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. Prof. Spicer specializes in the reception history and analysis of popular music, especially British pop and rock since the 1960s, and his writings have appeared in a number of scholarly journals and essay collections, including Sounding Out Pop, which he recently co-edited with John Covach and is due to be published by the University of Michigan Press in 2010. He is currently working on a new 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 Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music, co-edited with John Covach. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming (2010).

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

“Strategic Intertextuality in Three of John Lennon’s Late Beatles Songs.” In A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (Part I), ed. David Carson Berry, Gamut 2/1 (2009): 347–75. 

“Elvis Costello on Saturday Night Live.” In John Covach, What’s That Sound?: An Introduction to Rock and Its History, second edition, 434–35. New York: Norton, 2009.

"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.