David Michael McCarthy

David Michael McCarthy

David McCarthy served most recently as a Visiting Lecturer at Central Michigan University, where he taught graduate and undergraduate courses on music history and ethnomusicology. He studies interdependencies between modern ideologies and acts of perceiving sound and music. His dissertation for the PhD in Musicology at the CUNY Graduate Center (2016) studied ways of listening for musical aspects of recorded comedy during the 1960s. His publications appearing in Twentieth Century Music, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, and The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies have examined antagonistic ways of listening for the texture of sitcom laugh tracks, desires for a digital ethics in Lady Gaga’s music video pageantry, and labor in the automated call center. His current book project, “The Walking Black Man: A Critique of a Musical American Narrative,” examines depictions of walking black men in art and blaxploitation films and party records from the 1960s to the 1980s, arguing that such depictions challenged the contemporary formation of a black middle class. For the Legacies of the Enlightenment initiative, he is producing genealogies for the idea of a “mature citizen” in the criticism of the contemporary composer Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935).

View the material that David has curated for this website here.

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