Education & Professional History
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, MA; PhD
Andrew Flory received his B.A. from the City College of New York and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written extensively about American rhythm and blues, and is an expert on the music of Motown. His book, I Hear a Symphony: Listening to the Music of Motown, was published by The University of Michigan Press in 2017. Working with Universal Records, Andrew has served as a consultant for several recent Motown reissues. He is also co-author of the history of rock textbook What’s That Sound (Norton). He has been invited to speak nationally and internationally and is active in both the American Musicological Society and the Society for American Music. Andrew teaches courses in American music, focusing on rock, rhythm and blues, and jazz.
At Carleton since 2011.
Current Courses
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Fall 2025
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Winter 2026
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Spring 2026
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I am a historical musicologist who focuses on American popular music after 1945. My work uses a wide range of methodological approaches, incorporating elements of critical race studies and popular music studies with old-fashioned empirical research techniques. While seeking to account for people, identity, and bodies, I value historical records and find paper and media archives to offer a wealth of perspectives to my work.
I spend a lot of time writing, thinking, and teaching about the music of Motown Records, the most important and successful R&B-oriented independent record company of the post-War era. My book, I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B (Michigan), considers Motown as an agent for crossover within a highly segregated music business. Focusing on issues like the “Motown Sound,” the rise of soul and the politics of region and class, internationalization, visual media, and loss of brand specificity, this study argues that Motown was central to the growing interplay between racially coded music markets in the United States during a three-decade period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. As per my interest in archival materials, this work was bolstered by a vast collection of rare primary sources, including corporate studio paperwork and unreleased multi-track vault recordings.
I am also an expert in the history of rock music, and co-author of the industry leading textbook What’s That Sound: An Introduction to Rock and its History (W.W. Norton 2012, 2015, 2018). This knowledge of a variety of musics popular during the post-War period often intersects in interesting ways, broadening my work to span issues of race, class, region, and style.
An interest in Motown is part of a larger strain of my work that focuses on corporate agency and record production within the music business. My recent research about Decca Records and the formation of R&B genotypes during the 1940s makes arguments about the interplay between black musics during an earlier period. As a corporate consultant, I have investigated the work of record companies firsthand by working as a reissue producer for Motown on several large projects, further informing my ideas on this topic from an insider perspective.
As an expert on Motown’s tape archive (working closely with digital replicas of a wide variety of Motown master tapes) I have spent a lot of time thinking about audio production. This has led to a number of research projects. One is an article entitled “Marvin Gaye as Vocal Composer,” which details Gaye’s method of composing melodies and lyrics in an asynchronous manner in the recording studio. Another article on the topic, “The Ballads of Marvin Gaye,” considers Gaye’s work on cabaret material and standards.
My interest in audio technology is also evident in my article ““Fandom and Ontology in the Beach Boys’ ‘Smile’,” which considers the history of an complex, ill-fated recording project from the 1960s that was kept alive through, and eventually modified by, fan-oriented bootlegs over a twenty-year period. A different sort of fan-oriented recordings are central to the argument of a recent research project called “Liveness and the Grateful Dead,” which reads the historical significance of this group through their contributions to (and experiments with) sound reinforcement, fan interaction, and a number of other factors stemming from their role as a performance-oriented group.
I have a number of works-in-progress that engage issues of race, technology, record production and performance practice. In one, I examine the role of early electronic experimentalists in the history of rock music and their work to create stomp boxes, the modular effects units used by most electric guitarists to alter the sonic properties of their instrument.
Another expands this stomp box research into a large scale project on perversion as a primary character of American musical invention, focusing on topics like distortion, prepared piano, tape music, turntables, synthesizers, and novelty effects in recording to reveal a consistent theme of creative misuse in many of the most important musical developments in twentieth-century American music.
My most significant current project is a large-scale two part creative biography of Marvin Gaye. Using my extensive knowledge of the Motown tape catalog, and more than a decade of research into Gaye’s performance, television work, and studio techniques, I am writing a comprehensive study of his creative career. The first part considers Gaye’s work from 1957 to 1970; the second spans the inception of What’s Going On in 1971 to his tragic death in 1984.
The core of my teaching at Carleton comprises three introductory level courses: History of Rock, Golden Age of R&B, and History of Jazz. While these courses approach different topics and periods, they are bound together by a set of common goals.
Under the greater umbrella of factual information associated with these subjects, I teach students three basic skills in these introductory courses:
- Techniques for careful listening
- Ways to write about music
- Methods for approaching primary and secondary sources relating to popular music
Students bring a wide range of prior knowledge into these three courses, with very few having any formal musico-analytical experience. I find that close listening allows me to teach unfamiliar ideas to a wide range of new and experienced listeners.
I give students tools that allow them to hear, discuss, and write about aspects of musical structure, helping them to find topics of interest and providing methodological guidance. I also give them basic techniques to analyze live musical performances. My courses incorporate a variety of primary sources throughout all of these—including historical newspaper and magazine articles, biographical writings, and vintage source recordings—to help students see and hear historic events in context and musical processes at work.
I also teach upper-level seminars. I have led multiple iterations of courses on the Beatles, Motown, and early jazz reception. The goals of these courses are much different. After brief reviews of literature, methodological approaches, and research resources, students create lengthy original research projects, which are presented in both oral and written form.
The depth of these seminars can provide interesting learning experiences, for both student and instructor. Small groups and focused activities help to deepen student perspectives, while group investigations into primary source materials, and small weekly research presentations allow them to cover a lot of material and feel a sense of ownership over the discussions.
The subject matter of my courses draws many students who often have little training in music history and theory. This has caused me to reconsider the manner in which these seminar courses are “advanced.” Rather than thinking of these classes as the last in a series of building blocks, I use their advanced nature to investigate a more detailed aspect of history using primary source materials.
After a short introduction to the music at hand, students spend several weeks exploring various sets of sources and reporting on them. I use similar assignments for biography comparison, song form analysis, cover analysis, and exploring bootlegs as primary sources. In the final portion of the course, students are required to develop an original thesis, present their research to the group, and submit a written paper.
Another aspect of my teaching involves “Argument and Inquiry” courses, Carleton’s version of a freshman seminar. I have led two different iterations of these, one called “Keeping it Real: Authenticity in Popular Music” and the other “Bob Dylan’s America.” I find the Dylan course especially effective for this purpose, as it welcomes new students to Minnesota, Dylan’s home state, by focusing on the music of his early career when he was at a similar age as the students.
My interest in performance practice, studio production, and rock history also informs a hybrid course called “Rocklab,” which combines performance and academic study of rock music for non-majors. In this class I take about twenty students—with no consideration of prior experience—and place them into three or four bands. I provide all of the instruments and the rehearsal space for them to learn to play rock music at an extremely basic level. In the first half of the course, I use a variety of small-group coaching sessions to teach each band to perform two songs.
During the second half, the students make a recording of their performances, experimenting with a variety of recording techniques. Throughout the term, we augment these performance and recording activities with readings and discussion about performance practice in rock music and mediation of recording techniques, both extraordinarily rich topics in popular music studies. To teach the course, I have been instrumental in developing a college electro-acoustic lab, which serves as an instructional space while also supporting more advanced work by departmental composers and my own audio-oriented research projects.
I am very interested in pedagogy and spend a lot of time with my teaching. I’ve worked several times as a workshop leader with a group of non-music secondary school teachers as part of a seminar funded by the NEH called “Voices across Time” held at the University of Pittsburgh. I organized and administered a panel discussion on “teaching rock” at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland as part of the annual pop conference sponsored by the Experience Music Project. In 2014, I published a response in a roundtable concerned with popular music pedagogy in a new journal at the forefront of this movement, The Journal of Music History Pedagogy.
Certainly my most important work in the area of pedagogy has been my textbook What’s That Sound (W.W. Norton). Working on this text has forced me to carefully consider teaching and canon formation in new ways, putting aside my own practices to think about how other instructors might approach the subject.
Current Courses
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Fall 2025
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Winter 2026
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Spring 2026
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