Robert Fink wants you to think seriously about the concept of the music playlist.

“It’s about putting together a sequence of recordings and turning that into an experience,” says the Los Angeles-based musicologist and educator. “But I want to get into the nuts and bolts of how people can turn playlists into a kind of art.”

Fink is slated to deliver the annual Neumann lecture at the University of Richmond on Monday, Sept. 16. His talk, “What is Playlist Culture?” will explore the many different approaches to assembling a set of songs in a specific order. It will also argue for a broader definition of what a playlist is.

“Musicologists know that concert programmes are forms of playlists,” says the associate dean at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. “One common sense definition of a playlist is that it is made up of music that has already been, in a sense, performed. If you go to the symphony and look at the music they are going to play, you don’t think of that as a playlist. But it is. And some of the same issues arise … the same questions that you might consider when you make a [mix tape] for your significant other are also in play when you are trying to decide what a concert should be like.”

The success of playlists, whether they be personal iTunes mixes or songs spun in a club setting, depends on their context. “If you’re a minimalist techno DJ, you may want all of your songs in the same tempo. But another person’s playlist can be about making a collage where the excitement is all about the jagged edges of things that shouldn’t go together…. principles of contrast vs. principles of unity.”

Fink says that his “default lens” for the lecture will be the topic of DJ culture and electronic dance music (sorry – he won’t be offering up tips on how to compile that Spotify party mix). His lecture will conclude with a detailed look at one important British dance DJ, Paul Oakenfold, and specifically a song mix he made in 1994, “Goa,” that helped to invent a new, popular form of club music: trance.

The professor started, he says, as a “conventionally trained music historian.” But he began to drift into other areas, particularly what he calls “weird” music. “This was music sort of on the boundaries between new classical music and new pop music, stuff like Philip Glass and minimalism. It was not that far to go from repetitive electronic music written by composers to repetitive electronic music that was performed at raves.”

For nearly 20 years at UCLA, he’s taught a 400-student class on the history of electronic dance music. “My research on playlists comes out of the work I did on EDM and how deejays sort of structure their sets.”

He says that it’s all in the song transitions. “Oakenfold had these crazy transitions between songs… there’s a sense of danger and excitement. The contrasts are the things that give you the emotional experience and make DJ-ing into an art.” His favorite moments are when a DJ is mixing one song into another but they are in a clashing key. “You get this kind of dissonance, a cool thing.”

A disappearing thing too, he adds. “The technology exists now to make sure that kind of moment never happens, and it’s made the sounds more conventional. You take fewer risks and you have fewer moments of serendipity.” Oakenfold, he notes, didn’t have beat matching and key coding and today’s new DJ tech advances. “All he had was two turntables, maybe a DAT player and his hands.”

Every year but one since 2003, the University of Richmond’s department of music has invited a respected music scholar to deliver the annual Neumann Lecture on a topic of the scholar’s choice. Last year, Georgetown University professor Robynn Stillwell spoke on the music and public persona of Robbie Robertson, the leader of The Band. According to its mission statement, the Neumann lectures, named for university symphony founder Frederick “Fritz” Neumann, “offer a further opportunity to expand the vision of the University of Richmond as a locus for serious dialogue about music, the arts and society.”

So who is Fink’s lecture on playlists really aimed for? Is it for DJs, musicologists, everyday music fans? All of the above, says the professor, who also works as a forensic musicologist in copyright litigation cases. “My presentations tend to be multimedia, so I’ll have videos, sound clips … it will have an aspect of a show.” He laughs, adding “I do use terms like beats-per-minute, but you don’t have to be a raver to attend.”

Robert Fink will deliver the 2024 Neumann Lecture, “What is Playlist Culture?” on Monday, Sept. 16 in the Ukrop Auditorium at the University of Richmond. 7:30 p.m. The event is free but seating is limited. Reserve tickets at tickets.modlin.richmond.edu