Overview
Benjamin Piekut studied music and philosophy at Hampshire College before pursuing his M.A. in composition at Mills College, where he studied with Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. After a stint in the critical studies/experimental practices program at the University of California, San Diego, he completed his Ph.D. in historical musicology at Columbia University. His first monograph, , was published in 2011 by the University of California Press. Situated at the intersection of free jazz, the Cagean avant-garde, Fluxus, radical politics, and popular music, the book portrays New York experimentalism in the 1960s as a series of conflicts, struggles, and exclusions. In 2019, he published (Duke). A collective biography of the British rock band Henry Cow (1968¨C78), the book investigated how young musicians recast older questions of avant-garde politics in a space defined by the commodity form, the commercial marketplace, and vernacular modes of reception and transmission. Excerpts of The World Is a Problem ran in and , and reviews appeared in The Wire (UK), (MX), the , , and the , in addition to scholarly journals. The book in 2023.
He is the editor of (University of Michigan Press, 2014), a collection of essays that explore new corners of experimental music history. He is also the co-editor, with George E. Lewis, of The (2016), a two-volume set gathering authors from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. In celebration of the John Cage centennial in 2012, he co-edited (with David Nicholls) a special issue of Contemporary Music Review. In 2020, he co-edited (with Julia Bryan-Wilson) a special issue of Third Text on .
Piekut¡¯s research interests include music and performance after 1950, critical studies in race and gender, improvisation studies, sound art, and music technologies. He has published his research in Jazz Perspectives, The Drama Review, Contemporary Music Review, Cultural Critique, Twentieth-Century Music, American Quarterly, The Journal of the American Musicological Society, and a number of catalogs and edited volumes. In 2019, he curated the "After Experimental Music" section of the festival in New York City. (Deerhoof's contribution to that event was later released as the album Love-Lore, for which Piekut wrote .) He serves on the curatorial advisory board of (NYC) and writes occasional art criticism for and .
Piekut¡¯s research has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the American Musicological Society, the University of Southampton, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His article, ¡°Deadness,¡± co-authored with Jason Stanyek, won the 2011 Outstanding Article award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and was named one of MIT Press¡¯s ¡°50 Most Influential Articles¡± in all disciplines. Prior to joining the Department of Music at Cornell, Piekut taught at the University of Southampton (UK).
Publications
Books
. Tokyo: Getsuyosha, 2023.
. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
BP and George E. Lewis, eds. . 2 volumes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Paperback editions: 2022.
Editor, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014).
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
. Special issue of Third Text, co-edited with Julia Bryan-Wilson. Vol. 34, no. 1 (January).
. Special issue of Contemporary Music Review, co-edited with David Nicholls. Vol. 31, no. 1 (February 2012).
Articles and Book Chapters
"" in The Scores Project, ed. Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John Hicks (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2025).
"," in Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), ed. Michelle Kuo and Nancy Perloff (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2024), 21-33.
"," TDR: The Drama Review 68, no. 2 (2024): 35-54.
¡°,¡± in Cheyney Thompson: Several Displacements, Intervals, and Bellonas (New York: Lisson Gallery, 2024), 10-21.
¡°,¡± Revista del Instituto Superior de M¨²sica 25 (2024).
"," in New Music and Institutional Critique, ed. Christian Gr¨¹ny and Brandon Farnsworth (Berlin: J.B. Metzler/Springer, 2024), 101-15.
"," Contemporary Music Review, 2022.
¡±,¡± Flash Art (Spring 2021), 46-65.
"" [conversation with Tamara Levitz], ASAP/J website, 2020.
"&²Ô²ú²õ±è;°Ú³¦´Ç²Ô³Ù°ù¾±²ú³Ü³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô±Õ,¡±&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Perspective: Actualit¨¦ en histoire de l¡¯art, 2019 no. 2.
BP and Julia Bryan-Wilson, "," Third Text 34, no. 1 (2020).
"," Twentieth-Century Music 16/1 (2019): 67-93.
"" in Marina Rosenfeld, roygbiv&b (New York: Run/Off, 2018).
¡°," Liminalities, 14/1 (2018): 72-89.
"," in The Work Is Never Done: Judson Dance Theater, ed. Ana Janevski and Thomas Lax. New York: MoMA, 2018.
¡°,¡± Twentieth-Century Music, 14/3 (2018): 439-42.
¡°.¡± In Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America, ed. Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
in Merce Cunningham: CO:MM:ON TI:ME, edited by Fionn Meade and Joan Rothfuss, 113-29 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2017).
Representations 132 (Fall 2015): 112¨C120.
¡°.¡±&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Journal of the American Musicological Society 67/3 (Fall 2014): 769-824.
¡°,¡± in Tomorrow Is the Question, ed. Ben Piekut, 1-14.
¡°,¡±&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Twentieth-Century Music 11/2 (2014): 191-215.
¡°.¡± In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music and Sound Studies, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
¡°.¡±&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Cultural Critique 84 (Spring 2013): 134-63.
¡°.¡± In Red Strains: Music and Communism Outside the Communist Bloc, ed. Robert Adlington, 43¨C53. Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press.
¡°.¡±&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Contemporary Music Review, John Cage at 100 Special Issue, 31/1 (February 2012): 3-18.
(Ashgate, 2009). Notes (December 2010): 312-17.
¡°Mortitude: Tecnologias do Intermundano.¡± Portugese translation of ¡°Deadness,¡± co-authored with Jason Stanyek. In Rumos da cultura da m¨²sica¡ªneg¨®cios, est¨¦ticas, linguagens e audibilidades, ed. Simone Pereira de S¨¢. Rio de Janeiro: Sulina, 2010.
BP and Jason Stanyek. ".¡±&²Ô²ú²õ±è;The Drama Review 54/1 (Spring 2010): 14-38. BP and Jason Stanyek.
American Quarterly 62/1 (March 2010): 25-48.
In Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington, 37-55. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
¡°.¡±&²Ô²ú²õ±è;Jazz Perspectives 3/3 (December 2009): 191-231.
In the news
- Gift creates new Dallas Morse Coors Concert Series at Cornell
- New Klarman Fellows to join the Â鶹ÊÓƵ and Â鶹ÊÓƵ
- Kiss-Pophouse deal shows recording ¡®promises a certain immortality¡¯
- Popular Music Course Makes its Winter Session Debut
- Experimental band Henry Cow challenged itself, audiences
- New book explores Latin music experimentalism
- Experimental music symposium features concerts and speakers
