Dr. Andre Millard, Historian at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, will give an evening lecture on Wednesday, March 25th at 6pm at Western Reserve Historical Society, 10825 East Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio. Parking for this event is free.
The talk, titled Breaking Machines and Making Music: Technology and Creativity in American Popular Music, will examine technology as a social construct, exploring the disconnect between how engineers and inventors intend technology to be used and how musicians alter and interact with machines in the creation of new sounds.
Dr. Millard will focus on several critical case studies in music and technology, including distortion and feedback in rock music, the Roland TR 303 and electronic music, sampling and scratching and the use of cassettes, and the culture of studio recording, which will present the real innovations of the Beatles at Abbey Road.
This event is presented by the Cleveland State University Department of History and the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities as part of the Constructing, Consuming, and Conserving America teacher workshop series. Participating teachers should contact Nadine Grimm at nadine.grimm@esc-cc.org. Copies of Dr. Millard’s books Edison and the Business of Invention (Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (Cambridge UP, 1995), and The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon (Johns Hopkins Press, 2004) will be available for purchase.
This lecture is open to the public. Students, teachers and scholars from all levels and fields are invited to attend.
Andre J. Millard, joined the faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in September 1989 as an Associate Professor, after years playing for the High Numbers in N17. A historian of American technology, his book, Edison and the Business of Invention (Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), is the first scholarly analysis of the entirety of Edison’s career and the first to make use of the millions of documents in the Edison archive. An expert on popular music, he has published a book on the electric guitar and has completed a history of the record industry, entitled America on Record (Cambridge University Press, 1995), which was updated in a second edition (2005).