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David Brackett鈥檚 research focuses on the relationship between categories of music and categories of people, a topic that is at the heart of his most recent book, Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music (University of California Press, 2016), winner of the Society for American Music鈥檚 annual Lowens Award for book of the year. His earlier publications include Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge University Press, 1995; reprint University of California Press, 2000), which was a finalist for an ARSC book award; and a collection of annotated source readings, The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Documents, published by Oxford University Press, the fourth edition of which appeared in 2020. A special issue devoted to his work on genre, co-edited with Vanessa Blais-Tremblay, appeared in Spring 2024 in Volume! The French Journal of Popular Music Studies. Current projects include a volume that he is co-editing with Georgina Born for Duke University Press, titled Genre and Music: New Directions; and a book鈥攚ith the working title 1966: The Year in Music鈥攖hat extends the approach to genre developed in Categorizing Sound. He has published articles and reviews in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Black Music Research Journal, Journal of Jazz Studies, Musical Quarterly, Popular Music, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Popular Music & Society, and several other journals, as well as in numerous edited volumes and encyclopedias. He has served, or is currently serving, on the editorial boards of The Journal for the Society of American Music, Music Theory Spectrum, Popular Music, and others.

His research has been funded by both the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) of the United States. Brackett is currently working on a SSHRC-funded study with Lisa Barg (PI) and Richard King (CI) on 鈥淐ollaborative Creativity: Sound Recording and Music Making.鈥� In 2019 he was appointed a Tier One Canada Research Chair, which will be funded by SSHRC for a seven-year term.

Brackett teaches undergraduate courses on popular music, jazz, the history of recorded music, and contemporary art music, while his graduate seminars explore conjunctions between historiography, the sociology of culture, and music analysis. He has supervised many Master鈥檚 theses and PhD dissertations. Titles of PhD dissertations he has supervised include Mimi Haddon, 鈥淲hat is Post-Punk?鈥� (2015); Eric Smialek, 鈥淓xpression in Extreme Metal Music, ca. 1980-2012 (2015); Laura Risk, 鈥淭ransatlantic Trajectories in the Traditional Instrumental Music of Qu茅bec鈥� (2016); Melvin Backstrom, 鈥淭he Grateful Dead and Their World: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1965-1975鈥� (2017); Sean Lorre, 鈥淏ritish R&B: A Study of Black Popular Music Revivalism in the United Kingdom between 1960鈥�1964鈥� (2017); Farley Miller, 鈥淧opular Music and Instrument Technology in an Electronic Age, 1960-1969鈥欌�� (2018); Claire McLeish, 鈥�'All Samples Cleared!': An Investigation into the Aesthetic Consequences of Grand Upright v. Warner" (2020); Jennifer Messelink, 鈥淪trange Echoes: A Genre Study of Exotica鈥� (2022); 脡mmanuelle Majeau-Bettez, 鈥淭hrough Time and Space: 脡liane Radigue鈥檚 Relationship to Sound鈥� (2022).

Before he was categorized as a musicologist, Professor Brackett identified as a composer. His composition teachers included Karel Husa, Steven Stucky, Yehudi Wyner, Robert Ceely, and David Cope. His works have been widely performed, including performances at meetings of the Society of Composers, the Pittsburgh New Music Festival, the Syracuse Society for New Music, the Cornell Contemporary Chamber Players, and Chiron New Music. Awards include fellowships to the Yaddo Artist鈥檚 Colony and the Pittsburgh New Music Festival, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two grants from the Cornell Council for the Performing Arts, three grants from Meet the Composer, and the New Music Delaware Award (2000); he was also nominated for one of the annual awards granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996.

Brackett has been involved in a number of academic organizations. From 1998 to 2000, he served as President of the U. S. branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, following a turn as Secretary-Treasurer from 1995 to 1998. He has also participated on a number of committees for the American Musicological Society and the Society for American Music.

Brackett is currently active as a guitarist and mandolinist, playing a variety of genres that he will not name.