Mark Butler
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Associate Professor of Music Theory and Cognition, Northwestern University, Illinois

Daimler Fellow - Class of Fall 2007

Mark J. Butler is a music theorist whose research addresses popular music, rhythm, and technologically mediated performance. He is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the program in Music Theory and Cognition in the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. He previously served on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and was a Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin in 2009–10. He is the author of Unlocking the Groove (Indiana, 2006) and the editor of Electronica, Dance, and Club Music (Ashgate, 2012). His work on electronic dance music has received awards from Indiana University, the Society for American Music, and the Association for Recorded Sounds Collections. Other publications appear in journals such as Theoria, Music Theory Online, Semiotica, twentieth-century music, and Popular Music.

Project Description

Playing with Something that Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in Electronic Music Performance

Butler’s most book project, which is the focus of his research at the American Academy, was entitled “Playing with Something that Runs.” The book is based on extensive fieldwork with internationally active DJs and laptop musicians based in Berlin, and examines relationships between technology and improvisation. In so doing, Butler reveals how these musicians create dynamic, novel performances through the transformation of seemingly “fixed” prerecorded objects.

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