Hello,
I’m Andrew Mall
a popular music scholar and ethnomusicologist who researches and teaches courses about religious music, music industries, and popular music. I am an Associate Professor of Music at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
As Associate Professor of Music at Northeastern University, I teach ethnomusicology, music industry, and popular music courses for undergraduate music majors and minors, non-majors, and professional masters students. I also lead independent studies and advise undergraduate honors projects. My research and teaching emphases include, among other topics, categories of mainstream and underground musics; ethnographic research methods; histories of the recording industries; music festivals; nostalgia, collecting, and consumption; the organizational practices and hierarchies of music industry institutions; and the political economies of evangelical Christian congregational musics. I hold a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago (2012). Prior to coming to Northeastern, I taught at the University of Chicago and DePaul University.
My books include the monograph God Rock, Inc.: The Business of Niche Music (University of California Press, 2021) and the co-edited volume Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives (Routledge, 2021). I am book review co-editor of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s journal Ethnomusicology. My research has been published in American Music; the Journal of Popular Music Studies; the Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture; the Journal of the Society for American Music; Popular Music; Punk & Post-Punk; Twentieth-Century Music; the Yale Journal of Music and Religion; and several edited volumes published by Ashgate, Bloomsbury, Oxford University Press, Penn State Press, and Routledge.
I have been an active performer of Javanese gamelan since 2006. In Chicago I performed with the ensemble Friends of the Gamelan, where I also served on the board of directors and as the education coordinator. I co-launched a Javanese gamelan program at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. In the Boston area, I perform with Gamelan Laras Tentrem (formerly Boston Village Gamelan) and serve on its board of directors. A longtime volunteer DJ and administrator for college and community radio stations, I helped launch the Chicago Independent Radio Project and served on its board of directors until 2013, having previously volunteered for WLVR, WHPK, and WLUW; currently, I serve on an advisory committee for WRBB, Northeastern’s student-run radio station. I originally trained as a jazz saxophonist and also play guitar.
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In my current project, tentatively titled “Festivals Calling,” I am primarily interested in considering the ways in which the business objectives and ethics of festival organizers, promoters, and producers impact the lived experiences of festival attendees. For example, how do festival staff’s managerial and administrative decisions impact the sonic, social, and physical landscapes of music festivals as experienced by attendees? Similarly, how does a festival’s design inflect the needs and expectations of its stakeholders (musicians, sponsors, and vendors, among others)? Given the dramatic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on live music events in 2020 and 2021, how will the work of organizing music festivals change in the future? I am using a multi-methods approach to this research project: interviewing festival organizers about their objectives and decision-making practices, following the industry trade press and mass media about festivals and the festivals/events industry, and attending festivals (both in-person and virtually) as sites of ethnographic fieldwork.
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If you’d like to know more about my work, invite me to speak, or interview me for your own project, drop me a line and let’s connect.