About this Event
From Daw To Dancefloor: Black Sonic Virtuosity In Jersey Club Music Production
Jasmine Henry, musicologist and sound engineer (University of Pennsylvania)
This talk examines the production of Jersey Club music, a Black EDM genre currently dominating viral social media platforms. Henry recounts her experience taking music production lessons with Jersey Club DJ R3LL. Through these lessons, she identifies a distinct form of “sonic virtuosity” that is central to Black club music and culture. Additionally, she considers how R3LL negotiates his individual creative agency with the emergence of new digital audio technologies, the needs of nightclub dancers, and the cultural expectations of the Jersey Club community. Overall, this talk reveals the important influence Jersey Club artists have had on contemporary digital audio workstation production.
ABOUT THE 2023 COOPER LECTURE SERIES:
Music and Technology
This year’s series of public lectures will focus on different musical technologies, ranging from acoustic to digital and from classical to popular music: the piano, the synthesizer, and the digital audio workstation (DAW). The series will feature distinguished music scholars Jennifer Iverson (University of Chicago) and Jasmine Henry (University of Pennsylvania) as well as Frost faculty Matteo Magarotto.
This series continues in the yearly tradition of public talks established by internationally renowned musicologist Frank Cooper (Frost’s Research Professor Emeritus, Musicology).
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jasmine Henry (she/her) is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include Black electronic dance music, independent music production, and Afrofuturism. Her current book project focuses on how Jersey Club music DJs and dancers navigate the cultural politics of Black club music-making on local, regional, and global levels. Henry’s recent articles and reviews on popular music, race, and production appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Popular Culture Studies Journal. From 2017 to 2022, she served as the Media Lab Director at the Newark School of the Arts, where she provided youth from historically marginalized backgrounds with access to music technologies and industry knowledge
THU / OCT 5, 2023 / 7:30 P.M.
Zoom
FREE
Register for Zoom here.
