Draft:Benjamin Piekut (musicologist)

• Comment: The seven references you have included on this page do not show that Piekut is notable for an article. As of this edit, refs (1) and (2) are profiles of him by institutions where he works (which all professors will have); (3), (4), (5), and (6) are simply works he has written; (7) shows he won an award, but this single award does not make him notable (do the other winners all have articles?) JacobTheRox^{(talk | contributions)} 21:09, 7 June 2026 (UTC)

• Comment: This page's copyvio is in it's "Bibliography" book listing section, and should not be removed. nhals8 (rats in the house of the dead) 01:30, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

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Benjamin Piekut (b. 1975) is an American cultural historian and musicologist whose research focuses on music, sound, and performance after 1945. He is Professor of Music at Cornell University.

Biography

Piekut attended Hampshire College as an undergraduate and studied composition at Mills College under Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Curran. He completed the PhD in musicology at Columbia University in 2008. He has taught at the University of Southampton (lecturer, 2008–2011), University of California, Berkeley (visiting assistant professor, 2014), and Cornell University (2011-). He served as chair of the Department of Music at Cornell from 2022 to 2025, and again from 2026. He received an Early Career Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) in 2011, and was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, in 2025–26.

Scholarship

Piekut has published on such topics as experimental music history, critical race studies, postmodern dance, improvisation, phonography, and music historiography. His first book, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits, studied avant-garde music in New York City during the 1960s. It contained chapters on John Cage, Charlotte Moorman, Henry Flynt, the Jazz Composers Guild, and the Stooges; the book received favorable reviews from The Wire and All About Jazz, and, in the scholarly press, from Current Musicology, Twentieth-century Music, MLA Notes, and Tacet. Thomas Fogg called it "an original and important book," and Clemens Gresser wrote, "This is an important book, and should be part of every academic music library." In the French journal Tacet, Edward Crooks commented, "Richly deserving superlatives, it is a memorable, exciting, rigorous, and beautifully written book of considerable importance."

His second book, Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem, presented a collective biography of that British socialist rock band and an analysis of what he termed the “vernacular avant-garde” in music. It was reviewed widely around world, by The Wire (UK), Facelift, Nexos (MX), Jazzwise, Free Jazz Collective, Jazz Journal (UK), Punk & Post-Punk, Samples (DE), Tribune (UK), Los Angeles Review of Books, Liminalities, Popular Music, Context (AU), IASPM Journal, MLA Notes, and ARSC Journal. In 2023, Getsuyosha published a Japanese version of the book with a translation by Sojun Sugawa. He edited Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies and co-edited (with George E. Lewis) the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies.

A central theme of his research has been to describe and analyze how the fine-art field of music changed after 1945 by balancing his attention between classical, jazz, and popular musics. He was interviewed about his research by Rossana Lara and Jorge David in 2024. Since the late 2010s, he has increasingly published on dance, performance, and contemporary art. His 2010 article, “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane” (co-authored with Jason Stanyek) won the 2011 Outstanding Article award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Bibliography

Books

Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem (2019), ISBN 9781478004660

The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, vol. 1 (2016), ISBN 9780195370935

The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, vol. 2 (2016), ISBN 9780199892921

Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (2014), ISBN 9780472119264

Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-garde and its Limits (2011), ISBN 9780520268517

Essays and Chapters:

“An Anthology of chance operations….” In The Scores Project, edited by Michael Gallope and Natilee Harren (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2025).

“Sound against Music: The Musical Amateurs of the Judson Dance Generation.” The Drama Review 68, no. 2 (2024): 35–54.

“Sound at 9 Evenings: Cage and Beyond.” In Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), ed. Nancy Perloff and Michelle Kuo (Los Angeles: Getty Center, 2024), 21–33.

“Cheyney Thompson’s Automated Tombs.” In Cheyney Thompson: Several Displacements, Intervals, and Bellonas, 10–21. New York: Lisson Gallery, 2024.

“Black Music’s Institutional Critique.” In Music Institutions Critique, ed. Brandon Farnsworth and Christian Grüny, 101–15. Zurich: Springer, 2024.

“The Afterlives of Indeterminacy.” Contemporary Music Review 41/2-3 (2022): 310–27.

“Amateurism.” Co-authored with Julia Bryan-Wilson. Third Text 34/1 (January 2020): 1-22.

“The Musical and Choreographic Score,” colloquy convened by Kate van Orden and Mark Franko, Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art 2 (2019): 51–88.

“Music for Socialism, London 1977.” Twentieth-Century Music 16/1 (2019): 67–93.

“Another Version of Ourselves: The Enigmas of Improvised Subjectivity.” Liminalities 14/1 (January 2018): 72–89.

“Postwar Music and Sound.” Twentieth-Century Music 14/3 (January 2018): 439–442.

“On and Off the Grid: Music for Judson Dance.” In Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, 68–75. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018.

“Afterword: Locating Hemispheric Experimentalisms.” In Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America, ed. Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

“Not So Much a Program of Music as the Experience of Music.” In Merce Cunningham: Common Time, ed. Joan Rothfuss, 113–29. Minneapolis: Walker Arts Center, 2017.

“Pigeons.” Representations 132 (Fall 2015): 112–20.

“Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965–75.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67/3 (Fall 2014): 769–824.

“There Must Be Some Relation Between Mushrooms and Trains: Alvin Curran’s Boletus Edulis—Musica Pendolare.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music and Sound Studies, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, 172–86. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

“Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques.” Twentieth-Century Music 11/2 (September 2014): 191–215.

“Chance and Certainty: John Cage’s Politics of Nature.” Cultural Critique 84 (Spring 2013): 134–63.

“Sound’s Modest Witness: Notes on Cage and Modernism.” Contemporary Music Review, John Cage at 100, 31/1 (February 2012): 3–18.

“New Thing? Gender and Sexuality in the Jazz Composers Guild.” American Quarterly 62/1 (March 2010): 25–48.

“Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane.” Co-authored with Jason Stanyek. The Drama Review 54/1 (Spring 2010): 14–38.

“Race, Community, and Conflict in the Jazz Composers Guild.” Jazz Perspectives 3/3 (December 2009): 191–231.

“‘Demolish Serious Culture!’: Henry Flynt and Workers World Party.” In Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and The Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington, 37–55. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.