David Brackett is Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University, and Canada Research Chair in Popular Music Studies. His publications include Interpreting Popular Music (2000), The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates, 4th ed. (2020), and Categorizing Sound: Genre in Twentieth-Century Popular Music (2016), winner of the Society for American Music’s Lowens Book Award. Current projects include a special issue devoted to his work on genre, co-edited with Vanessa Blais-Tremblay, that will appear in Fall 2023 in Volume! The French Journal of Popular Music Studies; a volume that he is co-editing with Georgina Born for Duke University Press, titled Genre and Music: New Directions; and a book—with the working title 1966: The Year in Music—that extends the approach to genre developed in Categorizing Sound.
His research has been funded by both the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) of the United States. Brackett is currently working on two SSHRC-funded studies: he is principal investigator for “Popular Music: The Modernist Turn”; and co-applicant, with Lisa Barg (PI) and Richard King (CI) for “Collaborative Creativity: Sound Recording and Music Making.” He was recently appointed a Tier One Canada Research Chair, which will be funded by SSHRC for a seven-year term.
Abstract:
Creative Collaboration in the Recording Studio
The recording studio as a site for creative collaboration has received growing attention over the past two decades by scholars, a range of studio practitioners, and those who combine some or all of these competencies. This presentation builds on recent scholarship via the scholarly collaboration of an interdisciplinary research team consisting of two producer-engineers and two musicologists. Taking a recording session conducted in November 2018 as the material for our study, we focus both on musical interactions and the interpersonal dynamics that affect the flow of various contributions and ideas during the recording process. The material for our analysis will consist of video recordings made during the sessions, which will be supplemented by the recollections of participant-observers.
