main content Kaley Mason

Kaley Mason’s research examines the interplay of creative choices and material constraints in contemporary musical experience. Although his primary area of specialization is South Asia, his work is broadly concerned with how music serves as a vehicle for cultural dignity, and how performers in turn shape movements for social change. This is the focus of his first book, The Labor of Music: South Indian Performers and Cultural Mobility (forthcoming with Oxford). His second India-centered project tracks the relationship between art and activism in song, from the music of political theater and revolutionary film, to emergent genres like alternative rock. This line of research informed his work on the co-edited volume, Sound Alignments: Popular Music in Asia’s Cold Wars (Duke University Press 2021), which won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize in 2022. Mason also has a secondary interest in Francophone popular music, specifically the heterogeneous origins of the chanson française and the influence of singer-songwriters in debates over national belonging and intercultural empathy in France and Québec.

Courses taught at Lewis & Clark: MUS 106 Workshops in World Music; MUS 142 Music and Social Justice; MUS 236 Music of Asia; MUS 237 Music of Latin America; MUS 301 Portland Music Scenes; MUS 307 Topics in Music, including Global Film Music, Gastromusicology, and Indian Film Music.

Academic Credentials

PhD 2006, University of Alberta, B.Mus. 1999, Queen’s University