Abstracts and Bios:

“Workshopping Música de Cuerdas"

Son jarocho, a participatory musical tradition from southern Veracruz, Mexico, has long served as a vehicle for communal expression and political discourse, particularly through collective performances known as fandangos. These gatherings have inspired global movements around environmental justice, immigrant rights, and anti-capitalist critique. However, the tradition’s increasing commodification and professionalization have begun to undermine its radical potential, narrowing its scope and limiting its capacity to foster broader political coalitions. As son jarocho becomes more insular within its practitioners, its role as a tool for grassroots organizing and social transformation is increasingly constrained.

In response to these tensions, youth collectives in Mexico and Chicago have reimagined their son jarocho practice as música de cuerdas, a community-centered approach that prioritizes service, solidarity, and political engagement over artistic production. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the conceptual framework of poiesis, this study examines how these collectives cultivate inclusive spaces for intergenerational learning, affective bonding, and ideological development. Workshops (talleres) function not only as instructional settings but also as environments for healing and collective reflection. Through scenes of musical practice, the paper illustrates how música de cuerdas resists genre constraints and market logic, embodying a liberatory ethos rooted in conviviality and territorial belonging. This reconfiguration of music-making offers a compelling model for reclaiming artistic traditions as tools for community resilience and transformative politics.

Carlos Cuestas

Carlos Cuestas is an active musician and scholar based in New York City. He has performed in the United States, Mexico, Colombia, and Ireland as a soloist and in chamber, orchestral, and traditional music ensembles. Carlos has participated in numerous early music projects including opera and oratorio productions in New York City, New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Denver, and San Francisco. His performance practice interests extend to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century guitar repertoire and the art of improvisation in the style of the early Romantic period. As a scholar, Carlos researches the centuries-old son jarocho tradition from Veracruz, Mexico, playing a consort of traditional instruments, and was a member of the New York City ensemble Radio Jarocho. Carlos, a Colombian national, is a PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the City University of New York, The Graduate Center focusing on the intersection of activism between youth collectives and son jarocho practice in Veracruz and Chicago.

“Mon Laferte ft. Mujeres del Viento Florido: Indigenous Land, Women’s Identities Representation, and Cross-Border Feminist Collaborations in the Music Industry”

This paper examines the representation of Indigenous women in the music industry through the collaboration between the Regional Women’s Band “Mujeres del Viento Florido” and Chilean singer-songwriter Mon Laferte in the micro-documentary “Se Va La Vida.” I argue this production is not a passive invitation into the industry, but a strategic negotiation that allows Indigenous women musicians to expand their presence on new stages, build alliances, and influence their representation in audiovisual media. The analysis centers on three axes: 1) portrayals of the band and their land, highlighting the role of landscape and otherness; 2) the transformation of Laferte’s music through Oaxacan serrano brass arrangements and its impact on the band’s circulation; and 3) the implications of this collaboration for Indigenous women’s access to professional spaces, including tensions between inclusion and creative control. Drawing on feminist media and ethnomusicological studies, I analyze how “Se Va La Vida” articulates narratives of land, identity, and musical agency.

Mercedes Payán

Mercedes Payán is a scholar specializing in ethnomusicology and music education. She focuses on Indigenous brass bands in Southeastern Mexico and non-academicized music traditions undergoing academicization, such as mariachi and rock music. Her research, rooted in an anthropological perspective, explores the teaching and learning processes within community-based ensembles. She received a bachelor’s degree in music education from Universidad Veracruzana and a master’s degree in ethnomusicology from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and is currently pursuing her doctorate in ethnomusicology at the University of Texas, Austin. Her work explores themes of decolonization, indigeneity, gender, and the intersection of traditional and popular music. She actively participates in transnational collaborations, including the Red de Mujeres Músicas Transfronterizas (Network of Transborder Women Musicians) and the collective Las Montoneras, which promotes women’s contributions to music.

“Sounding Radical Environmentalism in the PNW: Avant-Activism of ¡TchKunG!”

Founded by a group of self-described “eco-anarchist punks” in Seattle, ¡TchKunG! existed as a music, performance, and activist collective throughout the 1990s. The collective, with its eclectic instrumentation, array of musical influences, riotous concert antics, and intensive political messaging, became known as a uniquely avant-garde musical experiment. Here, I situate ¡TchKunG! within a larger conversation on the role of avant-garde particularly within environmentalist political campaigns. Through a close examination of the group’s self-produced mini-documentary “TchKunG vs. The State” (1996) as well as their album Post World Handbook of the same year, I theorize that ¡TchKunG! helped to create a wider network of what I term artistic “avant-activist” groups both nationally and internationally. By unpacking the more tangible political consequences of “avant-garde” or “experimental” aesthetics, and the value frameworks which shape these aesthetics, I consider the broader implications of this work within fields like “ecomusicology" and beyond.

Elizabeth Frickey

Elizabeth Frickey is a Ph.D. candidate and MacCracken Fellow studying musicology at New York University. Her dissertation project examines the cultural, ecological, and political impact of community gardens and other NYC greenspaces through the lens of music and sound. Elizabeth has presented her research in numerous national and international settings, including annual meetings of the Society for American Music; the American Musicological Society; the Society for Ethnomusicology; the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment; the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts; the Music Studies and the Anthropocene Research Network; and the 2023 Music, Research, and Activism Conference held in Helsinki. Her writing has also been published in numerous forums including Jazz & Culture, the Journal of Jazz Studies, Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and Journal SEAMUS.

“Entangled Records: Voicing Bird Citizen Science in Costa Rica”

Citizen-science bird counts are crucial initiatives that inform conservation research addressing the long-term effects of climate change and land use on bird communities. However, the local sounded methods of citizen-science participants have yet to be the subject of intensive ethnographic research. Drawing from original fieldwork in northeastern Costa Rica, I consider how local naturalists practice vocal imitation (imitar) in the collaborative making of species records on bird counts. Records of bird species are vocally embodied and remain not just in the ongoing lifeways of the birds—the subjects/objects of those records—but always also in naturalists’ relational memories and ongoing entanglement with those birds. Naturalists’ intergenerational collaborations perform imitar as a sensory-vocal method for knowing and monitoring the region’s avifauna, thus grounding conservation efforts. I offer a critical rethinking of citizen science and ethno-ornithology from a practical and methodological perspective and point to goals of future research on that subject.

Charles Colwell

Charles Colwell (he/him) holds a Ph.D. in Composition from the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation, “Hacer el Canto: Tracing Entanglements of Vocality and Interspecies Knowledge in the Imitative Practices of Costa Rican Naturalist Guides,” explores how local naturalist guides employ vocal imitation as an embodied way of knowing birds and their vocalizations/singing,and as a technique for educating ecotourists at La Selva Research Station in northeastern CostaRica.His work in ethno-ornithology and multispecies ethnography synthesizes anthropological methods and theory that harmonize with the values and embodied experiences of his interlocutors.

KEYNOTE

“‘Like Roosters on Steroids’: Sounding out Sonic NIMBYism in Central California”

This presentation questions music studies’ aesthetic and epistemological investment in sound as a redemptive mechanism for achieving environmental justice. Through attention to a protest held by a Central Californian community opposed to the nearby presence of a gibbon conservation facility due to the volume of those endangered primates’ unruly vocalizations, I develop the concept of “sonic NIMBYism” to account for a variety of ways in which the very properties of music and sound celebrated in environmentally minded music scholarship were ironically mobilized in service of reproducing the precise entanglement of racial capitalism, fascism, and ecological extractivism that resulted in our current experience of environmental crisis. Ethnographically demonstrating how the acoustic has become a major inflection point in the plight of engendered gibbon species—from debates over the status of non-human musicality to the deployment of acoustic volume as a metaphor for political action—I theorize sonic NIMBYism as a necropolitical device that overdetermines which sounds and lives deserve to have a future, and which are in need of attenuation.

Tyler Yamin

Tyler Yamin is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at Bucknell University. An ethnomusicologist broadly interested the intersections of music, sound, and survival, his scholarship has appeared in journals such as Ethnomusicology, Sound Studies, and Environmental Humanities and his 2019 article in Ethnomusicology was recognized with the inaugural Best Article Prize from what is now the International Council for Music and Dance Traditions.