In March 2023, 12-time Grammy Award winner Taylor Swift broke the Guinness world record for being the only living artist to have ten albums simultaneously on the US Billboard 200 chart. In June 2023, she achieved that milestone again. All told, 33-year-old Swift has broken close to 100 Guinness records, many of which were set by her in the first place.
Swift’s prolific career and her influence on popular culture are impossible to condense into any meaningful statistics, but to be sure, the collective impact is as profound as it is complex. To help us dig into major themes within the oeuvre of Taylor Swift, the Arlington Museum of Art is thrilled to welcome three music experts for our next Articulate Lecture Series event.
Although this event is free, pre-registration is required because space is limited. No walk-ins, please!
Joining the AMA are Dr. Christa Anne Bentley, Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Arkansas; Dr. Chelsea Burns, Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin; and Dr. Paula Clare Harper, Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. Moderating the conversation will be Lacey Gee of 13: A Taylor Swift Fan Podcast.
Our conversation is inspired by an upcoming book entitled, Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans. The expected release date is late 2024. The book is co-edited by:
Dr. Christa Anne Bentley, Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Arkansas
Dr. Kate Galloway, Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology, Sound Studies, and Games at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Dr. Paula Clare Harper, Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago
This edited collection uses Swift as a prism through which to analyze a variety of timely and intersecting issues in contemporary digital culture and music: from songwriting and copyright, to constructions of race and gender, to fandom and digital reception.
Dr. Christa Anne Bentley is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Arkansas. Her research focuses on the politics of music at the intersection of folk and popular song. Her current research examines the confessional songwriting of the 1970s singer-songwriter movement, which is the subject of her first book Feeling Free: The Politics of the Singer-Songwriter Movement in the United States (under contract, University of Michigan Press). This project investigates how singer-songwriters provided a new language of musical protest that intersected with 1970s social movements—including the women’s movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, environmentalism, and Black freedom—arguing that within the context of the Nixon Era, the singer-songwriter’s confessional songs emerged as a highly politicized form of communication. This research has also led to a published chapter in the Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (2016) and a collaboration with the Grammy Museum, California Dreamin’: The Sounds of Laurel Canyon (2014).
Her extended research looks at singer-songwriters in the 21st century, in both folk and pop contexts. She is co-editing a collection titled Taylor Swift: The Song, The Star, The Fans (under contract, Routledge) that emerged out of a 2021 virtual study day dedicated to the artist. The event drew 300 registered attendees and the resulting collection brings together multi-disciplinary perspectives from an international cohort of authors.
Dr. Chelsea Burns is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to arriving at the University of Texas, she was Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music, and she previously taught in the music department at Harvard University. Her research interests include Latin American modernist concert music as well as bluegrass, country, and old-time musics. She is especially interested in the ways that contexts—economic, political, material—affect analytical interpretation. Her research suggests that such contextual understanding shapes analysis in critical ways, at times undermining or reversing prevailing musical interpretations. Her work touches on issues of race, postcoloniality, instrumental technologies, and expressions of privilege and class, among others.
Professor Burns has presented papers at national conferences of the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the US chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the Latin American Studies Association. Recent and forthcoming publications address issues of exoticism and modernism in relation to Brazilian indigeneity, the pedal steel guitar in 1960s country music, genre and race in 1970s country music, and pedagogical considerations for the undergraduate music-theory core curriculum. She is also an avid bluegrass player, and enjoys being part of the Austin bluegrass scene.
Dr. Paula Clare Harper is a musicologist and Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. She researches music, sound, and the internet. She is interested in putting digital ephemera and oddities into broader context, in hearing the musicality of online meme cultures, and in tracking music’s creation and circulation across digital platforms and communities.
Her current book project, Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms, documents the early 21st-century rise of ubiquitous social media platforms through an understanding of them as mechanisms for facilitating virality—a virality that is deeply sonic, and that can be productively analyzed as musicking. From Geocities and Webrings to Twitter and TikTok, the book charts a trajectory in which unpredictable virtual landscapes were tamed into entrenched channels and pathways, through exchanges between the vernacular work of digital actors and the top-down corporate attempts to capture, corral, and control their viral participatory practices.
Additionally, Paula’s research interests in music, gender, and digital fandom intersect in ongoing work on pop divas including Beyoncé and Taylor Swift; after co-convening the summer 2021 “Taylor Swift Study Day: Eras, Narrative, Digital Music and Media” conference, she is now co-editing the volume Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans. This edited collection uses Swift as a prism through which to analyze a variety of timely and intersecting issues in contemporary digital culture and music—from songwriting and copyright, to constructions of race and gender, to fandom and digital reception.
OUR MODERATOR: Lacey Gee, one of the hosts of 13: A Taylor Swift Fan Podcast, went to a prestigious community college before beginning her long standing career in radio and podcasting. While working on the Kidd Kraddick Morning Show, she met likeminded Swifties who decided to take their passion to the next level… and that’s how 13: A Taylor Swift Fan Podcast was born.
The podcast, which also features Nick Adams, Ana Castillejos and Amy Nichols, breaks down a Taylor Swift song every episode. They just wrapped up the Midnights era and are currently in the Speak Now era. They also clown hard while discussing all the theories and Easter eggs. It’s hard work being a Swiftie! You can find 13: A Taylor Swift Fan Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
ARTICULATE, a series of in-person talks by experts, is a collaborative programming series by the Arlington Museum of Art dedicated to nurturing life-long art lovers, building community through conversation, and inspiring the next generation of creatives.
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