Timothy D. Taylor, a professor in the Departments of Ethnomusicology, Anthropology, and Musicology at UCLA, is an interdisciplinary social scientist who studies capitalism and other economic issues, globalization, consumer culture, and technology as they relate to music. He is the author of over 50 articles and chapters, and many books, including: Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (Routledge, 1997), Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (Routledge, 2001), Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Duke, 2007), The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture (Chicago, 2012), Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present (Chicago, 2016), Music in the World: Selected Essays (Chicago, 2017), and editor, with Mark Katz and Tony Grajeda, of Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio (Duke, 2012). An ethnographic study of film and television musicians in Los Angeles, Working Musicians: Labor and Creativity in Film and Television Production, was published in 2023 by Duke University Press. Another book, Making Value: Music and the Social, was published in 2024 by Duke University Press. Current projects include The Oxford Handbook of Economic Ethnomusicology, co-edited with Anna Morcom and a study of background music in television from the 1940s to the 1980s.
Capitalism, globalization, technology, anthropology, popular music, world music.
Ph.D., M.A., Musicology, University of Michigan; M.A., 20th Century Music, Queen’s University of Belfast; M.M., Clarinet, Yale School of Music; B.A., Music and Northern Studies, Middlebury College