Michèle Duguay is a lecturer on music at Harvard whose work explores music theory, popular music, computer-assisted music analysis, and gender. Her scholarship also appears in Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR). She has written on topics ranging from the work of women composers in the twentieth century, how singers’ voices are positioned and perceived in recordings, how piano music creates a sense of balance and tension, and how the popular singing voice can be studied.
Michèle is a co-founder of the Engaged Music Theory working group.
What do you teach at Harvard, and why?
I typically teach courses on music theory and analysis for undergraduate and graduate students. In spring 2026, I will be teaching “Analyzing Popular Music” (Music 159), a course I designed when I arrived at Harvard in 2022. Topics like Western staff notation and pitch often take center stage in many music theory courses, but they can serve as a barrier to entry for students who haven’t studied Western classical music. Music 159 has no prerequisites. The repertoire we cover varies each year based on the musical interests of the students.
Over the course of the semester, we work through understanding how different elements of a popular song are constructed: form, timbre, rap flow, instrumentation, music videos, text-music relationships. We begin by assembling a class playlist, which is a great opportunity for all of us to learn about new artists. Each week, students are asked to analyze a song of their choice using a theoretical approach we discussed in class. Next semester, I’m especially looking forward to discussing Rosalía’s new album Lux, which blends conventions of opera, flamenco, EDM, reggaeton, and pop in novel ways.
Your research explores how sound and music intersect with identity and social power. How do you see those dynamics playing out in today’s popular music?
We can learn a lot about music’s intersections with identity by studying how specific artists navigate expectations set by their career trajectories or the commercial boundaries of musical genre. Some artists like Beyoncé explicitly critique and rethink genre boundaries through their work. Her 2024 album Cowboy Carter, for instance, generated a lot of discussion about the racial and gendered politics of who is considered a country musician and what counts as country music.
How have TikTok and streaming services changed the way we experience or analyze popular music?
In 2017, a study by music theorist Hubert Léveillé Gauvin found that song intros on U.S. billboard charts had progressively gotten shorter since the 1980s. He linked this trend to the rise of streaming platforms: in a competitive environment where listeners have access to countless songs, a short intro can be a good way to grab a listener’s attention in a competitive environment. Others have proposed that TikTok might have contributed to the decline in popularity of song bridges.
I’ve also been surprised to see older hits (Kelis’s “Milkshake” (2003) or Céline Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back To Me” (1996)) resurface in unexpected ways. For music analysts, digital platforms raise interesting questions. How do we understand, for instance, the cultural function of an album—its overarching narrative, structure, and themes—if many listeners are not playing the tracks in order, listening to a few tracks in isolation, or only engaging with snippets of a single? How can music analysts take into account the more transient forms of listening that take place through phone speakers and in public spaces?
What’s one piece of popular music today that you think scholars—and listeners—should be paying closer attention to, and why?
One of my favorite albums in recent years is Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Mélusine (2023). The album features a mix of originals, covers of French chanson, a song by the seventeenth-century French composer Michel Lambert, and texts by two twelfth-century trobairitz (the female equivalent of a troubadour). In a brilliant twist, she uses these disparate sources to tell the medieval European tale of Mélusine. I’ve been lucky enough to hear her perform twice (once at Sanders Theatre!), and I was amazed at how she uses her vocal training in jazz, baroque, and classical voice to completely reinvent existing songs.
As listeners and scholars, we have a responsibility to sustain and participate in our shared musical ecosystem. Streaming services have made music more accessible, but we can also purchase albums and keep an eye out for events at local live houses, clubs, and other venues. These are some tangible ways to encourage and support the artists we love.
Where do you see the study of popular music heading in the next decade?
It has been quite exciting to see so much new critical scholarship on the voice in the field of music theory. Describing with precision how particular voices carry emotional and cultural meanings has been especially challenging. Why are people drawn to Billie Eilish’s subdued “bedroom pop” tone? What does it mean when people compliment a singer for having “a powerful voice”? Within a North American academic landscape, I also hope to see more analyses of non-Western popular musics such as K-pop, Afrobeat, and reggaeton.
