Charles Hiroshi Garrett, 1966-2024

Charles Hiroshi Garrett, born on 21 November, 1966, died unexpectedly in Ann Arbor, MI, on 18 July, 2024. He leaves behind a legacy of disciplinary-shifting scholarship and a reputation for unwavering dedication to collegiality and mentorship.
 
Garrett earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and American History at Columbia University in 1988. While working as an information technology specialist at Columbia, he began taking music classes; his teachers included Mark Tucker, Elaine Sisman, and H. Wiley Hitchcock. He earned another BA at Columbia, in Music, in 1998. He earned his MA (2000) and PhD (2004) in Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, working under Robert Walser, Susan McClary, and Robert Fink, among others. His sole academic post was at the University of Michigan, where he taught for twenty years. He was well known as a cheerful and relentless advocate for his colleagues and especially for his students, whom he supported with a seemingly endless supply of good cheer and good counsel.
 
As a graduate student, Garrett auspiciously had early papers accepted at the inaugural meetings of two significant conferences; these include a paper on the musical representation of Asian characters in film at the Music and the Moving Image conference at New York University, and a paper on music, sports, and masculinity at the Experience Music Project conference (now called PopCon), in 2001 and 2002, respectively. He delivered his first AMS paper in 2002 at the Annual Meeting in Columbus, OH, on Louis Armstrong and migration—a topic that became a focal point of his dissertation. Garrett’s research received support and praise from the Society when he was awarded the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship in 2002 and the Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship in 2003. The completed dissertation became the source for his equally lauded monograph, Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (California, 2008).

Garrett was very active in AMS governance, beginning as student member of the Committee on Cultural Diversity (2000-2003); he was a member of the Council (2007-9), the Corresponding and Honorary Members Committee (2008-9), the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship Committee (2009-13; Chair, 2010-13), the Membership and Development Committee (2013-16), the Publications Committee (2017-20), the Board Nominating Committee (2022-23), and was a Director-at-Large on the Board of Directors (2019-22). He also gave much of his time and focus to the Society for American Music, culminating in his serving as President from 2015-17.
 
Besides his monograph, Garrett served as editor-in-chief of the Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition, which took nearly a decade to complete and immediately became the definitive reference guide for the field. Garrett also co-edited Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and its Boundaries (California, 2012) with David Ake and Daniel Goldmark, and Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century (Michigan, 2021) with Carol Oja. At the time of his death, he was working on a project exploring music and artificial intelligence. He is survived by his wife, Saleema, his parents, and his brother. 

-Daniel Goldmark