Kelsey Klotz

Appointed Fall 2023

Working at the crossroads between musicology, ethnomusicology, jazz studies and popular music, Kelsey Klotz is especially interested in the relationships between music and identity: How does music make meaning for various individuals? How do various individuals use music and music-practices to create meaning? Whose music “counts” in historical narratives? What do inclusive musical histories look and sound like? These questions guide her research, teaching, public and service work. 

Her recent book, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2023), is the first critical, book-length study of the role of whiteness in shaping jazz history. It uses jazz pianist Dave Brubeck’s mid-century performances of whiteness across his professional, private and political lives as a starting point to understand mid-century whiteness, privilege and white supremacy more fully. Drawing on archival records, recordings and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck, his critics and his audiences. Her previous articles have been published in Dædalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Studies, the Journal of Jazz Studies and Jazz Perspectives. Her work as a public musicologist has been featured in essays, concert talks and adult education classes sponsored by NBC, the Common Reader, the Milken Archive of Jewish Music and JazzArts Charlotte.

Klotz’s current research explores the simultaneous presence and absence of women in contemporary and historical jazz histories and narratives, examining how both spoken and unspoken gender norms historically defined the ways in which women could and could not participate in jazz—and how jazz was/is and was/is not defined. By considering what a history of jazz that begins with women’s suffrage might sound like (rather than with “Livery Stable Blues”), Klotz asks how students of jazz might learn new, more inclusive histories of jazz with less of the early twentieth century’s baggage. 

Klotz’s goal in teaching is to create an inclusive and accessible classroom in which students are able to practice critical thinking and cultural competence through close listening. She teaches courses in the history of popular music and jazz, and through these genres, she encourages students to recognize the listening, performance and analysis skills they bring to class while continuing to add new musical languages and methods of listening.

Prior to coming to the University of Maryland, Klotz was a lecturer in the Department of Music and Assistant Dean for Inclusive Excellence in the College of Arts+Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. She earned her PhD. in Musicology with a certificate in American Culture Studies from Washington University in St. Louis with a dissertation studying racial ideologies in 1950s cool jazz criticism, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Piano from Truman State University.