Musicology Colloquium Series
Sponsored by The University of New Mexico Department of Music and the Latin American and Iberian Institute
Thursday April 18, 2:00-3:30pm
LAII Conference Room
Talk Description:
Argentine soccer fandom involves a nuanced set of bodily practices and a vast repertoire of chants based on radio hits and broadcast advertisement. This talk demonstrates how chanting brings together sounds and bodies in an affective public practice that incites intense feelings of social cohesion and belonging meaningful beyond what is being said with words.
Biography:
Eduardo Herrera is Assistant Professor at Rutgers University specialized in musical traditions from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latinx peoples in the United States from historical and ethnographic perspectives. His book, Elite Art Worlds: Philanthropy, Latin Americanism, and Avant-Garde Music (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2019) explores the history of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales. Herrera is co-editor of Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2018). Herrera’s second book project, titled Soccer Chants: The Sonic Potentials of Participatory Sounding- and Moving-in-Synchrony studies collective chanting in Argentine soccer stadiums.
You Can’t Tell It Like I Can: Black Women, Music, and the Struggle for Social Justice in America
This lecture/performance explores how black women have used music as a method of shaping the public rhetoric and sentiment surrounding the black civil rights struggle in America. Through a historical framework that moves through the height of the abolitionist movement, the Popular front during the 1930s and 1940s, the frontlines of the direct action campaigns of the 1960s, and the proliferation of the Black Power movement in the 1970s.
An Americanish Songbook: Linda Ronstadt’s “other” Country
This talk will consider performances and recordings by singer Linda Ronstadt to propose what I refer to as her Americanish musical songbook. The suffix “ish” here intends to accentuate the “somewhat” or “to some extent” of “American” that Ronstadt—Tucson born and raised—lived and sonically imagined through her extraordinary musical career.
Arab Musicking on the U.S.–Mexico Border
This talk explores the relationship between trauma and identity by examining Arab music performance on the U.S.–Mexico border. Drawing on the musicking of Syrian and Mexican migrant communities, I interrogate theories of cultural and psychological trauma and borderland epistemologies to explore how border tensions influence the often-fraught views of identity.