Amy Frishkey

Amy Frishkey is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in popular music of the African diaspora in the Americas, exceptional vocality, and the world music and B2B background music industries. Her forthcoming book, Navigating Neo-Traditionalism in Garifuna Popular Music (Lexington Books, 2025), discusses the profound influence of neo-traditionalism upon Garifuna popular music since the mid-2000s and the different ways in which artists interpret and realize this aesthetic and ideological orientation as a way to contend with neoliberal socioeconomic developments. Dr. Frishkey’s current research and next book project focus on the vocal “break” between the speaking range and the falsetto (or “head” and “chest” voice) and the sociocultural meanings and metaphors that arise to make sense of this physiological “border crossing” within singing traditions around the world.
 
Dr. Frishkey has taught at UCLA, UC Riverside, University of Redlands, and Texas Folklife. She has presented her research at conferences for the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, the American Musicological Society (AMS), and New York University’s Music and the Moving Image. Her articles can be found in the journals Radical Musicology and Diagonal: An Ibero–American Music Review and in the edited volumes The Garifuna Music Reader and The Oxford Handbook of Global Popular Music