The “Here and Now”: Stories of Relevancy from the Borderlands

  • Ana R. Alonso-Minutti University of New Mexico

Abstract

This essay takes a stance that aims to destabilize music history narratives that confine music according to nation-state divisions in order to embrace the study of musical flows across borders. Drawing from her experience teaching in border states—California, Texas, and New Mexico—the author discusses the ways in which emphasizing the cultural complexities of expressive cultures at the U.S.-Mexico border provides multiple pedagogical possibilities for inclusion of Hispanic musics in the curriculum. Moreover, developing pedagogical connections with the “here and now†creates diverse levels of relevancy in music history teaching. A re-envisioning of the music history curriculum must not only advocate for a diversification of repertories, but also for a deep engagement with local contexts where contentions of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are at the core of the musical experience.

Author Biography

Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, University of New Mexico
Ana R. Alonso Minutti is Assistant Professor of Musicology and faculty affiliate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico. Her teaching and research endeavors blend musicological and ethnomusicological inquiry into the study of 20th-21st century musical practices across the Americas. Her scholarship focuses on experimental and avant-garde expressions, music traditions from Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border, and music history pedagogy. She has published in Latin American Music Review, Revista Argentina de Musicología, Pauta, and elsewhere. In conjunction with Eduardo Herrera and Alejandro L. Madrid, she is co-editing Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and her book Mario Lavista and Musical Cosmopolitanism in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico is under contract by Oxford University Press.
Published
2017-03-07
Issue
Vol 7 No 2 (2017)
Section
Roundtable

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