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Arts Division
Music Department
Graduate Candidate
Musicology
Graduate
History of Consciousness Department
Negotiating music and politics: John Cage's United States bicentennial compositions
Digital Arts Research Center
Music Center
Joseph Finkel is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at UC Santa Cruz, where he explores late-twentieth-century experimental music and its political implications. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in music from Youngstown State University and a Master of Arts in musicology from Arizona State University. Joe has presented on influential composers such as John Luther Adams, Ben Johnston, and La Monte Young, and has published research on Alvin Curran and John Cage.
Recently, Joe has been researching ideas around "ambient" culture, examining the works of Brian Eno and critical figures in Southern California minimalism, specifically Harold Budd. Outside his academic pursuits, Joe plays saxophone and piano, enjoys the natural beauty of Santa Cruz, and dabbles in experimental cooking.
20th/21st Centuries Music
Music and Politics
Minimimalism
Experimental Music
2024 Research Grant from the Mellon Foundation (through the Isaac Julien Studio)
2023 Research grant from The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz
2023 Travel grant from the Society for American Music for The Society for American Music Annual Meeting,
Minneapolis, MN
2023 Research grant from The Arts Division, UC Santa Cruz
2022 Best Graduate Student paper for the Northern California Chapter of the American Musicological Society, Berkely CA
2022 Research grant from The Arts Division, UC Santa Cruz
2021–22 Center for Archival and Teaching Fellow, UC Santa Cruz
2020 Best of the Arts Division in the 16th Annual UC Santa Cruz Graduate Research Symposium, “Music + Mycology = Local Musicology: John Cage and the UC Santa Special Collections,” Santa Cruz, CA
2019–20 Chancellor Fellowship, University of California, Santa Cruz
Finkel, Joseph. "Mirrors of History, Windows of the Future: Isaac Julien and Experimental Sound." de Young Museum, (forthcoming), April 2025.
Finkel, Joseph. “Building Environmentally Attuned Communities: The Politics of Alvin Curran’s Maritime Rites.” Leonardo (Oxford) 51, no. 3 (2018): 300–301
Finkel, Joseph. “Embracing Jewishness in Contemporary Composition: Alvin Curran’s Crystal Psalms, A Case Study” Arizona State University Jewish Studies Annual Review (Summer 2016): 33–34.
Finkel, Joseph. “Negotiating Music and Politics: John Cage’s United States Bicentennial Compositions ‘Lecture on the Weather’ and ‘Renga with Apartment House 1776.’” ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2015.
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