Brett Boutwell

William F. Swor Alumni Associate Professor of Musicology

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Biography

Brett Boutwell is the William F. Swor Alumni Associate Professor of Musicology at LSU. He was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Illinois.

With Blake Howe, Boutwell is the coauthor of The Musician in Society (W. W. Norton), a textbook developed from a course the two professors teach at LSU. Built on a modular framework, the book consists of nearly 100 independent case studies spanning a wide range of historical and global settings.

Boutwell’s specialized research concerns modernist and experimental music since 1945. His articles have appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Modernism/modernity, Contemporary Music Review, American Music, Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, and the forthcoming volume In Search of Morton Feldman: A Portrait of the Composer at 100 (Brepols). He has held affiliations with interdisciplinary research institutes at both Cornell University and the University of Illinois. Supported by grants, he has studied composers’ manuscripts and sketches at the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel), the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), and other archives.

Boutwell's courses in music history include American Popular Music (MUS 1600), which he developed for the university’s general-education arts curriculum and which earned him a university-wide teaching award. His graduate-level teaching in the School of Music includes topics spanning classical, traditional, and popular music of the twentieth century. His dissertation advisees are the recipients of grants and prizes from the Institute for International Education, the Southern Chapter of the American Musicological Society, and LSU.

Boutwell is a former president of the Southern Chapter of the American Musicological Society. He served as co-chair of local arrangements for the 2019 national meeting of the Society for American Music in New Orleans.

His interests in American music encompass jazz and a variety of popular styles, especially those of Louisiana. He has worked as a local consultant in Louisiana’s film and television industry, advising in the selection of period-appropriate music for historical settings, and he has served on the Board of Directors of the Baton Rouge Blues Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion and preservation of the city’s blues heritage.