Mark Burford

Image of Mark Burford

Mark Burford is an Associate Professor of Music at Reed College. He recently won the prestigious Irving Lowens Article Award for his piece on Sam Cooke that was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Burford is a music historian with expertise in nineteenth-century Austro-German concert music and twentieth-century African American popular music. His work on European art music and popular music of the Americas has also appeared in the Journal of Musicology, 19th-Century Music, Current Musicology, Notes, and Musical Quarterly. His current research focuses on the circulation and reception of black gospel singing within U.S. popular culture during the 1950s and early 1960s.Before coming to Reed in 2007, Burford taught at the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, where he was responsible for secondary and middle school education programs. He has also taught Western classical music and American vernacular music at Columbia University and City College of New York. He received a BA in music from the University of California at Santa Barbara and MA and PhD degrees in historical musicology from Columbia University.Bio courtesy of Reed College News Center, where you can also read more about Dr. Burford's Irving Lowens Article Award.

Dissertation
"The real idealism of history": Historical consciousness, commemoration, and Johannes Brahms's "years of study"
Columbia Degrees: 
PhD, Historical Musicology
2005