About Martin Scherzinger
New York, New York
Martin Scherzinger (CBA ’21) is a composer and associate professor of media studies at New York University. He works on sound, music, media, and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Primary areas include the musical and choreographic traditions of Europe, Africa, and America as well as global biographies of sound and other ephemera circulating in geographically-remote regions. Scherzinger’s research includes the examination of links between political economy and digital sound technologies, copyright law in diverse sociotechnical environments, relations between aesthetics and censorship, sensory limits of mass-mediated music, mathematical geometries of musical time, histories of sound in philosophy, and the politics of biotechnification.
Toward a Global History of Music’s Choreographic Beat
Martin Scherzinger’s CBA Fellowship project considers the history of music’s choreographic beat in a global frame. The research shows how a Newtonian conception for time-reckoning influenced conceptions of rhythm and meter in music theory, composition, and dance. In a scholarly article and a ballet score, Scherzinger aims to contrast this conception of time with pre-colonial music and dance traditions in non-western, notably African societies.
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