Mark Katz

Professor and Chair; Adjunct Professor of Communication Studies

• Office: 105B Hill Hall
• Email: mkatz@email.unc.edu
• Phone: 919-962-1039

Mark Katz (Professor and Chair) holds degrees from the College of William and Mary (B.A. in philosophy) and the University of Michigan (M.A., Ph.D. in musicology). Before joining the faculty at UNC, he taught at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University (1999–2006). His scholarship focuses on music and technology, contemporary popular music, and the violin. He has written three books, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (2004, rev. ed. 2010), The Violin: A Research and Information Guide (2006), and Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ (2012). He co-edited (with Timothy Taylor and Anthony Grajeda) the collection Music, Sound, and Technology in America (2012). He is the editor of Journal of the Society for American Music, a senior editor for Oxford Handbooks Online, and a member of the National Recording Preservation Board. 

Professor Katz teaches courses on music and technology, popular music, and modern art music. In 2011 he received an Innovation Grant from UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities to expand the scope and reach of university-level music pedagogy. One result of this grant was the creation of a new course, Beat Making Lab. Aimed at students without formal musical training, the course is co-taught with professional musicians and combines instruction in electronic music composition, entrepreneurship, and history. Read more about this project here.

Professor Katz lectures frequently on music to academic and non-academic audiences. He has been a guest speaker at universities and other institutions throughout the U.S. and Europe, with recent invited talks and keynote lectures at Cambridge, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Guelph, Harvard, Minnesota, Millikin, Northwestern, Oxford, the Sacher Stiftung, Stanford, and UC Davis. He also addresses general audiences through radio, newspaper, and blog interviews, pre-concert lectures, website chats, and engagements at the Smithsonian Institution, the British Library, the North Carolina Science Festival, and elsewhere.

Mark Katz is a long-time violinist, an amateur turntablist, and a DJ at UNC’s radio station, WXYC 89.3 FM.

Selected Publications and Course Offerings

Books

Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Music, Sound, and Technology in America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. (Co-edited with Timothy Taylor and Tony Grajeda).

The Violin: A Research and Information Guide. New York and London: Routledge, 2006.

Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. Revised edition published in 2010. Winner of the 2007 Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology.

Articles and Book Chapters

“Music and Technology.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Technology, ed. W. Bernard Carlson. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. (Co-authored with Tim Miller.)

“Music Technology.” In Oxford Bibliographies In Music. Ed. Bruce Gustafson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. (Co-authored with Brian Jones.)

“Songwriting as Musicological Inquiry: Examples from the Popular Music Classroom.” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 2 (March 2012): 133–52. (Co-authored with Travis Stimeling.)

“Amateurism in the Age of Mechanical Music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

“Beware of Gramomania: The Pleasures and Pathologies of Record Collecting.” In The Record, ed. Trevor Schoonmaker. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

“Men, Women, and Turntables: Gender and the DJ Battle.” Musical Quarterly 89 (Summer 2006): 580–99. [Actual publication date April 2008.]

“Portamento and the Phonograph Effect.” Journal of Musicological Research 25 (2006): 211–32.

“Beethoven in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: The Violin Concerto on Record.” Beethoven Forum 10 (Spring 2003): 38–55.

“Hindemith, Toch, and Grammophonmusik.” Journal of Musicological Research 20 (2001): 161–80.

“Aesthetics out of Exigency: Violin Vibrato and the Phonograph.” In I Sing the Body Electric: Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hans-Joachim Braun, 186–97. Hofheim: Wolke, 2000. Also published as Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

“Making America More Musical Through the Phonograph, 1900–1930.” American Music 16 (Winter 1998): 448–75.

Selected Courses

• The Art and Culture of the DJ (Music 061H, Music 355)
• Making and Marketing Music in the Digital Age (Music 089)
• Introduction to Rock (Music 143)
• World Musics in Theory and Practice (Music 234)
• Beat Making Lab (Music 239)
• Arts Entrepreneurship (Music 286/Economics 327, with Ken Weiss)
• Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (Music 286)
• Resources and Methods in Musicology (Music 750)
• Proseminar in Musicology: Under the Covers—Identity and Interpretation in Popular Music (Music 850, with Jocelyn Neal)
• Proseminar in Ethnomusicology: Music, Technology, and Culture (Music 870)

Videos