Institute News

It is almost a ritual in our publications, since the ISAM newsletter, to begin by updating readers about what we are up to. In a world that feels more unfamiliar each day, it is good to stick to traditions. There is comfort in knowing some things do not really change, or not that much, and yes I say this while you are reading American Music Review on Manifold for the first time but with the hopes that if you are a longtime “institute news” reader, you still feel connected to a certain spirit rooted in the half-century our institute has been alive.

This was an exciting year for HISAM, where we embarked on fruitful collaborations within CUNY and beyond. The latest one still puts a grin on my face, it was the first iteration of our “Deep Dive” series, an event that pairs a musician and scholar in conversation to discuss the depth and complexity of the work of iconic artists. We organized it in collaboration with the Office of Public Programs at the CUNY Graduate Center and funded it with a grant from the Elebash Global Voices Fund. Our first “Deep Dive” uncovered the rich sonic layers and deep political resonances in Bad Bunny’s latest album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, pairing historian Dr. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo with the Grammy-awarded jazz saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón. The hybrid format of the event brought over more than 400 attendees! If you missed it, you can stream the full event with this link and read about how the night unfolded through this chronicle.

Another wonderful event where different CUNY campuses came together took place at Lehman College earlier this year, where we connected with Brooklyn College professor Angela Piva for Hip Hop’s Voices, Beats & Breakthroughs, a celebration of the past, present, and future of female-led hip hop. Piva was joined by Audry Funk (a Mexican Bronx-based artist known for her conscious rap and activist spirit) and DJ KayKay47 (a Bronx based deejay and community activist) to discuss the intersection of hip-hop, feminism, and cultural identity to an audience of curious and engaged undergraduate students in the borough where hip hop was born. The event ended with an explosive performance by Audry and DJ KayKay47. Also at Lehman, we collaborated with the Mexican Studies Institute and the Music, Multimedia, Theater, and Dance department to host a deeply meaningful workshop on música de cuerdas, celebrating grassroots organizing and community-building with Colectivo Altepee from Veracruz and the Jarochicanos from Chicago.

Figure 3. (left to right) Angela Piva, Audrey Funk, DJ KayKay47, Agustina Checa at the "Women in the Mix" event at Lehman College.

Inspired by the moving work of the collectives we celebrated in our música de cuerdas workshop, we organized a symposium that offered critical interventions on the role of music and grassroots social movements in contexts of ecological crises. Resonant Ecologies: Music, Nature, and Community Activism happened online on November 4^th and brought together insightful scholars from different parts of the country to discuss the many ways in which music and sound intersect nature and the living environments and artistic practices of communities in the Americas. The proceedings of the conference (alongside some bonus articles!) make the bulk of this issue of American Music Review.

Working with an Open Educational Technology specialist this year we moved American Music Review to Manifold, an open-source, open-access publishing platform developed for scholarly work. Moving away from a static PDF onto a web-based, responsive platform (that works across devices and supports rich media) we are hoping should improve readability and engagement. Going through each of the texts in this year’s issue, you will find photographs, videos, links and dynamic footnotes. Each time you come across a three-dimensional square, you will find a multimedia resource to engage with. Our move to Manifold not only ensures ease in your experience as a reader and in-text engagement with sound and audiovisual examples (which are central to scholarly argumentation in a journal such as American Music Review), the platform will also significantly enhance accessibility. Its web-based format allows adjustable text size and reflow, supports keyboard navigation, and makes it easier to include alt-text for images and captions for media. These features help ensure that readers with visual, auditory, or cognitive disabilities can access and engage with the journal’s content more fully. Looking ahead, we plan to seek funding to migrate all previous issues of the journal to Manifold so that earlier scholarship can benefit from the same multimedia possibilities and accessibility features, ensuring greater equity, usability, and longevity across the entire archive.

We have big plans for next year, which include a symposium on Jazz and Labor for which we have already received some support from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). We are also nurturing some future collaboration with the American Music Research Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, along with HISAM, the oldest surviving academic centers and institutes that focus on American music; and we are hoping to make an appearance at the Society of American Music conference next year (more on that to be announced!). In the meantime, mark your calendar for our second iteration of “Deep Dive” on April 15^th where a scholar and musician will discuss the cultural and sonic impact of D’Angelo and his incredible synthesis of and critical contributions to Black music.

HISAM would not be what it is without its people, the board members and donors that keep supporting our mission and encouraging us at disparaging times, the graduate fellows and undergraduate interns that bring excitement and refreshing perspectives that push our programming and scholarship contributions to new, undiscovered, territories. None of our accomplishments this year could have happened without the tenacity, discipline, and vision of Ph.D. candidates Kelsey Milian and Maurice Restrepo (which are able to work with HISAM because of the generosity of the Music Department and the office of the Provost at the Graduate Center). I am lucky and honored to guide and assist them as they use HISAM as a platform to plan, organize, and experience events that speak to their research interests and to connect to scholars they admire in the process. This issue of AMR, or its crisp presentation on Manifold, could also not have happened without them.

At a time when diversity and inclusion efforts are targeted and stripped from access to federal funding, at the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music we have lingered in our efforts to amplify the representation of the plurality of voices that make music in the Americas. At a time when scholars shy away from political activism and issues of climate change are intentionally dismissed and sidelined from the public, we gave platforms that sustain ongoing critical engagement with these important topics, underscoring the ways in which these are intrinsically linked to cultural production . At a time of individualist discourses and self-driven neoliberal entrepreneurship, we honored the performers, communities, and activists that use music and sound to bring people together. Looking ahead, we will keep finding ways to keep fulfilling our mission of supporting the study of music in the Americas through the paths that bring scholarship, research, and artistic prowess closer to social justice.

In this issue

The writings that make up this year’s American Music Review are as insightful as they are timely––each a longer version of a paper delivered at our Resonant Ecologies: Music, Nature, and Community Activism symposium. With case studies that represent all distinct geopolitical and historical subregions of the Americas, this robust issue became a platform to addresses pressing questions that deal with the dynamic intersection of music, nature, sound, and sustainability in our ever-changing world; a space to examine the unique instances where artistic practice and grassroots activism speak to one another on equal terms; and a document to register the unique ways in which particular sonic practices can open new pathways for environmental awareness, care, and mobilization.

Our keynote speaker at the symposium, Tyler Yamin, kicks off the issue with a deft analysis of the discourses and practices that shape “sonic NIMBYism [not-in-my-back-yard-ism],” the ways in which sound is controlled to construct soundscapes as sites of political and/or environmental conflict (Yamin, this issue). His unique case study is around the tumultuous time in which residents of Parkhill Road in Central California protested against the opening of a center to protect gibbons, an endangered species of apes known for their loud vocalizations. Yamin finds that practices of “sonic NIMBYism” are crucial for establishing and reproducing difference between human and non-human bodies; and unique instances where the acoustic becomes a mechanism of displacement and territorialization.

Sound serves to connect rather than divide different species in Charles Colwell’s piece “Entangled Records: Voicing Bird Citizen Science in Costa Rica.” With rich ethnographic detail, Colwell examines how naturalist volunteers at the La Selva reservoir imitate birds as an embodied way of knowing birds their singing/vocalizations. An in-depth analysis of these citizen-science bird counts uncovers rich intergenerational, place-based, sensibilities that differ from the scientific methods of data collection privileged in extractivist research practices of experts from the Global North and community-aimed conservation efforts that could help mitigate habitat transformation as a result of climate change. Elizabeth Frickey’s analysis of the activist performance ensemble ¡TchKunG! dares to look into the “nature” and “culture” divide that, as she insightfully points out, “fields such as ecomusicology have both critiqued and perhaps unintentionally upheld” (Frickey, this issue). Frickey explores the role of avant-garde and experimental music within environmental political activism, coining the term “avant activist” to refer to aesthetic and organizing practices that refuse stable boundaries. This is particularly helpful for examining the lasting impact of a group like ¡TchKunG! who used fluidity and hybridity of music styles and worlds to sound environmental politics.

Working with a multi-sited ethnographic approach in Argentina and Brazil, Rubens de la Corte examines efforts of sustainability in lutherie practices and pedagogical programs. De la Corte describes the challenges that sustainability presents for luthiers in the Global South while providing insight into how educational models such as project-based learning “promote responsible craftsmanship and ethical production, ensuring the continued relevance of lutherie in ever-changing environments” (De La Corte, this issue). In her article, Mercedes Payán provides an in-depth analysis of the collaboration between Mujeres del Viento Florido (a band of Indigenous women musicians from Oaxaca, Mexico) and Chilean singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Mon Laferte. Examining the micro-documentary “SE VA LA VIDA,” Payán researches how the interaction of performance practice, discourse, and natural territory provides a space for indigenous feminisms to challenge colonial impositions of identity and cultural value, even when engaged by a larger music industry that restricts agency to their self-representation. Carlos Cuestas also looks intentional practices of re-signification, in this case studying the ways in which practitioners move away from describing their musical practice as the “Son Jarocho” style, instead adopting a larger “música de cuerdas” terminology that better communicates an ethical praxis rooted in strong community bonds and relationships with the natural world, against the increasingly commodified and global practice of Son Jarocho.

Figure 4. Colectivo Altepee at the “música de cuerdas" workshop we organized at Lehman College. Learn more about them through Carlos Cuestas' article on this journal.

The issue closes with a rich and mobilizing conversation I had with Kyle Devine in anticipation of his upcoming book “Recomposed. Music, Climate, Crisis, Change” where we discussed some of the steps that musicians, fans, policy makers, and company executives, are taking to address the environmental impact of the music industry. Can music ever have a sustainable relationship to the environment? I will not spoil the answer because I believe you already know it. The issue closes with a review of Yaquis: La Resistencia Imbatible by Kelsey Milian. The book, written by Mexican journalist and photographer Daliri Oropeza Álvarez, examines the resilience of the yaquis of Sonoma (Mexico) and their ongoing fight for Indigenous rights. Milian examines Oropeza Álvarez’s interdisciplinary approach to storytelling, and uplifts this book as a model for future scholarship as an empathetic resource of ethical and historically-dense representation, “a moral imperative” (in Milian’s words).

At a moment when environmental crisis shapes the social and political landscape of the Americas, thinking about how sound and music both contribute to and help resist changes in the Anthropocene is a necessity. Ecological change is audible; and sonic practices can give voice to the communities most affected by environmental harm. Can it also give us tools to imagine forms of solidarity and resilience that exceed the limits of policy or discourse alone? This issue of American Music Review invites us to atune to the sonic practices and social mobilizations that can open new pathways to care about/in this world.

Thank you for reading!