Patrick Burke

Patrick Burke

Chair, Department of Music
Professor of Music
Performing Arts Department (Affiliate)
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
BA, University of Pennsylvania
research interests:
  • jazz
  • rock
  • race in the United States; music, colonialism and empire
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    contact info:

    office hours:

    • By appointment

    mailing address:

    • Washington University
      CB 1032
      One Brookings Drive
      St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
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    Professor Burke's research centers on jazz and popular music in the United States. He teaches courses on such topics as the history of jazz and popular music, music of the African diaspora, and the methods and theories of ethnomusicology.
     

    Patrick Burke received his B.A. in music at the University of Pennsylvania (1996) and his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2003). Since 2004, he has been a professor of music at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on such topics as the history of jazz and popular music, music of the African diaspora, and the methods and theories of ethnomusicology.  In 2013-14, he was a Guest Scholar at the University of Oslo, Norway, and he served on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society from 2013 to 2018.  In past years, Prof. Burke has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies and Head of Musicology in the Department of Music. 

    Prof. Burke's research centers on jazz and popular music in the United States, with a focus on the relationship between music's performance and reception and the formation of racial ideology.  His work has been supported by fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Social Science Research Council, and the Center for the Humanities at WUSTL.  Prof. Burke is the author of Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Tear Down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock (University of Chicago Press, 2021). He was also project director, researcher, and writer for the digital humanities project Music and Racial Segregation in Twentieth-Century St. Louis: Uncovering the Sources (link below).  Prof. Burke’s current research addresses the role of the Norwegian shipping industry in establishing Western ideas and stereotypes about music of the global South during the Age of Empire. In addition to his academic work, Prof. Burke is a guitarist and composer.  He has also performed in a Javanese gamelan and on the amadinda, a Ugandan xylophone.
     

    Courses

    Undergraduate:

    Music 1021: Musics of the World (cross-listed with African and African American Studies)

    Music 1022: Popular Music in American Culture (cross-listed with African and African American Studies and American Culture Studies)          

    Music 3014: Ethnomusicology

    Music 3021: Music of the African Diaspora (cross-listed with African and African American Studies, American Culture Studies, and International and Area Studies)

    Music 3023: Jazz in American Culture (cross-listed with African and African American Studies and American Culture Studies)

    Music 3028: Music of the 1960s (cross-listed with American Culture Studies)

    Graduate:

    Music 509: Introduction to Ethnomusicology

    Music 519: Music, Race, and Ethnicity

     

    Publications

    Books:

    Tear Down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

    Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street.  University of Chicago Press, 2008.

    Edited Works:

    Co-editor (with Gerald Early and Mina Yang), “American Music,” special issue of

    Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (vol. 142, no. 4, Fall 2013).

    Articles:

    “Race and the New Jazz Studies,” forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies (New York: Routledge).

    “Powell Hall: Safe Space, Comfort Zone,” forthcoming in edited collection The Material World of Modern Segregation: St. Louis in the Long Era of Ferguson (2018).

    “What Is Music?” Humanities 36, no. 1 (January-February 2015).

    “The Fugs, The Lower East Side, and the Slum Aesthetic in 1960s Rock,” Journal of the Society for American Music 8, no. 4 (November 2014): 538-566.

    “The Screamers,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 142, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 11-23.

    “Clamor of the Godz: Radical Incompetence in 1960s Rock,” American Music 29, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 35-63.

    “Rock, Race, and Radicalism in the 1960s: The Rolling Stones, Black Power, and Godard’s One Plus One,” Journal of Musicological Research 29, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 275-294.

    “Tear Down the Walls: Jefferson Airplane, Race, and Revolutionary Rhetoric in 1960s Rock,” Popular Music 29, no. 1 (January 2010): 61-79.

    “Oasis of Swing: the Onyx Club, Jazz and White Masculinity in the Early 1930s,” American Music 24, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 320-346.

    Reviews in:

    American Historical Review

    Belles Lettres

    The Common Reader

    Ethnohistory

    Jazz Perspectives

    Journal of American History

    Journal of the Society for American Music

    Volume! La revue des musiques populaires 

    Western Historical Quarterly

    Hold That Thought Podcast

    Rock and revolution

    “Music is too important to be left to the musicians,” ethnomusicologist Christopher Small wrote in 1977. A decade earlier, the experimental rock band the Godz seemed to agree. As Patrick Burke reveals, musicians in the 1960s resisted predetermined categories or simplistic musical identities.