John Covach

Professor of Music and Director of the Institute for Popular Music; Professor of Theory at Eastman School of Music University of Rochester

  • Rochester NY

John Covach is an expert on the history of popular and rock music, 12-tone music, and the philosophy and aesthetics of music.

Contact

University of Rochester

View more experts managed by University of Rochester

View all Experts

Spotlight

2 min

University of Rochester's John Covach gives perspective on Beatles Abbey Road Anniversary

September 26 marks the 50th anniversary of the worldwide release of the Beatles’ Abbey Road. While Let It Be was released in 1970, most of the tracks on that album were recorded earlier, making Abbey Road the band’s last album project.   John Covach, director of the Institute for Popular Music at the University of Rochester, coauthor of What’s That Sound: An Introduction to Rock and Its History, and Beatles academic expert, notes:   “It’s definitely the Beatles’ last statement. You’ve got a band that’s breaking up and everyone knows they’re breaking up. They’re arguing with each other, suing each other, and it’s ugly and goes against the band’s legacy. This all happens in 1969, so they decide to go back into the studio and do one last record to leave on a high note, which is Abbey Road. And there’s this moment where they come out with this album that it’s back to form; just a fantastic Beatles project after the last project had failed. Abbey Road is the group playing together, singing together, and working together in a way that they haven’t really done for some time and putting their personal differences aside.” The University of Rochester’s Institute for Popular Music and Eastman School of Music will host The Abbey Road Conference, from September 27 to 29. The conference will feature speakers Ken Townsend, recording engineer and former Abbey Road manager; Andy Babiuk, author of Beatles Gear, Walter Everett, author of The Beatles as Musicians; and Kenneth Womack, author of Maximum Volume: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin.

John Covach

Areas of Expertise

Rock 'n' Roll
Music and Culture
Progressive Rock in the 1970s
The Beatles
Popular Music
The Rolling Stones
Philosophy and Aesthetics of Music
Music Industry
British Invasion

Social

Biography

John Covach is Director of the University of Rochester Institute for Popular Music, Professor of Music in the College Music Department, and Professor of Theory at the Eastman School of Music. Professor Covach teaches classes in traditional music theory as well as the history and analysis of popular music. His online courses at Coursera.org have enrolled more than 350,000 students in over 175 countries worldwide.

Professor Covach has published dozens of articles on topics dealing with popular music, twelve-tone music, and the philosophy and aesthetics of music. He is the principal author of the college textbook What's That Sound? An Introduction to Rock Music (W.W. Norton) and has co-edited Understanding Rock (Oxford University Press), American Rock and the Classical Tradition and Traditions, Institutions, and American Popular Music (Routledge), Sounding Out Pop (University of Michigan Press), as well as the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones. He is one of the founding editors for Tracking Pop (Michigan), a series devoted to scholarly monographs on popular music. He appears regularly on radio and television in North America and England, and his writing may be found in Time, Newsweek, The Huffington Post, CNN.com and FoxNews.com.

As a guitarist, Covach has performed widely on electric and classical guitar in both the US and Europe and recorded with the progressive rock band, Land of Chocolate. He currently performs with several bands, including Going for the One.

Education

University of Michigan

Ph.D.

Music Theory and Composition

1990

University of Michigan

M.A.

Music Theory and Composition

1985

University of Michigan

B.A.

Music Theory and Composition

1983

Affiliations

  • Institute for Popular Music : Director

Selected Media Appearances

Pink Floyd sells song rights to Sony for $400M

NY Daily News  print

2024-10-01

Eastman School of Music Professor John Covach told the Daily News in 2021 that there are a few reasons an artist might relinquish ownership of their music.

“If you’re a young artist in your twenties, you might think, ‘This is my retirement money, I have a revenue stream, I’m not going to sell my songs now,'” he said. “It’s different when you have more history behind you than future in front of you.” (Also reported by MSN News)

View More

Springsteen, Jagger, and rock’s senior citizens: Still rollin’ Illness and injury are taking a toll on artists of a certain age. Do ticket-buying fans mind?

Boston Globe  online

2024-03-08

“Most of us are just happy to be in the presence of the real-live version of the person we’ve admired all these years,” said rock ‘n’ roll historian John Covach, a professor at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. “It doesn’t matter that they can’t sing the high notes anymore. It doesn’t matter that they’re kind of stooped over. We’re seeing the person we remember from 40 or 50 years ago.”

View More

Beatlemania and 60th anniversary of the Beatles' first live TV performance in the U.S.

WXXI Connections  radio

2024-02-07

In our second hour, 60 years ago today, the Beatles arrived in the United States for the first time. Two days later, the group made its live American television debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” with 70 million Americans tuning in from home. This hour, we discuss how Beatlemania helped shape American music and culture. Our guests:

John Covach, director of the Institute for Popular Music and professor of music in the Arthur Satz Department of Music at the University of Rochester, and professor of theory at the Eastman School of Music

View More

Show All +

Selected Articles

Review of Robert Freeman, The Crisis of Classical Music in America: Lessons from the Life in the Education of Musicians (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014)

Music Theory Online (MTO)

John Covach

2015

Robert Freeman is probably best known among post-secondary music faculty as the former director of the Eastman School of Music; he came to Rochester from a musicology post at MIT in 1972, served for more than two decades at Eastman, and left in 1996 to take up positions as dean at the New England Conservatory and then later at the University of Texas at Austin. While Freeman had very little administrative experience when he began the top job at Eastman, he soon became a leading figure in collegiate music administration, in part because of his vision and innovation as director, and in part owing to the prestige and standing of the school he led. Indeed, many today would consider Freeman to be among the country’s most authoritative and experienced senior figures in performing-arts leadership—the dean of music-school deans.

View more

To MOOC or Not To MOOC?

Music Theory Online

John Covach

2013

At colleges and universities across North America, online education is a topic that has generated a significant amount of discussion in the past year or so. In many ways, the idea of online education is only the most recent version of something that got its start in the nineteenth century: the correspondence course. (1) The development of radio and television in the twentieth century, and then the rise of the internet over the last twenty years, has made it possible to conduct courses with far less time lag than was present in the early days of distance learning, when lessons and assignments were carried by surface mail. Each issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education seems to bring word of some new development or wrinkle in the rapid development of online courses, and perhaps no topic is more controversial than MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). (2) While many embrace the idea that MOOCs make college-level learning available to thousands who would otherwise not have pragmatic access to it, others worry that MOOCs threaten to put traditional college courses out of business. (3)

View more

Traditions, Institutions, and American Popular Tradition: A special issue of the journal Contemporary Music Review

Contemporary Music Review

John Covach, Walter Everett

2013

This issue of Contemporary Music Review focuses on the composers, performers, theorists, historians, critics, and listeners who welcome the potentially difficult-but also potentially fruitful-intercourse between" classical" and" popular" styles and techniques in American music and culture; this group of new essays addresses a variety of philosophical, historical, and analytical topics concerning the relationships between the learned and the vernacular in the music of this century's stage, screen, sound recordings, and academies. Taken together with its companion volume," American Rock and the Classical Music Tradition," these essays suggest that the interaction of popular and art music in American culture not only raises a number of fascinating and even sometimes highly charged issues, but that it also has a rich history dating back at least to the end of the nineteenth century...

View more

Show All +
Powered by