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Concepts We'll Ponder
Identity, Improvisation, and Community in the Phish Experience
Concepts We'll Ponder
Identity, Improvisation, and Community in the Phish Experience
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Description
Concepts We'll Ponder: Identity, Improvisation, and Community in the Phish Experience launches the rapidly growing field of Phish Studies by revealing how the band's music and culture offer meaningful insights that extend beyond concert grounds into broader social, cultural, and political phenomena. Emerging from the inaugural Phish Studies Conference at Oregon State University, its sixteen innovative essays embody an ethos of serious play; the essays adopt creativity, joy, and improvisation as tools for scholarly inquiry.
Distinctively interdisciplinary, the collection draws from diverse disciplines including musicology, communications, statistics, and philosophy. By blending academic methods with passionate “phan” encyclopedic knowledge, the authors of this volume challenge traditional hierarchies between fan/scholar, personal/professional, and high/low culture. They explore “phan” identity, decode the complexities of famous jams, examine concerts as healing spaces, analyze show ratings, and more. In their examinations of the “Camden Chalk Dust,” “Colonel Forbin's Ascent,” and the “Phish Chicks” community, and beyond, these scholars invite readers to treat Phish as an “intellectual playground” and explore the significance of the Phish experience.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Editors' Introduction
Stephanie Jenkins
How I'm Forced To Learn: Methodologies
Chapter 1: We Are Aphicionados! We Are Vernacular Theorists! A Critical Reconsideration and Anti-Hegemonic Recasting of Phish, Phandon, and Fan Praxis
Jnan Blau
Chapter 2: Read The Book: Experiencing Philosophy in the Classroom with Phish
Stephanie C. Jenkins
Companions On This Ride: Phish Fan Community and Identity
Chapter 3: I Strive to Convey What You Strive to Condone': Phish Scene Identity and
Understanding America
Elizabeth A. Yeager
Chapter 4: A Cultural Rhetorical Model of Identity for Dispersed
Communities: Case of Jam Band Communities
Natalie J. Dollar, Nicholas Dahl, & Alexa Tawzer
Chapter 5: Donuts, Dresses and Phish: The Effects of Trademark Law on the Production of Culture Inside and Outside of the Phish Scene
Daniel W. Dylan
Chapter 6: Phish Fan's Performance of Resistance, Recuperation, and Reiteration
Christina L. Allaback
We're All in This Together: Gender and Accessibility in the Phish Community
Chapter 7: Inside this Silent Scene, All Are Free: An Assessment of Accessibility Issues Facing Deaf/Hard of Hearing (HoH) Fans at Phish Concerts
Joel Gershon
Chapter 8: You Were the Song That My Soul Understood: Personal Connections Through Shared Discourse in Facebook Community, Phish Chicks
Denise Goldman
Healing The Symptoms
Chapter 9: From the Concert to the Couch: Phish and the Therapeutic Alliance
Isaac Slone
Chapter 10: Community Through the Phellowship: A Support Group of Phans who Choose to Remain Sober
John Boatner
Shiny Music That Descends From Overhead: The Significance of Musical Structure and Improvisation
Chapter 11: On the Persistence of the Groove: Structural Fog and Jouissance in a 'Split Open and Melt' Jam
Stephen Reale
Chapter 12: 'Up the Mountain': The Compositional Use of the Arpeggiated Augmented Triad in Anastasio's 'Colonel Forbin's Ascent'
Julie Viscardi-Smalley
Chapter 13: The Camden 'Chalk Dust Torture' as a Model for Understanding Improvisational Aesthetics
Jacob A. Cohen
Chapter 14: An Ethnographic & Feminist Listen-In: Riffing on Phish Through the Influences of Improvised Music Histories and Collective Practices
Dana Reason
Do You Have to Count Them?: Setlists and Ratings
Chapter 15: A Graph-Theoretic Approach to Setlist Structure Analysis
Matthew Sottile
Chapter 16: “Waiting, Calculating:” Phish Setlists and Fans' Show Ratings
Paul Jakus
Product details
| Published | Nov 27 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 368 |
| ISBN | 9781666955187 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 20 b/w |
| Dimensions | 229 x 152 mm |
| Series | For the Record: Studies in Rock and Popular Music |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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