Benjamin Oyler

Adjunct Professor of Musicology

Dr. Benjamin Oyler is a teacher, performer, and researcher who studies the political economy of music in the twentieth- and twenty-first century United States. His scholarly work is multidisciplinary and sits at the intersection of musicology and ethnomusicology, sound studies, philosophy, and critical theory. Topically, Oyler’s research explores the ways that musical virtuosity is expressed and valorized in the context of new digital media platforms and creative labor. His recent publications and presentations have focused on the relationship between the private musical work of “woodshedding” and virtuosic performance, as well as on how music-based technologies have become factors in the conditioning of musical and other cognitive abilities in children. A first monograph project examines these practices alongside contemporary genres of social media performance; a second focuses on how philosophers in the Marxist tradition have used the concepts of virtuosity and the virtuoso as models to theorize social and political change in capitalist modernity.

An avid guitarist, improviser, and songwriter, Oyler has performed in ensembles spanning jazz, free improvisation, punk rock, and country (among many other styles). He earned his PhD in music studies from the University of Pennsylvania and, previously, a BA and MM in musicology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.