Dr. Abigail Shupe has created the Music Research Colloquium Series at Colorado State University, featuring academic music faculty giving talks about their current work.

The series launches with CSU music professor, Dr. John Pippen, speaking about his research on Chicago Avant-garde musicians and socioeconomic class. It’s titled “The Musical Work Ethic, Rehearsals, and Middle-Class Values in Contemporary Classical Music.”

Dr. Pippen’s ethnographic research examines how musicians in contemporary classical music reproduce social class. This paper theorizes that musicians organize their labor via what he calls ‘musical work ethic.’ This musical work ethic, like the Protestant work ethic theorized by Max Weber, facilitated the upward mobility of musicians who positioned themselves as working as if called to art. Dr. Pippen demonstrates that the musical work ethic shapes how musicians understand skill, how they evaluate themselves, and how they present themselves to others.

About John Pippen

John Pippen is assistant professor of Ethnomusicology at Colorado State University. His courses address sociological and anthropological studies of music, musical practices around the world, and histories of music in the United States and Europe.

His primary research has been an extended ethnographic study of the new music scene in Chicago. Blending approaches from labor studies and aesthetic theory, Dr. Pippen writes about struggle in the classical music scene in the United States. You can read about his recent research on New Music Box. Dr. Pippen has presented his research at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, and College Music Society, among others. Recent work includes a chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music, and several articles out for review. Dr. Pippen is also an avid athlete, having raced the half-marathon, marathon, and triathlon.

Degrees
Ph.D., Musicology, University of Western Ontario
M.M., Musicology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
B.M., Music Education, Tennessee Tech University