Guest Lecture
"Soundscapes, Sound Archives, and the 'Sounded' City"
The production of soundscapes and the surge of sound art collectives and an awareness of sound and sound-related historical cultural practices —aspiring intellectuals and artists— shows a novel approach to sound as a source of knowledge and distinction among young educated middle classes in Mexico City. This trend may be a consequence of larger social and cultural processes in which technology revitalizes forms of knowledge production considered pre-modern, especially orality and attention to sound. This paper explores such connections and proposes the term "sounded" city as an alternative to Angel Rama's traditional characterization of the "lettered" city as a site of knowledge. This conceptualization may help us engage de-nationalized or post-national circulations of knowledge through sound that allow for the establishment of new networks of "cultured" belonging and distinction beyond national borders.
By focusing on a soundscapes project started by Mexico City's Radio Educación in 2006 and currently continued by the Fonoteca Nacional, this essay investigates the social organization of urban spaces through sound and the use of sound. The discussion focuses on soundscapes as both, descriptive as well as performative interventions that speak of socially informed models that organize urban space and our perception of it.
Coordinated by the Association of Graduate Ethnomusicology and Musicology Students (AGEMS)
Alejandro L. Madrid (PhD Ohio State) is an ethnomusicologist and cultural theorist whose research focuses on the intersection of modernity, tradition, globalization, and ethnic identity in popular and art music, dance, and expressive culture from Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the circum-Caribbean. His interests include the performance of democratic values through music, media, and technology; questions of continuity, change, cosmopolitanism, and race in Latin American late 19th-century and early 20th-century music; and transnationalism, gender, and embodied culture in contemporary popular music.
Dr. Madrid is currently on the editorial board of Boletín Música, Latin American Music Review, Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música, and Dancecult. Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, and is senior editor of Latina/o and Latin American entries for The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd edition). He has also served on the council of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the executive board of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, the executive committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in both, the international and U.S. branches, as well as the advisory board of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas. He has recently become the new editor of the Oxford University Press's award-winning series Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music.
His writings on music, performance, and popular culture have appeared in Boletín Música, Ethnomusicology, Fragmentos de Cultura, Heterofonía, Hispanic American Historical Review, Latin American Music Review, Latino Studies, Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, Resonancias, The World of Music, as well as Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and The Grove Dictionary of American Music. He was also guest editor of a special issue on music and performance studies for Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música (2009).
Dr. Madrid’s books include In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 (Oxford University Press), Danzón. Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance (Oxford University Press) [with Robin Moore], Music in Mexico. Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford University Press), Nor-tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World (Oxford University Press), Sounds of the Modern Nation. Music, Culture and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Temple University Press), and Los sonidos de la nación moderna. Música, cultura e ideas en el México post-revolucionario, 1920-1930 (Casa de las Américas). He is editor of Transnational Encounters. Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border (Oxford University Press) and co-editor [with Ignacio Corona] of Postnational Musical Identities. Cultural Production, Distribution and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario (Lexington Books). He is the recipient of the Béla Bartók Award of the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards (2014), the Robert M. Stevenson Award of the American Musicological Society (AMS) (2014), the Ruth A. Solie Award of the AMS (2012), the Woody Guthrie Book Award of the IASPM-US Branch (2010), the Casa de las Américas Prize for Latin American Musicology (2005), the Samuel Claro Valdés Award for Latin American Musicology (2002), the A-R Editions Award of the AMS, Midwest Chapter (2001-2002), as well as fellowships and subventions from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Program, the Ford Foundation, the American Musicological Society, and Fundación Carolina.
Dr. Madrid has held positions as researcher at Mexico's Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información Musical "Carlos Chávez" (CENIDIM) and as visiting scholar at the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies of the University of Texas at Austin and El Colegio de la Frontera Norte-Tijuana. He has taught musicology, ethnomusicology, music aesthetics, music history courses, performance studies and Latin American cultural studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, Texas A&M University, and Universidad de las Américas-Puebla, and has been a guest professor at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad de la República in Uruguay, Instituto Superior de Artes in Cuba, Universidad de San Martín and Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina, and The Newberry's Teacher Consortium of the Newberry Library in Chicago. Dr. Madrid is currently associate professor of ethnomusicology at Cornell University.