Kelsey Klotz
Email: kklotz1@uncc.edu
ABOUT: Dr. Kelsey Klotz is a lecturer in UNC Charlotte's Department of Music. Her research focus is on jazz and race, specifically critical whiteness studies.
“My research and teaching pay particular attention to the ways in which histories are written: whose voice is heard? Whose voices have the power to define and shape particular narratives? What do inclusive histories look like? My book project, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness uses Brubeck’s mid-century performance of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand mid-century whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully—and further, how those past performances of whiteness structure present-day performances. How is whiteness performed, and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a listener’s mind, filter the sounds a listener hears?
As an educator, I teach critical listening not only as a method of analytical listening, but also as a tool to facilitate a culturally competent classroom in which students encounter perspectives other than their own. While many of my students are UNC Charlotte students, I also regularly teach and lecture around the Charlotte community, for JazzArts Charlotte and at the Southminster Retirement Community. Ultimately, as a musicologist/ethnomusicologist, my goal in teaching is to empower students to engage with a range of musical genres, but to do so with the understanding that their perspective is one among a constellation that make up the broader world of musicking.”
Past courses she has taught include "Hearing Race in 1950s American Musical Culture," "History of Jazz," "World Musics," and "From the Sorrow Songs to Black Lives Matter: Music and Black Political Protest."
Dr. Klotz is currently working on a book manuscript titled Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness, under contract with Oxford University Press. The project examines white cool jazz pianist Dave Brubeck's career, music, and reception in the 1950s and 1960s. By analyzing fan letters, unreleased outtakes, private recordings, business documents, reviews, articles, and interviews, Dr. Klotz uncovers the modes of whiteness inherent in critics', audiences', and Brubeck's mid-century constructions of whiteness. Her previous articles have been published in Dædalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Studies, the Journal of Jazz Studies, and Jazz Perspectives.
Dr. Klotz has presented her research at meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the American Studies Association, the American Studies Association, the Feminist Theory in Music conference, and various regional meetings.
Publications, Lectures and Media
Music Lecture: Kelsey Klotz: "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" -Duke Trinity College of Arts and Sciences
Dr. Kelsey Klotz, on Brubeck, Brahms & 1959 - Jazz Arts Charlotte
1619 Project Interview with Kelsey Klotz - Heights Libraries
Negotiating Jewish Identity in Dave Brubeck’s The Gates of Justice - Milken Archive
Dave Brubeck's Southern Strategy - MIT Press Direct
“Your Sound Is Like Your Sweat”: Miles Davis’s Disembodied Sound Discourse - American Studies Journal
On Musical Value: John Lewis, Structural Listening, and the Politics of Respectability
Ellie Kemper's Veiled Prophet debutante ball past is more than a celebrity scandal - NBC News THINK
