Jacek Blaszkiewicz

One of my class assignments is to rewrite mvt 5 of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique “but it’s Gen Z.” And it never, ever disappoints.

The 900-word sentence by David Foster Wallace in Mister Squishy written out in full

Hannah Smart on the 900-word David Foster Wallace sentence she's spent the last year diagramming, against the advice of well-meaning family
and friends: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nothing-ever-happens-mister-squishy-and-the-year-of-the-sentence-diagram/

Coming soon in 19th-Century Music: a cultural history of sight-reading at the Paris Conservatoire

AMS Accountability Archive Grassroots membership response to a professional society in crisis

in case this hasn’t made it over here yet amsaccountabilityarchive.carrd.co

Call for Papers: Global Musical Modernities and Local Agency, 7-10 May 2026, Toronto

https://www.rma.ac.uk/2025/11/09/call-for-papers-global-musical-modernities-and-local-agency-7-10-may-2026-toronto/

Yellow graphic with dark blue text reading Fall Sale. 50% off with code FALL25. Available Books & Journal Issues. Oct 20-Nov 9. Duke University Press logo is in bottom right corner.

Have you checked out our fall sale yet? Save 50% on books & journal issues with coupon FALL25.
buff.ly/Bk390cu

Cosmos, Production, and Anarchy [book-strip index="1"] In our era of climate change and global environmental catastrophes, is communism relevant anymore? At first glance, there are at least three reasons to doubt it.  The first reas...

"Communism must become ecological. And yet this argument is incomplete if it does not include its corollary: political ecology can become truly revolutionary only by becoming communist"

Sensory studies 2026: a state-of-the-art review Published in The Senses and Society (Ahead of Print, 2025)

Sensory studies 2026: a state-of-the-art review www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

What’s Happening to Reading? For many people, A.I. may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end.

Will reading become obsolete? How A.I. could transform our relationship to the written word.

Fall 2025 Conference AMS-Midwest Fall 2025 Conference (Hybrid), hosted by Oakland University   Date : October 11, 2025 Host : Oakland University, Rochester, MI Note : The meeting will be held in person and virtually...

I’m presenting new material—on “The Science of Sight-Reading: Notation and/as Ocular Technology in fin-de-siècle France”—
at the American Musicological Society Midwest Chapter on Oct. 11. The conference will be livestreamed.
amsmidwest.weebly.com/fall-2025-co...

Best if enjoyed with Cortot's fumbling yet ethereal recording: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8O9...

Intense-looking slide from my upcoming talk,"The Science of Sight-Reading: Notation and/as Ocular Technology in fin-de-siècle France."The hands are Alfred Cortot's, recorded in slow motion then freeze-framed bar by bar.The slurs in the score are not phrasing; they denote lateral/vertical motion.

Autumn 2025 issue is out! Read articles by Martha Feldman, James E. K. Parker, Anne M. Thell, Jennifer Rae Greeson, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Wendy Anne Lee, and Brian Massumi.

criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/past_issues/...

Sympathy for the Devil: Faust, the ’60s, and the Tragedy of Development - Dissent Magazine Our day and night at the Pentagon, like Faust’s encounter with the Earth Spirit, marked a new awareness of ominous, fearful powers that had to be dealt with before our dreams of freedom and self-fulfi...

Very proud to be able to share, via @dissentmag.bsky.social, Marshall Berman's essay "Sympathy for the Devil," about the Pentagon exorcism, The Rolling Stones, Faust, and the culture of the 1960s. It's been out of print for forty years, and it's a masterpiece www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

A kind review of my book is out in the Journal of Modern History. I’m reviewed by James H. Johnson, whose own book, “Listening in Paris: A Cultural History,” I read as a graduate student and have referenced and taught ever since.

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

John Ogdon’s Rolls In the history of sight-reading, anecdotes abound. Famous keyboardists were often super-readers of difficult scores. We know this because they wad witnesses. Here is Carl Czerny on his student, Fra…

I wrote about pianist John Ogdon's infamous sight-reading abilities, and whether they could be called superhuman or something else.
sightliteracies.wordpress.com/2025/08/27/j...

Today, we designated Wayne State University (WSU) a “Hostile Campus” for its repeated repression of Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and allied students who oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Learn more: islamophobia.org/hostile-camp...

Excited to present new stuff at MLA 2026 in Toronto

Slightly diminish a band:
The Maybe Maybe Maybes

Sight-Reading the ondes Martenot (feat. Kittler and Duruflé) You don’t wing it with technology. Before I can enter the world of media studies—the world of McLuhan and Kittler and networks and interfaces and epistemology and so forth—I have to type, thumb, sw…

New blog post: sight-reading on the Ondes martenot, and how Kittler could make sense of it.
sightliteracies.wordpress.com/2025/08/04/s...

If only I could write like this

Volume 49 Issue 1 | 19th-Century Music | University of California Press

"As musicology has become more conscious of the monumentalizing forces of canon formation in music historiography, object lessons can offer a 'punctuating' alternative." In its new issue, "19th-Century Music" publishes its first "Object Lesson." online.ucpress.edu/ncm/issue/49/1

Jack Blaszkiewicz Jack Blaszkiewicz Back to Gargoyle Online Party in Tiltsville, Florida The palm trees flash red and blue. Like the intoxicated driver negotiating with the police, they sway, feigning stability agai…

My first short fiction has just been published in Gargoyle Magazine. It’s loosely inspired by a recent family trip to Florida.

My last piece of published creative writing was a poem I wrote when I was nine. This feels good.

gargoylemagazine.com/jack-blaszki...

What an amazing, cacophonous scene.

NAC19CM - 2025 Conference Schedule Wednesday, June 25 8:00–9:00 Breakfast (provided) 8:45 Welcoming Remarks, Jack Blaszkiewicz and Jeffrey Sposato 9:00–10:30 New Approaches to Analyzing and Researching Nineteenth-Century Music ...

Excited to host the North American Conference on 19th-Century Music at Wayne State University next week! Check out the program here:
sites.google.com/view/nac19cm...

Surface Studies It’s been a while since I last posted. Professional and personal life has gotten in the way (okay, to pinpoint it: teaching three courses and raising a toddler), but I have continued to think…

My latest blog post discusses new reading-related lit that has had me thinking hard. I also link to my latest review, published in Exacting Clam.
sightliteracies.wordpress.com/2025/06/11/s...

Exacting Clam No.17 is here.

Gina DeMartino's A Clam at the Bellagio adorns the cover.

Stunning fiction, poetry, criticism and essay adorns the rest of it.

Subscribe today

https://www.exactingclam.com/subscribe/

Sometimes a book's physique, more than its contents, dictates the format of a review. For @exactingclam.bsky.social I wrote about Mike Corrao's Surface Studies.
www.exactingclam.com/issues/no-17...

Another review of my book “Fanfare for a City” just came out—this time in Nineteenth-Century French Studies. The review is by Mark Seto, a musicologist whose work I read and assign often.

www.ncfs-journal.org/mark-seto/se...

NAC19CM - 2025 Conference Schedule Wednesday, June 25 8:00–9:00 Breakfast (provided) 8:45 Welcoming Remarks, Jack Blaszkiewicz and Jeffrey Sposato 9:00–10:30 New Approaches to Analyzing and Researching Nineteenth-Century Music ...

The program for the North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music is here! I'm so excited to host these fine scholars on the campus of Wayne State University from June 25-27.

sites.google.com/view/nac19cm...