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About Kristen Turner

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. She co-authored Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher’s Guide (Routledge, 2022) with Horace Maxile. Her research on U.S. operatic culture and popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century has appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, the Journal of Musicological Research, and a number of collected editions including the Cambridge Companion to Gershwin (CUP, 2019), and Carmen Abroad: Bizet’s Opera on the Global Stage (CUP, 2019) which received the 2021 RMA/Cambridge University Press Outstanding Edited Collection Book Prize. She is past president of the AMS-Southeast Chapter and currently serves on the Society of American Music’s Board of Trustees.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

NBN Episodes hosted by Kristen:

Music November 15, 2023

Musical Migration and Imperial New York

Early Cold War Scenes

Brigid Cohen

Hosted by Kristen Turner
The heart of Brigid Cohen’s Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes (University of Chicago Press, 2022) are the connections forged and broken amid the dislocations caused …
Music May 3, 2023

On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone

Philip Ewell

Hosted by Kristen Turner
On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press, 2023) by Philip Ewell is an unflinching look at white supremacy and the academy, specifically in the …
Music March 11, 2023

Sportin' Life

John W. Bubbles, an American Classic

Brian Harker

Hosted by Kristen Turner
John W. Bubbles was an actor, singer, comedian, and most importantly, a dancer. Born in 1902, Bubbles was an innovator in the jazz tap style and half of the great …
Music February 14, 2023

Queer Voices in Hip Hop

Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance

Lauron J. Kehrer

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual …
Music December 8, 2022

An American Singing Heritage

Songs from the British-Irish-American Oral Tradition as Recorded in the Early Twentieth Century

Norm Cohen, Carson Cohen, and Anne Dhu McLucas

Hosted by Kristen Turner
The Music of the United States of America Series of musical editions is a monumental undertaking funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities with financial and organizational support from …
Music September 19, 2022

My Old Kentucky Home

The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song

Emily Bingham

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Any song as old and as familiar as “My Old Kentucky Home” is bound to have accrued many different meanings and an interesting history. Emily Bingham’s book, My Old Kentucky …
Music September 2, 2022

O Say Can You Hear?

A Cultural Biography of the Star-Spangled Banner

Mark Clague

Hosted by Kristen Turner
The national anthem of the United States is familiar around the world from Olympic medal ceremonies and American patriotic celebrations. Like anything that is over 200 years old, the meaning …
Music July 11, 2022

Freedom Girls

Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop

Alexandra Apolloni

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Alexandra M. Apolloni is about how the vocal performances of girl singers in 1960s Britain defined—and sometimes …
Music June 21, 2022

Singing Like Germans

Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms

Kira Thurman

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman (Cornell University Press, 2021) is a truly interdisciplinary study. Dr. Thurman’s work sits at …
Music May 11, 2022

From Servant to Savant

Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution

Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Today’s copyright laws are predicated on the idea that music is intellectual property; a commodity that has value to its creator and to its publisher. But, how did that concept …
Music April 6, 2022

The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France

Louis K. Epstein

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Patronage has long been an important topic of study in musicology, but is much more likely to be one that specialists in medieval or renaissance music research. In The Creative …
Music February 9, 2022

This Is America

Race, Gender, and Politics in America's Musical Landscape

Katie Rios

Hosted by Kristen Turner
“This is America”: Race Gender and Politics in America’s Musical Landscape by Katie Rios (Lexington Books, 2021) examines an eclectic mix of different artists and cultural products, from Laurie Anderson …
Music January 6, 2022

Lying in the Middle

Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America

Jake Johnson

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Jake Johnson, author of Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America (University of Illinois Press, 2021) takes as his subject the artifice of musicals—no …
Music December 20, 2021

Instruments of Empire

Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music During US Colonization of the Philippines

Mary Talusan

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines published in 2021 by the University Press of Mississippi by Mary Talusan focuses on …
Music October 29, 2021

Industry

Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace

William Robin

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Presenting eclectic, irreverent marathons of experimental music in crumbling venues on the Lower East Side, Bang on a Can sold out concerts for a genre that had been long considered …
Music June 24, 2021

George Frederick Bristow

Katherine K. Preston

Hosted by Kristen Turner
George Frederick Bristow, born in 1825, was a significant musical figure in the United States from the 1850s until his death in 1898. Now, almost one hundred years after his …
Music June 11, 2021

Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony

Douglas W. Shadle

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Most music students have been taught that the New World Symphony was the first piece of classical music written in an American national style which Antonín Dvorák invented when he …
Music May 28, 2021

Bossa Mundo

Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries

K. E. Goldschmitt

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2020) takes on the circulation of Brazilian music in the Global North since the 1960s. The challenge faced by Brazilian …
Music May 4, 2021

Black Diamond Queens

African American Women and Rock and Roll

Maureen Mahon

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Maureen Mahon’s book, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (Duke University Press, 2020), focuses on the contributions to rock and roll by African American women from …
Music April 9, 2021

Ballet in the Cold War

A Soviet-American Exchange

Anne Searcy

Hosted by Kristen Turner
During the Cold War, cultural diplomacy was one way that the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union tried to cultivate goodwill towards their countries. As Anne Searcy …
Music March 15, 2021

Appalachian Spring

Original Ballet Version

J. DeLapp-Birkett and Aaron Sherber

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Premiered in 1944, Appalachian Spring is a ballet developed in a close collaboration between the composer Aaron Copland and choreographer Martha Graham. It is one of Copland’s most famous compositions …
Music February 8, 2021

Resonant Recoveries

French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars

Jillian C. Rogers

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Understanding how people cope with large-scale traumatic events has become more urgent as we continue to cope with the effects of the pandemic. In Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma …
Music January 26, 2021

Musical Solidarities

Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland

Andrea Bohlman

Hosted by Kristen Turner
Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland (Oxford University Press, 2020) by Andrea Bohlman is a study of the music of dissent and protest during the Solidarity …
Music December 14, 2020

How Belfast Got the Blues

A Cultural History of Popular Music in The 1960s

Noel Mclaughlin and Joanna Braniff

Hosted by Kristen Turner
There is no shortage of books about the British Invasion or the history of R&B and the Blues in the United Kingdom. Belfast might seem like something of a peripheral …