Daniel Fister

Daniel Fister

PhD student in Musicology
Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellow in American Culture Studies
research interests:
  • Collegiate A Cappella, Musical Theater, American Popular and Concert Music, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Voice and Sound Studies, Performance Studies, and Ethnography.
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    Daniel studies American popular music, singing, race, and performance. In his ethnographic dissertation, he examines how race, particularly whiteness, impacts the sounds and social structures of contemporary scholastic a cappella. Additional interests include musical theater, American vernacular vocal harmony, Anglo-American concert music, and music history pedagogy. In 2018, he co-convened Broadway Bodies, an interdisciplinary conference on the American musical in embodied performance, at Washington University. Daniel has presented papers at national and regional Society for Ethnomusicology meetings, the Society for American Music, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and Feminist Theory in Music. His research has been supported by the Margery Lowens Dissertation Fellowship from the Society for American Music and funding from Washington University. He is also an editorial assistant for the quarterly, peer-reviewed journal American Music.
     

    2021-22 
    “Structures and Ideologies of Whiteness in Collegiate A Cappella Auditions” 
    Society for Ethnomusicology, Virtual Conference.

    2020-21 
    “‘A Fairly Honest Depiction’: Singing, Stereotypes, and Racial Tokenism in the Pitch Perfect Film Franchise” 
    Society for American Music, Virtual Conference.
    “Whiteness as Vocal Aesthetics: An Examination of Judging Practices within Collegiate A Cappella Competitions” (Lise Waxer Student Paper Prize winner from the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology, 2019)
    International Association for the Study of Popular Music-United States Chapter, Virtual Conference.
    “Rewarding White Singers Who Sing Black: Solo Vocal Performance as Structural Sonic Whiteness in Contemporary Scholastic A Cappella” Society for Ethnomusicology, Virtual Conference.

    2019-20
    “Whiteness as Vocal Aesthetics: An Examination of Judging Practices within Collegiate A Cappella Competitions” 
    National Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Bloomington, IN.

    2018-19 
    “Organizing Coalitions through Song: Bernice Johnson Reagon, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Ella Baker’s Legacy” 
    Feminist Theory and Music, Boston, MA.