Matthew Gilbert

Matthew Gilbert is a singer-songwriter and scholar of twentieth-century American folk music. He holds a B.A. in Musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at Stanford University, as well as a dissertation fellow at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE). His research is concerned with the stories we tell about music: what it is, where it comes from, how it travels, and whom it belong to. His dissertation, "Blow for Californi-o: Recording Folk Music in the American West, 1890–1975" (working title), explores how a generation of folklorists and ethnomusicologists in the first half of the twentieth century evacuated California of its folk musical history. Their stories of musical-cum-regional identity privileged histories of the nation-state and frontier settlement, relying upon and bolstering the racialized geographies of American folk song that still remain in the cultural imaginary today. Matthew's project seeks to unsettle these received narratives and provide alternative folk musical histories in the American West without the assumption that culture moves only in one direction. Ultimately, his work aims to prompt new questions not only about how music travels, but how our stories about music may travel along.