Charles Kronengold

I’m a scholar of music, film, literature, philosophy, and popular media. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in all these areas. As a scholar I focus on three interlocking questions: what are genres, how do they depict and embody thinking, and what sorts of ethical work do they encourage? This research encompasses my first monograph, Living Genres in Late Modernity: American Music of the Long 1970s (UC Press); my fully drafted second monograph, Crediting Thinking in Soul and Dance Music; articles on music, film, and aesthetics; The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (Oxford),  co-authored with Adrian Daub; and my new book-project, Unredeeming Music: Rethinking Value in Musical Practice and Experience. These questions have emerged from open-ended empirical investigation of large corpora (especially records, scores, movies, poems, and filmed performances). My answers have sought to embrace and register the variety I’ve found. 

Living Genres in Late Modernity forms the core of this research. It asks what we can learn about genres from attending to thousands of pop, soul, funk, and disco songs, hundreds of nocturnes, and 1,400 concertos, heard against other cultural and social phenomena of the American 1970s. This book treats genres as unstable constellations of works, people, practices, institutions, technologies, capital, conventions, forms, images, spaces, ideas, and multisensory experiences. Moving between zoomed-in and panoramic views, Living Genres provides a new account of the musical work as produced in concert and conflict with a host of forces; its sustained attention to Black American musicians keeps ethical questions of identity and recognition in the foreground. I discussed this book with the great George Lipsitz, Research Professor Emeritus of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California–Santa Barbara, in an online conversation as part of the Popular Music Books in Process series. You can hear much of the music I talk about in this book and elsewhere by going to my Spotify page.

Living Genres tries to remind its readers how much goes into a work, and how much gets taken out. The James Bond Songs makes this a theme. These songs involve many people with different agendas; they reflect tensions in the films, in popular music, and in the broader culture; and they’ve been received in incompatible ways. This book asks afresh, for scholarly and popular audiences, how songs embody ideas. The book seeks to get at the people and cultural formations that the songs embody but the films themselves shuffle to the margins: women, people of color, Black culture, urban subjects, postcoloniality. These songs are old-fashioned, fractured constructions that show every clumsy join. But their brokenness, refusal to change, and longevity as a genre give them the capacity to reveal how changed and broken is everything around them. Legendary rock critic Greil Marcus posted this review of the book on Pitchfork.

I’ve also published several articles on multisensory experience in urban film; these papers show how a film’s many-layered audiovisual flow can model the heterogeneity, layered character, and social embeddedness of thinking.

All these projects contribute strands to my forthcoming book, Crediting Thinking in Soul and Dance Music. Crediting Thinking tracks thinking and thoughtfulness across 1960s–70s soul, funk, gospel, jazz, and disco. This book adopts an inclusive view of what counts as thinking: listening hard to the work and the words of Black American musicians, especially Black women, it seeks to broaden our conception of musical thought, and more generally of thinking as a human activity. "Thinking" here is both verbal and nonverbal, it's social, and it happens partly outside the head.

My new book-project, Unredeeming Music, asks what music is good for when it doesn’t make us better or smarter, when it doesn’t heal us or bring us together. By listening seriously to the doubts, odd details, mistakes, fads, casual encounters, and apparent dead-ends that often animate late-modern musical practices, this book argues that music’s value lies in its capacity to produce social relations that can’t be separated from uncertainties about music’s means and ends. The book’s basic claim is that music can help us grasp sounds, ideas, and feelings that have been passed over as without value, and can thereby bring us closer to people who have gone unheard or unrecognized.

I joined the University of Minnesota in Fall 2023, after fifteen years of teaching in the Department of Music at Stanford, where I was also a faculty affiliate in Modern Thought and Literature, American Studies, and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, and a 2016–17 faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Before that I was an external faculty fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. I received a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California–San Diego and a B.A. in Music from Yale. I grew up in New York City, where I attended Hunter College High School.