Seattle Symphony hosted in March 2014.

Gubaidulina’s experience with Astraea broadened her musical horizons in many ways.

Even within a single work we can find different points along this continuum, and this is the case with The hour of the soul.

Once upon a time I wrote an awful lot about Sofia Gubaidulina’s music.

[Uh… I’m not sure where these footnotes went.

In 1961, Rochberg’s 17-year-old son Paul was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

In his book Twelve-Tone Music in America, Joseph Straus cites a number of potentially damning studies that suggest the average listener is in fact unable to perceive the row and its transformations in the abstract (as presented in the examples above) or in

I did my master’s thesis on George Rochberg and have continued to be fascinated by his music.