Season 4, Episode 3

Election Day is approaching, and both presidential candidates have been foregrounding music, from Kamala Harris walking out Beyoncé’s “Freedom” to Donald Trump…dancing for 30 minutes to “Memory” from Cats. It’s been a weird, and terrifying, campaign season. But music can help us make sense of it, according to musicologist Dana Gorzelany-Mostak, who runs the project “Trax on the Trail.” In this conversation, we discuss the sound and spectacle of this turbulent moment: how do Harris’s playlists and Trump’s dance parties define the candidates to voters, and what do they say about the state of American democracy?

Dana Gorzelany-Mostak is an Associate Professor of Music at Georgia College & State University.

If you’re interested in learning more about Dr. Gorzelany-Mostak’s work, check out:

• The web project Trax on the Trail
• The performance project Songs of Political Persuasion (with Dr. Jennifer Flory)
• The 2023 book Trax on the Trail: Popular Music, Race, and the US Presidency
• The 2015 article “‘I’ve Got a Little List’: Spotifying Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election,” in Music and Politics
• The 2017 essay “Donald Trump, Jackie Evancho, and the Performance of Embattled Whiteness,” in Musicology Now

Sound Expertise is hosted by Will Robin (@seatedovation), and produced by D. Edward Davis (@warmsilence). Please subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and/or Spotify. Questions or comments? Email soundexpertise00 @ gmail

A written transcript of this episode is available here; thanks to Andrew Dell’Antonio for volunteering to prepare transcripts for the show!