Faculty and Staff
Jeffrey Taylor
Professor of Music
Director
Jeffrey Taylor (Ph.D., Michigan) has been a member of the Conservatory faculty since 1993. He specializes in jazz and other areas of music in the United States, though he also teaches general courses in Western music history and musicology and has regularly led sections of the Conservatory's introductory Core course (he is also a co-author of that course's textbook). He is also on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center, where he teaches doctoral seminars in American music and jazz history and historiography. His scholarly work has focused primarily on pre-1940s jazz, though his interests include many aspects of current trends in jazz and popular music scholarship and performance, particularly those related to race, gender, class, sexuality and spirituality. He is on the editorial boards of Black Music Research Journal and The Journal of the Society for American Music. His writing has appeared in Musical Quarterly, Black Music Research Journal, American Music, American Music Review, and other publications. As a performer Prof. Taylor has focused primarily on the work of early jazz pianists such as Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and James P. Johnson, and in 1998 appeared with fellow pianist Artis Wodehouse at several events related to ISAM's The Gershwins at 100 festival. His volume in the MUSA (Music of the United States) series, Earl "Fatha" Hines: Collected Piano Solos, 1928-41, won the Claude Palisca Award from the American Musicological Society in 2007. He recently published an essay in the collection Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, co-edited by Sherrie Tucker and Nichole T. Rustin (Duke). He is currently at work on several entries for the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of American Music and Musicians (Oxford) as well as a book titled Earl Hines and Chicago Jazz (California).
Email Professor Taylor: jtaylor@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Ray Allen
Professor of Music
Senior Research Associate
Trained in folklore, ethnomusicology, and American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in 1987, Ray Allen has been affiliated with the Hitchcock Institute since 1993. His research has ranged from African American gospel, Caribbean Carnival music, and the folk music revival to the works of composer’s Ruth Crawford Seeger and George Gershwin. His books include Singing in the Spirit: African-American Sacred Quartets in New York City (University of Pennsylvania Press), Island Sounds in the Global City: Caribbean Popular Music in New York City (University of Illinois Press, co-edited with Lois Wilcken), Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth Century American Music (University of Rochester Press, co-edited with Ellie Hisama), and most recently Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Urban Folk Music Revival (University of Illinois Press). Professor Allen co-edits American Music Review with Jeffrey Taylor. Through the Institute he has coordinated a series of scholarly conferences including “Black Brooklyn Renaissance: Black Arts and Culture in Brooklyn, 1960-2010”; “New York City’s Friends of Old-Time Music and the Urban Folk Revival” (2006); “Calypso in New York and the Atlantic World” (2004); “Folk Music in the American Century: An Alan Lomax Tribute” (2003); “Ruth Crawford Seeger: Modernity, Tradition, and the Making of American Music” (2001); “Gershwin at 100: An American Artist and His Music” (1998); “Henry Cowell's Musical Worlds” (1997); and “Island Sounds in the Global City: Caribbean Music in New York” (1994). Professor Allen teaches courses on music of the United States and New York City, as well as cultural studies courses in Brooklyn College’s American Studies program which he directed from 1998-2010.
Email Professor Allen: rayallen@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Michael Salim Washington
Associate Professor of Music
Research Associate
Salim Washington received his Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation on John Coltrane. A Harlem-based tenor saxophonist, he also plays the flute and the oboe, and is an avid composer/arranger. While on a commission for works celebrating the life and music of Dexter Gordon he established a new group, the Harlem Arts Ensemble, which continues the legacy of his Boston-based band, the Roxbury Blues Aesthetic. In addition to his own groups, Salim plays regularly with a number of ensembles including the Donald Smith Quintet, Antonio Dangerfield's Ensemble Uniqua, Frank Lacy's Vibe Tribe, and the Frank Lacy Octet, James Jabbo Ware's Me, We, and Them Orchestra, the Brooklyn Repertory Ensemble, Ahmed Abdullah's Diaspora, and the Carl Grubbs group. He has travelled extensively, playing music festivals throughout the US and Canada, Latin America, and Europe. He has also led music workshops for the Northern Ireland Arts Council in Belfast, the Bill Evans conservatory in Paris, Harvard University, the Vermont Jazz Center, Plymouth State College, the Guelph Music Festival, and elsewhere. He was a member of the Jazz Study Group at Columbia University and has participated on various committees and panels in service of jazz, including those convened by the Ford Foundation, the Boston Pheonix, the New England Foundation for the Arts. He is co-author with Farah Jasmine Griffin of Clawing at the Limits of Cool: the Collaboration between Miles Davis and John Coltrane, 1955-1961 (Thomas Dunne). Washington has spent extended periods in Brazil and South Africa, lecturing and performing. In spring 2010 he delivered a lecture on African American music at the American University in Beirut, and engaged in several performances in that city’s Razz’zz Jazz Club. As leader and performer, Prof. Washington appears on over a dozen recordings.
Email Professor Washington at salimwashington.tenor@gmail.com.
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton
Assistant Professor of Music
Research Associate
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton received her Ph.D. in Musicology (with a dissertation on Miriam Gideon’s 1958 opera Fortunato) and a Women's Studies Certificate from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2008. Her work has been published in Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies, edited by Ellie M. Hisama and Evan Rapport, and most recently, in Sounding Off: Theorizing Music and Disability, edited by Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus. Stephanie's scholarly work focuses on three operas written by women in 1950s New York City, including works by Miriam Gideon, Julia Perry, and Louise Talma. As a performer, Stephanie specializes in contemporary repertory, and has been hailed by The New York Times as a soprano who sings "brilliantly and confidently." Her research interests include American music, women in music, and disability studies. A specialist in music in the U.S. after 1900, Jensen-Moulton places particular importance in her work on music as a product of culture. Her current research focuses on music by women composers, feminist ways of engaging musical texts, popular music studies, and the body as a musical technology. Prof. Jensen-Moulton spent the Fall 2009 semester researching the cultural role of disability in five American operas written since 1900. She presented her work on muteness in Menotti's The Medium at the first CUNY Symposium on Music and Disability, of which she was also a chair. Jensen-Moulton also received a contract to publish her edition of Miriam Gideon's opera Fortunato as volume 72 of the A/R editions series Recent Researches in American Music, forthcoming in 2012. Other forthcoming publications include a chapter on Pauline Oliveros in New Approaches to Experimental Music (University of California Press) and an article on Art Music in American Culture (Clio Press).
Email Professor Moulton: sjensenmoulton@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Rachael Brungard
Graduate Fellow
Rachael Brungard, fellow, is a doctoral student in historical musicology at the City University of New York. She earned her B.A. and graduated with honors in musicology from Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2005, and received her M.A. in musicology from Queens College in 2008. At Oberlin, she was awarded the James H. Hall Prize in Music History. Rachael's primary research interests encompass current popular music remixes, rap versions, and mash-ups, as well as several U.S. popular music genres, including rock and roll, rap, techno, funk, and pop. She also enjoys studying the Romantic symphony, the symphonic poem, and 20th-century Western art music, particularly music influenced by cubism and minimalism. Rachael was recently elected a Student Representative for the Greater New York chapter of the American Musicological Society.
As an assistant editor at Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), Rachael accesses in English and German, creates starter abstracts as needed, and provides basic indexing.
Email Rachael Brungard: rbrungard@gc.cuny.edu
Anjuli Deo
College Assistant
Anjuli Deo is a graduate student at Brooklyn College Conservatory, working towards her M.M in vocal performance. Her interest in performing started at a very young age, playing roles in musicals and choral ensembles occupied much of her youth. After deciding to pursue a classical training in voice she attended Loyola Marymount University in the heart of Los Angeles where she received her BA in vocal performance. After finishing her undergraduate education she took time off the academic world to teach music at a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. Her decision to pursue her master’s degree brought her across the country to New York City. She is currently working hard toward her Master’s Recital and looks forward to receiving her degree and pursuing a career in the field.
Email Anjuli Deo: ADeo@brooklyn.cuny.edu