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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:
February 24, 2026
The Resounding Revolution
What happened to freedom singing after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination? Stephen Stacks considers this question in The Resounding Revolution: F…
January 19, 2026
Formulating Foster
Stephen C. Foster (1826–1864) was a prolific song composer. A few of his minstrel tunes have become so enmeshed in American musical culture that they …
December 10, 2025
Opera Parody Songs of Blackface Minstrels (1844–1860)
Minstrelsy is often called the first American popular entertainment form. Minstrel shows presented musical, dance, and entertainment styles that conti…
November 15, 2025
Dreaming in Ensemble
Recently, musicologists and others have started writing about Black participation in opera. Lucy Caplan’s Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Tran…
October 9, 2025
Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives
In the late 1930s, fieldworkers with the Works Progress Administration interviewed about 3,500 formerly enslaved people resulting in approximately 20,…
September 27, 2025
Taylor Swift
Only 35 years old, Taylor Swift has already had a long career and is a pop culture icon. Her music and career are reported on by the world’s press, an…
July 25, 2025
New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859
Jazz is the music that many people associate with New Orleans. But before there was jazz in New Orleans there was opera. It was the only city in the U…
June 21, 2025
Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades That Changed a Country and Its Sounds
Michael Broyles examines a wide variety of musical, technological, and social currents that helped to shape American music in Revolutions in American …
June 8, 2025
William L. Dawson
William L. Dawson (University of Illinois Press, 2024) by Gwynne Kuhner Brown is a biography of the Black American composer, conductor and pedagogue. …
June 2, 2025
Sound Pedagogy
Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music (University of Illinois Press, 2024) is a collected edition about Pedagogies of Care edited by Colleen Renihan, …
March 5, 2025
Yankee Doodle Dandy
George M. Cohan was one of those rare Broadway figures who was a composer, lyricist, playwright, performer, director, theater owner, and star actor. H…
February 7, 2025
South Side Impresarios
South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene by Samantha Ege (University of Illinois Press, 2014) is a collectiv…
January 20, 2025
Women in American Operas of The 1950s
The 1950s looks placid from the outside, but underneath that calm post-war exterior roiled the intellectual and activist beginnings of the political m…
October 25, 2024
Opera for Everyone
Every year a relatively small number of canonic operas are produced around the world. Many companies shy away from new works, afraid of alienating a p…
July 15, 2024
The Meaning of Soul
Soul is one of those concepts that is often evoked, but rarely satisfactorily defined. In The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 19…
July 7, 2024
The Possibility Machine
Las Vegas is a place the American dream made; a city built in the middle of desert visited by millions of people every year hoping to make their dream…
May 12, 2024
Circle of Winners
Founded in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation provides support to what their current website says are "exceptional individuals in pur…
April 27, 2024
Imagining Musical Pasts
Imagining Musical Pasts: the Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson University Press, 2023) by Kr…
March 12, 2024
Becoming Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) was one of America’s greatest musicians. In this major biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer who Transforme…
February 3, 2024
The Beat Cop
Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) was a Chicago police officer and a folk music collector. Michael O’Malley connects these two seemingly unrelated activitie…
December 18, 2023
T.O.B.A. Time
Black vaudevillians and entertainers joked that T.O.B.A. stood for "tough on black artists." But the Theater Owner's Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) pl…
November 15, 2023
Musical Migration and Imperial New York
The heart of Brigid Cohen’s Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes (University of Chicago Press, 2022) are the connections for…
May 3, 2023
On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone
On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press, 2023) by Philip Ewell is an unflinching look at white supr…
March 19, 2023
Literacy in a Long Blues Note
Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries by Coretta M. Pittman (Universi…