Who We Are
Musiqology Media Group is a creative professionals collective that makes art and helps you make yours. We offer artistic support to musicians, filmmakers, institutions, and independent artists. We’ll help you tell your story in the best way possible, always with detailed attention to your vision.
Our Fact Sheet
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Musiqology Media Group is a company devoted to producing powerful art that stimulates meaningful conversations within the artistic community and beyond.
Our work compels with its captivating music, stunning visuals, and thought-provoking topics, forging strong connections to our audience. We strive for excellence in both audio and visual production. Rest assured any piece MMG creates will leave a lasting impression!
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Musiqology Media Group is dedicated to crafting art that sparks conversation. With four decades of experience as award-winning practitioners and educators, MMG brings aesthetic value, insight and expertise to every project.
If you’re a non-profit or a for-profit organization in need of music consultation, a filmmaker needing original music, a performer desiring the skills of a producer, or desire help shaping the ideas around your work, MMG is here for you.
Or, if you’re just a lover and consumer of music and want one-of-a kind, reliable, clear, and exciting information about your favorite artists, or even the historical figures you want to know more about, MMG is your one stop.
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Musiqology Media Group has developed a unique and large body of critically acclaimed intellectual property—music, books, articles, films, and scores—that are grounded in a deep sense of history, and that speak to the contemporary moment. We can help you with any aspect of musical production and criticism.
Meet The Team
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Founder & CEOBorn on the southside of Chicago, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. was nurtured in the “Up South” culture of migrants who made that city a musical powerhouse that produced gospel, jazz, blues, house, hip-hop and more. This rich background continues to shape Guthrie’s work as an author, pianist, composer. As a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his award-winning work has been recognized for the poignant connections it makes between performance, scholarship, and activism. Guthrie’s activities are always grounded in building intergenerational communities, respect for historical knowledge, and shaping the future through poignant, relevant, and fresh, contemporary music.
He’s the author of Who Hears Here: On Black Music Pasts and Present (2022), The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop (2013), and Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003). He edited and wrote a foreword for Rae Linda Brown’s The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (2020) and co-authored with Melanie Zeck, Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.’s The Transformation of Black Music (2017).
Ramsey brings broad expertise to the Musiqology Media Group experience. As a producer, label head, and bandleader, Guthrie has released six recording projects, including A Spiritual Vibe, vol. 1. His sonic signature embodies all of the musical histories of his life and study. He’s performed at The Blue Note, The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and Harlem Stage. He recently scored the 2019 prize-winning documentary Making Sweet Tea and his documentary Amazing: The Tests and Triumph of Bud Powell (2015) was a selection of the BlackStar Film Festival. Guthrie co-curated the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s 2009 exhibition Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment and was a consultant and narrator in the 2020 Emmy Award winning HBO documentary Apollo: The Soul of American Culture.
Guthrie is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society, and founder and CEO of Musiqology Media Group.
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Jr. PartnerWayv Wilson is a multi-modal artist whose practice centers on contemporary storytelling through word and sound. Based in Philadelphia, Wayv (or “V”) is a singer, songwriter, arranger, rapper, multi-instrumentalist, poet, producer, educator, and engineer. A profound and well-developed musicianship links all of these practices into an impactful artistry that is legendary and sought-after among V’s peers and collaborators.
V’s capacious art was honed in an eclectic background with roots in several traditions. As a young child, V was chosen to be a member of the elite group, the Chester Children’s Chorus, which provided training in western art music repertoire, voice training, and knowledge of music theory based in Solfege and interval recognition. A vibrant musical culture at home contributed to V’s deep knowledge of the broadest range of African American music’s vocal and instrumental traditions, particularly gospel, soul, pop, and hip-hop. These varied streams of influence form in V’s creative signature, an astonishing alchemy of styles, flavors, and musical grammars that are unique, powerful, and arresting.
As a gifted professional singer throughout college at Indiana University, Pennsylvania and beyond, V has toured and sung with notable gospel artists like Pastor Mark Collier and Fresh Fire Movement, Tasha Cobbs-Leonard, Earnest Pugh, Shawn Bigby, Dorinda Clark-Cole, and many more. V’s unmatched collaborative skills has forged producing opportunities in numerous artistic networks such as the Philadelphia hip-hop Collective, Sound Village, Musiqology Media Group, Philadelphia Contemporary’s Love Jawns podcast, and many others. You can hear V’s astonishing vocal and producing skills on the indie release Black Child: A Song Cycle, and V was heavily featured on GLIDE HARD by Glahyd. There you’ll hear an example of the vocally plush, lyrically elegant, and emotionally insightful work that V has developed through the years. With a rapidly growing and impressive resume of collaborators—poets, vocalists, instrumentalists, and producers lining up—V, the ultimate “soundsmith,” is poised to shape, make, and inspire great art-making for years to come.
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FilmmakerCobbina Frempong is a videographer, editor, director, and storyteller who was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Philadelphia and Accra, Ghana. His father was a musician, and as a child, Cobbina attended his performances, drumming along with the music. He followed that musical spark in his teen years when became a rapper and by age twenty-two began recording. As a member of the group Society Park that specialized in Christian hip-hop aesthetics and insurgent commentary about social injustice. He attended Temple University and Philadelphia Community College feeding his interests in mechanical engineering and journalism.
When he started using his first camera—a Canon T3i camera—Cobbina discovered that in film and video production, he could make magic by combining his passions for storytelling, technology, and aesthetics. Cobbina began filming and producing videos for Society Park, and his skill set flourished. The word spread and other groups began to commission his services. Cobbina knew that he’d found another creative form to tell the stories that had fueled his rapping. There’s a magic in the synergy between sound and the visual that he makes behind the camera. It’s evidenced by his impeccable and creative use of rhythm, flow, color, and the lush, sensuous style of his films.
Cobbina’s founded his flourishing company, Green District Media, in 2017 with a focus to help others tell their own stories through the power of video. GDM has be engaged by the Philadelphia Citizen, NPR, Dreamworks, and Musiqology Media Group, among many others.
The Story
Musiqology Media Group was founded on the energy of an eclectic group of Philadelphia-based musicians collaborating on songs, multi-media live concerts, albums, lectures, film scores, and more. MMG’s commitment is to make art that reflects our values of collaboration, mutual respect, freedom, experimentation, and soulful execution. It’s how we started and where we’re going.
We have been a trusted voice in Black music research and production for over three decades. Our CEO, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a musicologist, author, pianist, composer, producer, record label head, and bandleader. He has produced several recording projects, including most recently, A Spiritual Vibe, vol. 1 and has performed and lectured at venues throughout the United States, South Africa, South America, and Europe.
More To Know
Educational Aspects
Voice
Musiqology Media Group offers vocal lessons to help you realize your singing potential, work on growth edges, and bolster your confidence taught by MMG’s own Wayv Wilson, an accomplished singer-songwriter..
Audio Production
Musiqology Media Group offers a comprehensive and immersive lesson plan in Audio Production on the Logic Pro X digital audio workstation, also led by Wayv Wilson, one of MMG’s in-house producers.
Our Reach
We are especially excited to offer our film services, which have a strong track record. We’ve scored the prize-winning film Making Sweet Tea, a documentary about Black gay men of the South, and appeared in the Emmy Award-winning, HBO documentary Apollo: The Soul of American Culture. Our documentary, Amazing: The Tests and Triumph of Bud Powell, was a selection of the BlackStar Film Festival, and we’ve also completed other documentaries about the local Philadelphia scene as writers, editors, and composers.
Non-profit institutions like museums have been among our satisfied clients. We’ve completed teaching films and written essays for many foreign and domestic cultural institutions, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Newark Symphony Hall, the Barnes Foundation, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The most rewarding part of our business is keeping up with our exciting current projects. New books like Who Hears Here?, a new album A Spiritual Vibe, vol. 2, and live events like our upcoming, multimedia presentation “The Renaissance, Refried” at the Barnes Foundation, and a new documentary on early African American music will round out our fall season.
Our impact can be measured from our community arts engagements at local non-profits like St. Paul’s Baptist Church in North Philadelphia and by the recognition we’ve received from prestigious awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Our educational programs benefit from many years of teaching at community arts centers, the University of Pennsylvania, Tufts University, Princeton University, and Harvard University. Yet through it all, Musiqology remains grounded in the knowledge gained from the rich variety of music making our CEO and the rest of our team have received as writers, singers, songwriters, instrumentalists, producers, engineers, and filmmakers.
You can find examples of our previous content at guthrieramsey.com, Amazon.com, and on our blog, Musiqology.com. You can also visit our Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Bandcamp, and iTunes platforms to keep up with the latest from MMG.
Work With Us
Let’s get your next project started!