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Wednesday, April 27, 5pm,
Recital Hall (Music Building)
Guest Lecture and Retirement Tribute to Dr. Gene Cho
Mark Spicer, guest speaker
The Music History, Theory and Ethnomusicology Division pays tribute to Professor Gene Cho upon his retirement after 42 years of teaching at the University of North Texas College of Music.
Mark Spicer is Professor of Music Theory at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He specializes in the reception history and analysis of popular music, especially British pop and rock since the 1960s, and his writings have appeared in a number of scholarly journals and essay collections. His book Sounding Out Pop, co-edited with John Covach, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2010, and he has since edited the volume on Rock Music for the Library of Essays on Popular Music series from Ashgate. Most recently, he completed a three-year term (2013–15) as Associate Editor of Music Theory Spectrum. Among his current and ongoing research projects, he is working on a book that will explore how certain pop and rock musicians since the early 1970s have confronted their anxiety of influence towards the Beatles, provisionally titled In the Beatles’ Wake.
Prof. Spicer served for ten years (2005–15) as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music at Hunter College, and was the 2015 recipient of Hunter’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, he maintains an active parallel career as a professional keyboardist and vocalist, having worked with several groups in the US and the UK since the 1980s. In the early 1990s, he was a founding member of the critically acclaimed group Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks, and can be heard on their first two CDs, On the Blank Generation (1991) and World of Fireworks (1994). He continues to take the stage most weekends with his own “electric R&B” group, the Bernadettes, and with the Christ Church Choir in New Haven.