Daniel Goldmark
Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Initiatives and International Affairs
Director, Center for Popular Music Studies
Professor, Department of Music
At five years old, Daniel Goldmark started taking piano lessons to learn to play a song he had heard. Years later, in a college music history class, he realized he first heard that song while watching Hollywood cartoons from the 1930s-’50s.
This discovery—and the realization that the field of musicology “had nothing but contempt for music related to pop culture and media” at the time—motivated Goldmark to specialize in music research.
Watch a video about Goldmark’s research
What is it like researching music history today compared to when you started this work?
In many ways, researching music has gotten easier because we have access to so much more archival material than we did when I first got started. There are millions of songs available through online repositories. The real difficulty is in narrowing one’s area of focus with so much amazing material out there that no one has discussed before!
What do you find is the most pivotal time in music history?
The rise of mass media has profoundly changed how people have experienced music. Let’s look at the latter part of the 19th century, when printing technologies became more widespread and less costly to manage, leading to an explosion of (among other things) songs being published—that is, the rise of sheet music and popular songs.
Since the turn of the 20th century, new forms of audio recording have come along, as have new ways to store and play back those recordings: cylinders, records, magnetic tape and digital media. We have access to more music now than at any point in history. For historians, this can be both overwhelming and exciting.
What advice would you give students interested in pursuing research?
Students absolutely need to learn how to manage the materials they are going to find. They have to figure out how to be in conversation with the work that influences and guides their own ideas. They need to figure out how their work can contribute to the building of knowledge for future use.
As the Murphy Postdoctoral Fellow mentor, what are some important qualities for a researcher studying music?
Those interested in studying or exploring music need to have a keen sense of curiosity and a willingness to chase down leads in whatever their research uncovers. I encourage students to keep digging. They need to understand that exploring the context for whatever they find can take a lot of time, but that time is well spent if it helps them draw more thorough and accurate conclusions.