2020 - 2021 Academic Year
Hip-Hop in Times of Pandemic and Protest
Art by Chetna Mehta @mosaiceye
March 3, 4, 10, 17, and 24
All Online, Free, and Open to the Public
Hip-Hop in Times of Pandemic and Protest is a series of four Wednesday evening events in March, 2021 that explore the impacts, challenges, and possibilities of the current moment on Hip-Hop. Focusing on issues of representation, politics, performance, and pedagogy, these events are a collaboration with Kalonji Nzinga, Director of the Race and Popular Culture Laboratory (RAPLab) and have been funded by the generous support of a Roser Grant and the cooperation of CU Boulder’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS) and the Department of Theatre and Dance. In collaboration with this series, the Latin American Studies Center and the Musicology Graduate Students Association will host a presentation and talkback on Indigenous Hip Hop on Thursday, March 4.
Persevering Legacy: Spring 2021 Concert
Tuesday, March 23 at 7:30 pm (MST)
This event will be available to watch online, .
Free and Open to Everyone
Persevering Legacy champions a unique, catalytic collaboration that elevates stories of historically marginalized, diverse female composers to align classical music with social activism.
The College of Music will partner with the American Music Research Center (AMRC) and Diverse Musicians' Alliance to present this unique performance event. This free performance features College of Music students performing music written and composed by historically marginalized, diverse female composers.
Even though we are not gathering in person, you can still enjoy this performance from the comfort of your home. Stream this performance Tuesday, March 23, 7:30 p.m. MST.
Dancing With Death: Celia Cruz’s Azúcar and Queer of Color Survival
A Virtual Presentation on Zoom with Kristie Soares
Monday, November 2, 5:30 pm on Zoom (MST)
Free and Open to Everyone
The American Music Research Center is proud to introduce its new Counterpoints Lecture series featuring distiguished music scholars from across CU campus. Dr. Kristie Soares will inaugurate the series with “Dancing With Death: Celia Cruz’s Azúcar and Queer of Color Survival.”
This talk explores the evolution of Celia Cruz’s (picture left) signature catchphrase azúcar [sugar] from her early career with Fania Records, to her later music with Sony Music, and finally to its posthumous adoption by queer fans of color both at her funeral and in the aftermath of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre. In doing so the talk argues that azúcar represented an embodied way to negotiate the patriarchal norms of the artist’s records labels, a mode of pushing back against the aspirational whiteness and heteronormativity of the Cuban community, and a model for queer of color survival in a murderous world.
is an Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies and an active performance artist. Both her performance work and her research explore queerness in Caribbean and Latinx communities.
Americanism as Musical Strategy: From Pan Americanism to Latin Americanism
A Virtual Presentation on Zoom with Eduardo Herrera, Rutgers University
Monday, October 26, 1:00 pm on Zoom (MST)
Free and Open to Everyone
This presentation reveals how graduates of the (CLAEM 1962–1971) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, mobilized a shared discourse of Latin Americanism as a professional strategy and as musical style to position themselves within the classical music tradition. The two-year fellowships at CLAEM enabled composers to defy the very coloniality that kept them mostly unaware of the musical scene of one another’s countries, and instead allowed them to imagine a regional community that was of strategic professional use. Composers who met at CLAEM developed an identification as Latin American that was imagined through the sounds of avant-garde music and articulated through personal interactions. The tension between the Latin Americanist character of CLAEM emanating from its very name to the de–Latin Americanizing goal of its avant-garde ethos led to an active attempt to reconfigure what it meant to be a Latin American composer in the Western art music tradition.
(he/him/his) is Associate Professor of Musicology at Rutgers University. His book, (Oxford University Press, 2020) explores the history of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (1962–1971) as a meeting point for local and transnational philanthropy, the framing of pan-regional discourses of Latin Americanism, and the aesthetics and desires of high modernity. Herrera is currently working in two book projects: Sounding Fandom: Chanting, Masculinity, and Violence in Argentine Soccer Stadiums and the second, Soccer Sounds: Transnational Stories of the Beautiful Game. Both books build upon from sound studies, critical race theory, performative theory of public assemblies, and gender studies to inform analysis of the cases in which sound in soccer has been a central player.
Music and HIV/AIDS – A Look at Then and Now
A Virtual Presentation on Zoom with Matthew J. Jones and John Seesholtz
Monday, October 12, 5:30 pm on Zoom (MST)
Free and Open to the Public
5:30 Love Don't Need a Reason: The Life and Music of Michael Callen
A talk by the book's author, Dr. Matthew J. Jones
Michael Callen (1955-1993) is a forgotten hero of the US AIDS activist movement. Singer, songwriter, author, and activist, Callen played a pivotal role in the response to AIDS during the first fifteen years of the epidemic in America. Based on ten years of archival and ethnographic research, my forthcoming book, Love Don’t Need a Reason: The Life and Music of Michael Callen (Punctum Books, 2020) repositions Michael in the broader history of HIV/AIDS. This talk considers songs about AIDS from Callen’s solo records as well as from his time with The Flirtations, a queer a cappellagroup he co-founded in the late 1980s. This talk will introduce Callen, his biography, and his music and position him within the larger AIDS movement in the United States while also reflecting on his music, and music about AIDS more broadly, in light of the current global coronavirus pandemic. I also discuss some of the theoretical questions that arose during the writing of the book, including hybrid methodologies and conducting research as an “independent” scholar.
6:15 The Lost Songs of the AIDS Quilt Songbook
A talk by Dr. John Seesholtz,
The AIDS Quilt Songbook was a musical response to the shame surrounding the outbreak of the HIV virus and was one of the first art song publications to deal with the topic of HIV and AIDS. It was created to parallel the AIDS Quilt NAMES Project as "a never- ending work whose meaning and spirit is renewed and redefined with every addition." This concept of additions has continued the expansion of the AIDS Quilt Songbook Project from 1993 to 2020. The AIDS Quilt Songbook project has over sixty-seven documented additions, but only eighteen of the sixty-seven additions were published. The Lost Songs of the AIDS Quilt Songbook, is a collection of the previously unpublished pieces dedicated to this project and new pieces submitted to the collector. Dr. Seesholtz will lecture on the progression of the Quilt Project from 1980 – 2020 and perform a few selections from the new publication.
Matthew J. Jones is a Houston-based musicologist and cultural critic. A first-generation college student from rural northern Georgia, he received a doctorate in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia in 2014. His work explores the relationships between LGBTQIA+ culture, music, media, and activism. His book, Love Don't Need a Reason: The Life and Music of Michael Callen (Punctum Books) will be published in 2020. His work has also appeared in The Journal of the Society for American Music, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Women and Music, and the Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness. In 2017, he won the ASCAP Deems Taylor/ Virgil Thompson prize for concert music criticism for his essay, “Enough of Being Basely Tearful: ‘Glitter and Be Gay’ and the Camp Politics of Queer Resistance.” He is currently at work on a second book, Popular Music-Making During the AIDS Crisis: 1981–1996 (Routledge, forthcoming).
John Seesholtz, dramatic baritone and vocal pedaoguge, is the Director of Vocal Pedagogy at the University of Colorado. His most recent operatic performances include; Madame Butterfly (Sharpless), Florencia en el Amazonas (Alvaro), Verdi’s Otello (Iago), Candide (Pangloss), Silvio (Pagliacci),Verdi's Falstaff (Ford), and Gianni Schicchi (title role). Some of his solo concert performances include Camina Burana, Brahm’s Requiem, Five Mystical Songs, Sea Symphony, and Dona Nobis Pacem by Vaughan Williams. He has multiple articles published with the Journal of Singing and currently holds positions with the National Association of Teachers of Singing, Up North Vocal Institute, La Lirica Musica, CU NOW, and Art Song Colorado. His coming publications include, “Hyperadduction: A Pedagogical Approach for the 21st Century Voice Instructor,” and a musical collection entitled, “The Lost Songs of the AIDS Quilt Songbook, Vol 1.” In September, he released a video/audio project titled, “Marginalized Voices,” with Art Song Colorado. The project highlights compositions and poetry of Black, Latinx, LGBTQ+, Cis-Female, and Jewish artists. He holds vocal performance and pedagogy degrees from University of Michigan and University of North Texas.