Michael J. Millenheft III

Overview

Michael J. Millenheft III is a Ph.D. candidate in Music and Sound Studies at Cornell University working across ethnomusicology and popular music studies. A drummer and educator, his scholarship grows from sustained participation in musical practice and scene life. He has performed in Southern California punk scenes since 2009, including with the powerviolence band Sordo since 2011, and currently performs in Cornell jazz combos and Ithaca’s local music scene. His research interests include sound studies, media studies, drum kit studies and performance practice, human geography, coloniality and decoloniality, touch, emotion, improvisation, and practical musical knowledge. With an ear toward the provincial, the improvisatory, and the quotidian, his broader work asks how grassroots and DIY practices transform ordinary materials, spaces, and techniques into ways of knowing, making media, and sustaining social life.

His dissertation, provisionally titled “Powerviolence as an Orientation Toward Noising: Drumming, DIY Mediation, and Decolonial Possibility in Southern California,” is an ethnographic and historical study of powerviolence, an extreme form of hardcore punk that developed in Southern California around 1990 and became known for speed, brevity, and noise. The project approaches powerviolence as an orientation toward noise as practice, captured in the gerund “noising.” It follows noise through three interrelated constellations. The first brings musical analysis into conversation with touch and live performance through the relation between drummer and dancer. The second considers the hands-on labor of recording, duplicating, self-releasing, and circulating recordings and other DIY media. The third turns to local histories and geographies to understand how participants make social and decolonial meaning from inherited conditions of coloniality. Across these constellations, Michael traces the entanglement of sound, bodies, media, place, and collective life. His earlier work has examined improvisation on the Zimbabwean mbira dzavadzimu, including an undergraduate research and pedagogy project that helped establish opportunities for mbira study at California State University, San Bernardino; jazz and drumming in Qingdao, China, where he learned Mandarin largely through everyday immersion, taught music, and performed locally; and post-COVID resocialization through sound, space, and new media centered on a digital jukebox in a neighborhood pizzeria in Boston in 2022. He has worked in education since 2017 across primary, secondary, arts, and university settings, and remains interested in pedagogy that treats listening and making as forms of critical thought.