Jonathan A. Gómez, assistant professor of music in the Department of Musicology, has published a new research article, “Marquis Hill’s Modern Flows: Musical Metapragmatics and Blackness,” in the summer 2026 issue of the Journal of Musicology. Gómez examines the music and career of Chicago-born trumpeter Marquis Hill (b. 1987) to illustrate how Black music studies can benefit from greater attention to “metapragmatic indexicality.” This process, Gómez argues in the article, is particularly useful for music-analytical studies aimed at better understanding how identity – specifically Blackness and Black musical identity – is signaled in musical performance.
“I hope to provide a pathway for identifying overt and covert signs of identity in a range of musical and rhetorical practices,” Gómez writes. “Key to this work is taking, wherever possible, Hill’s own knowledge and theorizations of Black American musical history not only as a point of departure but also as a guide for music-theoretical insights and listening through his music for meaning-making potential. Though my work focuses on Blackness and Black American music, the broader theoretical approach is one that may be applied to the study of various communities, identities, styles, and time periods in music history.”
The article’s abstract states:
In this article, I make a methodological intervention into Black music studies by arguing for greater consideration of “metapragmatic indexicality,” as theorized by linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein (1976, 1993, 2003), in examining Black musical identity formation. More specifically, I wish to address how metapragmatic indexicals from Black musical history “calibrate” the pragmatic level of musical signs and pull them into a configuration that ultimately signals Blackness to listeners at a metalevel. With particular attention to what Silverstein calls “reflexive calibration,” this work reveals how Black musicians deploy their music-historical knowledge to signal Blackness at and beyond a pragmatic level of semiosis. This work extends foundational studies of interactivity and sociality in improvised musics, particularly jazz, by Ingrid Monson (1996) and R. Keith Sawyer (1996) but with a more robust focus on Blackness as a historically and culturally situated identity category.
To elucidate this framework, I examine the career and music-making of Chicago-born trumpeter Marquis Hill (b. 1987), whose genre-crossing musical aesthetic and theorizations of Black musical history offer an ideal corpus for analysis. I offer close musical-semiotic analysis of two of Hill’s recorded tracks: “Medley: The Way We Play / Minority,” a combination of spoken word and a cover of a jazz standard (saxophonist / composer Gigi Gryce’s “Minority”) from his 2016 album The Way We Play, and “Ego vs. Spirit,” an original composition from his 2018 album Modern Flows Vol. 2. Through transcription and analysis of these performances, and remaining attentive to Hill’s compositional, business (via his record label), arranging, and improvisational actions as well as the lyrical content, I demonstrate the utility and applicability of metapragmatics in identity formation across a range of musical materials.
Gómez’s article is online through the Journal of Musicology or can be accessed through the University of Michigan Libraries.