Todd Decker
Todd Decker is Assistant Professor of Music at Washington
University in St. Louis, with joint appointments in American Culture
Studies and Film and Media Studies. He teaches courses in American
popular music, film music, the studio-era film musical, and
eighteenth-century classical music. He has also taught at UCLA.
Decker is currently working on a book project entitled Music
Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz to be published by University of
California Press. The book will link Fred Astaire’s film and
television career to the histories of popular song and jazz, with
special attention to Astaire’s many dances accompanied by African
American musicians. This study will place the studio-era film
musical within the history of popular music and American musical
culture more generally, bringing popular music, film, dance, and
culture together in an interdisciplinary context that speaks to the
disciplines of film studies, musicology, and dance history.
Decker received his Ph.D. in historical musicology at the
University of Michigan in 2007. His dissertation, entitled
“Black/White Encounters on the American Musical Stage and Screen
(1924-2005),” examined signal examples of interracial performance on
Broadway, in Hollywood, and on the American opera stage across the
twentieth century and received an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship
from the American Musicological Society.
Outside his work on film, Decker has published several articles
on eighteenth-century keyboard composer Domenico Scarlatti and holds
a Master of Music in harpsichord performance from the San Francisco
Conservatory of Music. He has many years’ experience performing on
harpsichord, piano, and organ, as well as conducting and staging
musical theater.
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