Faculty: Theory/Analysis

Mark Spicer 
Associate Professor, Hunter College and the Graduate Center
(PhD, Yale)

Hunter College of the City University of New York
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
212-772-5024
mark.spicer@hunter.cuny.edu  

Mark Spicer  is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center, and also Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music at Hunter College (on sabbatical leave in 2008–09). Prof. Spicer specializes in the reception history and analysis of popular music, and his writings on this subject have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Contemporary Music Review, Music Theory Online, twentieth-century music, and other scholarly journals, as well as three essay collections. Among his current projects, he is completing an analytical article on the structure and affect of choruses in recent pop and rock songs, and conducting research for a book that will explore how certain pop and rock musicians since the early 1970s have confronted their anxiety of influence towards the Beatles, provisionally titled In the Beatles’ Wake. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, Prof. Spicer maintains an active parallel career as a professional keyboardist and vocalist, having worked with several groups in the US and the UK since the 1980s. In the early 1990s, he was a founding member of the critically acclaimed group Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks, and can be heard on their first two CDs, On the Blank Generation (1991) and World of Fireworks (1994). He continues to take the stage most weekends with his own “electric R&B” group, The Bernadettes.

REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS: 

Sounding Out Rock: Analytical Essays in Popular Music, co-edited with John Covach. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming (2009).

“‘Reggatta de Blanc’: Analyzing Style in the Music of the Police.” Forthcoming in Sounding Out Rock, ed. John Covach and Mark Spicer.

“Strategic Intertextuality in Three of John Lennon’s Late Beatles Songs.” Forthcoming in a new Festschrift for Allen Forte, edited by David Carson Berry. New York: Pendragon Press.

"Genesis’s Foxtrot." In Composition and Experimentation in British Rock, 1966–1976, a special issue of Philomusica Online (2007).

Review-essay of Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul. Music Theory Online 11.4 (2005).

Review of Progressive Rock Reconsidered, ed. Kevin Holm-Hudson. twentieth-century music 1/2 (2004): 285–93.

"(Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music." twentieth-century music 1/1 (2004): 29–64.

“Large-Scale Strategy and Compositional Design in the Early Music of Genesis.” In Expression in Pop-Rock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays, ed. Walter Everett, 77–111. New York: Garland, 2000. (Revised and expanded second edition, 313–44. New York: Routledge, 2008.)

Review of Edward Macan, Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture, in American Rock and the Classical Music Tradition, Contemporary Music Review 18/4 (2000): 149–58.