Mike Ford
Mike Ford is a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at Columbia University. His research focuses on improvisation in non-musical settings such as corporate management and lean startups. By transposing understandings of musical improvisation from musicology and critical improvisation studies, his research provides insights into the day-to-day activities and thinking of business leaders and founders.
Mike has presented papers at regional, national, and international conferences. His research has been published in European journal Musicologica Olomucensia and Afrikaans online journal LitNet Akademies: 'n Joernaal vir Geesteswetenskappe, and he is a contributing editor of the first volume of the Vladimir Drozdoff Publication Project. Before coming to Columbia, Mike completed an MA in Musicology at Rutgers University and a BMus in Orchestral Conducting at the University of Pretoria. In addition to various university scholarships and grants, his studies have also been supported generously by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust.
Mike teaches Music Humanities in the Columbia Core Curriculum and fills positions in student government organizations including External Affairs Vice President of the Arts and Sciences Graduate Council and GSAS Humanities Senator in the University Senate. Aside from his academic pursuits, he also participates in entrepreneurship programs and applies his knowledge of improvisation in the context of corporate change management. He co-founded a cybersecurity company that is active in the defense and cyber insurance markets and is currently under contract with the US Air Force.
Supervisors: George E. Lewis, Eduardo Herrera, Alexander Johnson, Heinrich van der Mescht, and Ellie M. Hisama
Mike has presented papers at regional, national, and international conferences. His research has been published in European journal Musicologica Olomucensia and Afrikaans online journal LitNet Akademies: 'n Joernaal vir Geesteswetenskappe, and he is a contributing editor of the first volume of the Vladimir Drozdoff Publication Project. Before coming to Columbia, Mike completed an MA in Musicology at Rutgers University and a BMus in Orchestral Conducting at the University of Pretoria. In addition to various university scholarships and grants, his studies have also been supported generously by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust.
Mike teaches Music Humanities in the Columbia Core Curriculum and fills positions in student government organizations including External Affairs Vice President of the Arts and Sciences Graduate Council and GSAS Humanities Senator in the University Senate. Aside from his academic pursuits, he also participates in entrepreneurship programs and applies his knowledge of improvisation in the context of corporate change management. He co-founded a cybersecurity company that is active in the defense and cyber insurance markets and is currently under contract with the US Air Force.
Supervisors: George E. Lewis, Eduardo Herrera, Alexander Johnson, Heinrich van der Mescht, and Ellie M. Hisama
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Thesis Chapters by Mike Ford
Papers by Mike Ford
In this article, I demonstrate the ways in which the music and text of Schoenberg and Pappenheim’s monodrama Erwartung is an intense portrayal of loneliness. I provide an overview of the literature on the concept of loneliness by Gotesky (1965), Mijuskovic (1979), and Dahlberg (2007) in an attempt to explain this phenomenon and I then discuss the monodrama critically through the lens of loneliness. I argue that loneliness, as conceptualized and described by the three authors, can be linked to the various elements in Schoenberg and Pappenheim’s Erwartung, including the dreamscape setting, expanded temporality, symbols and color complementarity, plot and characterization, formlessness and lack of thematic material, sung text, and static, supporting chords. My study adds loneliness to the discourse on psychoanalysis and music by focusing on this specific aspect of human experience and its musical and textual portrayal in Erwartung.
Conference Presentations by Mike Ford
performances were the initial lack of capacity to save patch configurations and, until the introduction of MIDI in 1981, the inability of synthesizers of different brands to be connected efficiently. This led to indeterminate settings in which musicians created patches on the fly, unsure of their sonic results.
In this paper, I argue that the uncertainty of manipulating, combining, and recombining early synthesizers generated a form of improvisational lutherie, creating sutured-together hybrid instruments. Understanding improvisation as comprising indeterminacy, analysis of conditions,
agency, and choice (Lewis 2016), it can be both an “in the moment” practice as well as a process that can take place over longer periods of time. I demonstrate how Herbie Hancock and his sound engineers Patrick Gleeson, Bryan Bell, and Keith Lofstrom improvised instrument-
building both on-stage and off-stage, in their continual acquisition and exploration of electronic instruments and the sonic possibilities of their combinations during the early 1970s, providing new ways of musical improvisation.
While these indeterminate conditions of constructing and combining electronic instruments have been noted in recent scholarship (Fellezs 2011; Gluck 2012), such forms of lutherie have not been understood as improvisational. This paper adds not only to the slowly growing discourse on jazz fusion, a genre that has been historically neglected in jazz scholarship, but also to electronic organology and the study of the early development of synthesizers.
racism to the vibrant response from hip-hop artists; indeed, three days after the Times article, Rolling Stone Magazine published 'Songs of Black Lives Matter: 22 New Protest Anthems,' an article that includes songs by Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and many other hip-hop artists. While these two articles make it clear that the hip-hop community has taken an active and activist stance in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, not all classical musicians are as passive in this protest as Lee believes them to be. Indeed, Georg Friedrich Haas provides a counterexample by reacting to the death of an African American at the hands of police officers by composing I can’t
breathe for solo trumpet in memoriam Eric Garner.
This paper demonstrates the ways in which Haas’s I can’t breathe responds and corresponds to the horrific event(s) that incited its composition. After situating it within #BlackLivesMatter, partially by drawing upon interviews with the composer, I provide a close reading of the work, drawing parallels between I can’t breathe and the physical violence that Garner suffered,
including musical topics associated with death and pitch- and timbre-based means of depicting suffocation. In my discussion of Haas’s response to systematic racism, I address the widely-publicised issue of the sadomasochistic relationship between the (white) composer and his
(black) wife. My study shows not only that this classical composer is indeed actively involved in #BlackLivesMatter, but reveals some of the compositional strategies he employs to add his voice to the international protest anthem against racism and police brutality embodied by #BlackLivesMatter.
This paper employs Jacques Lacan’s register theory to provide a new interpretation of Ives’s The Unanswered Question. Although the register theory—which proposes the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real as the three fundamental dimensions of psychic subjectivity—is usually associated with psychoanalysis or linguistics, recent studies in other disciplines have shown its wider applicability. Drawing on the example set by literary theorist Slavoj Žižek, I illustrate parallels between the distinct instrumental groups in The Unanswered Question and the Lacanian registers. In juxtaposing the three instrumental groups with Lacan’s register theory, I reveal new means of understanding Ives’s narrative through alternative spatial configurations.
In this article, I demonstrate the ways in which the music and text of Schoenberg and Pappenheim’s monodrama Erwartung is an intense portrayal of loneliness. I provide an overview of the literature on the concept of loneliness by Gotesky (1965), Mijuskovic (1979), and Dahlberg (2007) in an attempt to explain this phenomenon and I then discuss the monodrama critically through the lens of loneliness. I argue that loneliness, as conceptualized and described by the three authors, can be linked to the various elements in Schoenberg and Pappenheim’s Erwartung, including the dreamscape setting, expanded temporality, symbols and color complementarity, plot and characterization, formlessness and lack of thematic material, sung text, and static, supporting chords. My study adds loneliness to the discourse on psychoanalysis and music by focusing on this specific aspect of human experience and its musical and textual portrayal in Erwartung.
performances were the initial lack of capacity to save patch configurations and, until the introduction of MIDI in 1981, the inability of synthesizers of different brands to be connected efficiently. This led to indeterminate settings in which musicians created patches on the fly, unsure of their sonic results.
In this paper, I argue that the uncertainty of manipulating, combining, and recombining early synthesizers generated a form of improvisational lutherie, creating sutured-together hybrid instruments. Understanding improvisation as comprising indeterminacy, analysis of conditions,
agency, and choice (Lewis 2016), it can be both an “in the moment” practice as well as a process that can take place over longer periods of time. I demonstrate how Herbie Hancock and his sound engineers Patrick Gleeson, Bryan Bell, and Keith Lofstrom improvised instrument-
building both on-stage and off-stage, in their continual acquisition and exploration of electronic instruments and the sonic possibilities of their combinations during the early 1970s, providing new ways of musical improvisation.
While these indeterminate conditions of constructing and combining electronic instruments have been noted in recent scholarship (Fellezs 2011; Gluck 2012), such forms of lutherie have not been understood as improvisational. This paper adds not only to the slowly growing discourse on jazz fusion, a genre that has been historically neglected in jazz scholarship, but also to electronic organology and the study of the early development of synthesizers.
racism to the vibrant response from hip-hop artists; indeed, three days after the Times article, Rolling Stone Magazine published 'Songs of Black Lives Matter: 22 New Protest Anthems,' an article that includes songs by Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and many other hip-hop artists. While these two articles make it clear that the hip-hop community has taken an active and activist stance in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, not all classical musicians are as passive in this protest as Lee believes them to be. Indeed, Georg Friedrich Haas provides a counterexample by reacting to the death of an African American at the hands of police officers by composing I can’t
breathe for solo trumpet in memoriam Eric Garner.
This paper demonstrates the ways in which Haas’s I can’t breathe responds and corresponds to the horrific event(s) that incited its composition. After situating it within #BlackLivesMatter, partially by drawing upon interviews with the composer, I provide a close reading of the work, drawing parallels between I can’t breathe and the physical violence that Garner suffered,
including musical topics associated with death and pitch- and timbre-based means of depicting suffocation. In my discussion of Haas’s response to systematic racism, I address the widely-publicised issue of the sadomasochistic relationship between the (white) composer and his
(black) wife. My study shows not only that this classical composer is indeed actively involved in #BlackLivesMatter, but reveals some of the compositional strategies he employs to add his voice to the international protest anthem against racism and police brutality embodied by #BlackLivesMatter.
This paper employs Jacques Lacan’s register theory to provide a new interpretation of Ives’s The Unanswered Question. Although the register theory—which proposes the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real as the three fundamental dimensions of psychic subjectivity—is usually associated with psychoanalysis or linguistics, recent studies in other disciplines have shown its wider applicability. Drawing on the example set by literary theorist Slavoj Žižek, I illustrate parallels between the distinct instrumental groups in The Unanswered Question and the Lacanian registers. In juxtaposing the three instrumental groups with Lacan’s register theory, I reveal new means of understanding Ives’s narrative through alternative spatial configurations.