Neumann Lecture on Music: Robert Fink

Neumann Lecture: Robert Fink, What is Playlist Culture?

In the era of streaming music, everyone is a DJ. We are all participants in playlist culture.From the perspective of the work-based musical cultures of the Western tradition, or even the recording-centered monoculture of 20th-century popular music, the new culture of the playlist looks so ephemeral and chaotic that only its most corrosive effects -- on musical forms, on money-making strategies, on modes of listening -- can be tracked and analyzed. But what if we saw the playlist itself as a newly dominant cultural form?

Robert Fink is Professor of Musicology and Music Industry, and serves as Special Academic Senior Associate Dean in The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Trained as a music theorist and musicologist, his primary areas of interest include musical analysis, avant-garde and minimal music, popular music studies, timbre and rhythm in music, and the history of electronic dance music.

He has published widely on contemporary and popular music in academic journals, and is the author of Repeating Ourselves, a 2005 study of American minimal music as cultural practice; and The Relentless Pursuit of Tone, an interdisciplinary survey of research into the “sound” of popular music, awarded the American Musicological Society’s Ruth Solie Prize for best edited collection in 2018.