​Assistant Professor of Music Benjamin Piekut (Cornell University) is author of Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits, published in 2011 by the University of California Press. Situated at the intersection of free jazz, the Cagean avant-garde, Fluxus, radical politics, and popular music, the book portrays New York experimentalism in the 1960s as a series of conflicts, struggles, and exclusions.

Piekut is editor of Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (University of Michigan Press, 2014), a collection of essays that explore new corners of experimental music history. He is also the co-editor, with George E. Lewis, of The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (forthcoming), a two-volume set gathering authors from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. In celebration of the John Cage centennial in 2012, he co-edited (with David Nicholls) a special issue of Contemporary Music Review. 

Piekut’s research interests include experimental music in the US and UK, jazz after 1950, critical studies in race and gender, improvisation studies, music technologies, and performance studies. Prior to joining the Department of Music at Cornell, Piekut taught at the University of Southampton (UK).

Free (a Valente Lecture)