David Grubbs: This Indeed Is Music!

“The American poets,” proclaimed Walt Whitman in the first, epochal 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, “are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people.”

David Grubbs— musician, writer, poet and Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY— is just such a bard, and though he’d likely demure from the assertion, in career that spans five decades of acclaim, the people have spoken. That Grubbs and his family don’t live far from the 99 Ryerson Street, Brooklyn, home where Whitman wrote the early Leaves is a happy coincidence.

A respected figure in underground music since his high school punk rock days in mid-1980s Louisville, Kentucky, Grubbs has recently received a burst of attention for Drag City Records’ release of We Have Dozens of Titles, a bracing collection of archival recordings by Gastr del Sol, a Chicago-based, largely non-rock 1990s project Grubbs—who studied classical piano as a youth—co-led with the chameleonic experimentalist, Jim O’Rourke.

Grubbs’ prolific output since then is no less compelling, both as a solo artist and an eager collaborator whose wide-ranging discography—from folk- inspired songs to Telecaster guitar compositions and improvised soundscapes— is nearly a Kosmos of its own. Grubbs’ writing, including a trilogy of book length poems published by Duke University Press, reflects, in parts, the influence of two other music obsessed bards, Louis Zukofsky and John Ashbery.

Although soon to depart for Germany, where he’s a 2024-25 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Grubbs, will excitedly be returning to CUNY for the next spring semester. In the interim, two stellar new albums, a duo with guitarist Loren Connors, Evening Air, and a trio with guitarist Wendy Eisenberg and multi-instrumentalist Mark Kramer as Squanderers, are soon forthcoming.

You went to undergraduate college at Georgetown University—including the years when Big East basketball was at its peak. Did you ever meet Hoyas center and future Knicks captain, Patrick Ewing?

I didn’t. My clearest recollection of the Georgetown basketball was seeing their players in line at the school cafeteria and realizing how enormous Division One men’s basketball players are. I was more of a Louisville Cardinals supporter than a Hoyas fan; when the University of Louisville won the NCAA championship in my freshman year, I may have been the only person on campus rooting for them.

Like the great poet and artist, Jackson Mac Low—though he only as a student, I believe—your academic path went from the University of Chicago to Brooklyn College.

I did a PhD in English at the University of Chicago. I started releasing records and touring when I was in high school, and when I graduated from college I was able to picture myself making a living as a college English professor, which would facilitate my playing music. More or less the best experience that I had at Georgetown was two years of tutoring in English and Philosophy classes in the maximum-security wing of the now-closed Lorton Penitentiary in Lorton, VA, and based on that I felt good about the possibility of teaching. I started graduate school in 1990 and defended the dissertation in 2005; fifteen years is pretty long even by U of Chicago standards, in which people notoriously take forever to finish.

“It’s a long, long down way down to Reno, Nevada, it’s a long long way to your home”— Richard Fariña, of Linden Boulevard, Flatbush, sang that.

In my case, I barreled through several years of classes and exams, but by the time it came to write a dissertation I was happier spending time playing in Gastr del Sol and the [experimental rock band] Red Krayola, releasing records and touring everywhere. I taught for a couple of years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, mainly because I had a great time doing so. Prior to that, the Red Krayola was the closest I came to art school.

I moved to New York in 1999 for love, and divided my time professionally between playing music, doing freelance writing (I contributed a monthly piece for the Feuilleton section of the Munich newspaper the Süddeutsche Zeitung), and, uh, spending a lot of time reading. I was enrolled in “extended research residence” at Chicago because (a) I’m stubborn and (b) that’s where I received health insurance.

I was hired at Brooklyn College in 2005 through the CUNY Digital Media Initiative, which gave each the schools wide latitude in creating ideally interdisciplinary positions. I was hired to teach in the Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) graduate certificate program, which soon thereafter became an MFA program, and I divided my teaching between PIMA and the Conservatory of Music, my home department.

Occasionally I was roped into teaching things like Television Criticism which, truth be told, I really enjoyed.

Car 54, Where Are You? (1960-1962)– filmed at the old Biograph Studios in the Bronx, with some local location shooting too—is my favorite sitcom. Nat Hiken was a comic genius. William Faulkner was also a fan.

My previous academic experience was nothing like CUNY, but I’ve become such a CUNY booster— who wouldn’t want to teach in this sprawlingly complex (and thus absolutely rewarding) system in New York City where tuition is the smallest fraction of that of private schools? I love speaking to prospective students— in large part because I believe deeply in CUNY’s mission.

That’s wonderful to hear. if someone wishes to study with you at CUNY, how can they do so?

At the Graduate Center I’m on the doctoral faculty of Musicology, although happily I’m the person that Art History (and sometimes Sociology and English) students call if they’re working on sound art or sound studies. At Brooklyn College I teach primarily in the MFA programs in Sonic Arts and Performance and Interactive Media Arts, although I’ve also taught poetry in the Creative Writing MFA program. I’m pretty easy to find, and people should reach out if they want to know more about any of these programs. Amazing folks have come through them.

You’ve collaborated with an astonishing range of artists, from those a generation or more older than yourself (Pauline Oliveros, Susan Howe, Tony Conrad, Joe McPhee, Mayo Thompson) as well as younger (Ryley Walker, Wendy Eisenberg). How do you prepare for these diverse situations?

I do my homework; my watchword is “insufficiently overprepared.” Carve it on my tombstone. Growing up playing in punk bands, it was weird if you were in a band with someone more than a couple of years either older or younger than you. But before long I was working with folks who were of my parents’ generation— and couldn’t have been more different in their life experiences from my parents— and my life is all the richer for it. It is odd playing with younger folks now— I guess I knew that it would happen, that I’d be the strange oldster. I try not to default into telling long tales of decades past.

Blue Chopsticks, the sub-label you run within Drag City Records, takes its name from a composition by pianist Herbie Nichols, who was also a poet and critic for the Black weekly newspaper, New York Age. How did you discover Nichols?

Through the one-two punch of picking up a used copy of Herbie Nichols’ The Third World and shortly thereafter Duck Baker’s wonderful recordings on nylon-string guitar of Nichols’ compositions. But I had forgotten—or never knew— that Nichols was a poet and critic. Thanks for the reminder.

David Grubbs can be found on X, Instagram and Bandcamp.