Elizabeth Lindau
Associate Director, BCCM + Music History
Office: UMC-C206
e-mail: elizabeth.lindau@csulb.edu
Musicologist Elizabeth Ann Lindau writes about rock music’s engagement with avant-gardism since the 1960s. She has published articles and book chapters on Brian Eno, Yoko Ono, and Sonic Youth. Her work on the Velvet Underground & Nico and Andy Warhol was supported by a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for research at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives. Dr. Lindau is active in scholarly societies and conferences, presenting at Feminist Theory and Music, the Pop Conference at Seattle’s Museum of Popular Culture, and annual meetings of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US (IASPM-US), and the Society for American Music (SAM). She served as secretary of the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the AMS (2022–2026), secretary of the IASPM-US (2018–2020), general editor of the SAM Bulletin (2016–2019), and committee chair of the 2014 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Prize for best scholarly monograph on popular music.
Dr. Lindau’s current writing projects include an article on Gray, the experimental band co-founded by painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and percussionist Michael Holman in 1979. In spring 2024, she presented this work to the University of Oregon’s School of Music and Dance as part of the Steve Larsen Distinguished Lecture Series.
Lindau earned PhD and MA degrees in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia, and bachelor’s degrees in Piano Performance and Piano Pedagogy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining the music faculty at CSULB in Fall 2016, she held visiting appointments at Earlham College (Indiana), Wesleyan University (Connecticut), and Gettysburg College (Pennsylvania).
Selected Courses:
- Popular Music in America
- Music in the Age of Recording
- Musical Avant-Gardes
- Landscape and Soundscape
- Music and Decadence from Baudelaire to Bowie
- Music and Portraiture
Publications:
- "Review: Roadrunner, by Joshua Clover." Journal of Popular Music Studies, 35, no. 3, 2024.
- "Portrait of the Artist as Andy Warhol: Lou Reed and John Cale’s Songs for Drella." In What Goes On: The Velvet Underground and After, edited by Sean Albiez and David Pattie, 237–252. New York: Bloomsbury, 2023.
- "‘We can bring it back’: Revisiting Cateforis in 2018." Journal of Popular Music Studies, 30, no. 4: 113–120.
- "‘Mother Superior’: Maternity and Creativity in the Work of Yoko Ono." Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 20: 57–76.
- "Avant-gardism, ‘Africa,’ and Appropriation in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts." In Brian Eno: Oblique Music, edited by Sean Albiez and David Pattie, 193–209. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
- Review of The Velvet Underground and Nico, White Light/White Heat, and The Velvet Underground (45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition Reissues). Journal of the Society for American Music 9, no. 4 (November 2015), 517–521.
- "Goodbye 20th Century! Sonic Youth Records John Cage’s ‘Number Pieces.’" In Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, edited by Benjamin Piekut, 15–38. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
