Andrei Pohorelsky

Andrei Pohorelsky is a musicologist who studies music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular interest in American vernacular music and the prospect of a materialist musicology.

His current book project, "In Search of Ragtime," theorizes ragtime music and its afterlives as a musical mediation of American industrial capitalism. From the emergence of ragtime in the "Gilded Age," to its revival in the economic turmoil of the 1970s, the book charts transformations in musical value and social structure, revealing how ragtime enabled and frustrated historically specific fantasies of belonging and collectivity.

His other research projects include source sound and music in cinema verité and love songs in periods of social transformation. He has presented at national meetings of the American Musicological Society, Music and the Moving Image, and elsewhere.