Email: mark.spicer@hunter.cuny.edu
Office: Room 400b Hunter North
Phone: 212-772-5024
Spring 2023 Office Hours:
Tuesdays & Wednesdays by appointment
Mark Spicer is Professor of Music at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Prior to joining the Hunter faculty in 1999, he taught at the University of North Texas, Yale University, and La Salle College of the Arts, Singapore. Prof. Spicer specializes in the reception history and analysis of popular music, especially British pop and rock since the 1960s, and his writings have appeared widely in scholarly journals and essay collections. His book Sounding Out Pop, co-edited with John Covach, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2010, and he has since edited the volume on Rock Music for the Library of Essays on Popular Music series from Ashgate. (A representative listing of his publications may be found at https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/mark-spicer.) Spicer’s article “Fragile, Emergent, and Absent Tonics in Pop and Rock Songs” (Music Theory Online, 2017) won the 2020 Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory.
Prof. Spicer was the 2015 recipient of Hunter’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching. In addition to his scholarship and teaching, Prof. Spicer maintains an active parallel career as a professional keyboardist and vocalist, having worked with several groups in the US and the UK since the 1980s. In the early 1990s, he was a founding member of the critically acclaimed group Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks, and can be heard on their first two CDs, On the Blank Generation (1991) and World of Fireworks (1994). He continues to take the stage most weekends with his own “electric R&B” group, the Bernadettes, and with the Trinity Church Choir in New Haven.
