Conference Agenda

From the early 1960s East German society was permeated by a discourse of international solidarity that posited the peoples of the then Second and Third Worlds as united in anti-colonial brotherhood. Music played an important role in fostering this ideal; between the 1960s and 1980s, East German musicians created a large cross-genre repertoire that articulated anti-imperial sentiments, international friendships, and the GDR’s support for causes such as North Vietnam and African liberation movements (Brady and Nielinger-Vakil, 2017; Kelly, 2019). International solidarity functioned best in the abstract; the hierarchical relationships it inscribed between socialist citizens and their romanticized Third World beneficiaries were sustained by the distance of the latter. Its shortcomings as a lived and sounded practice were exposed by the arrival in East Germany of contract workers and students from recently decolonized states.

This paper explores the limits of international solidarity from the perspective of the music making of these workers and students. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and audio-visual footage, I look first at how officials used groups such as the choir of the FRELIMO-sponsored Schule der Freundschaft or the Leipzig-based Ensemble Solidarität—comprising some 200 international students, researchers, and apprentices from over twenty countries—to reinforce the tropes of East German solidarity. Taking Ensemble Solidarität as a paradigmatic example, I posit that the framing of its performances—which involved its members being billed as temporary guests of the state and divided into national groupings, each exhibiting their traditional music, dance, and costumes—laid bare the demarcations between socialist self and foreign (racial) other that were implicit in solidarity discourse. I then consider how this rhetoric of difference was destabilized by self-directed migrant music making, which, I argue, acted as a subversive force. Looking in particular at the eclectic fusion style of the band Bayon, formed by Cambodian, Cuban, and East German students in Weimar in the early 1970s, I explore how music and musical practices that challenged the stereotypes of international solidarity suggested the possibility of more fluid and equitable relations with the Third World.

In his 2000 song cycle Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel (With pipe, drum, reed fiddle) for mezzo and percussion, György Ligeti conjures a colorful childhood fantasy that covertly interacts with his identity as a Hungarian exile. The title is taken from a nursery rhyme in which a child magically heals a stork using an odd assortment of toy instruments. Anthropologists have hypothesized that this reference to curative noisemakers preserves the vestiges of ancient shamanic practices from Hungary’s pre-Christian past. Drawing on archival research, artist interviews, and concepts from nostalgia studies and music therapy, this paper argues that Síppal, dobbal enacts an analogous process of emotional healing for the composer.

Ligeti’s cycle comprises seven playful settings of nonsense verses by his friend and compatriot, poet Sándor Weöres (1913-89). In my analysis, I discuss folkloric influences on the composer’s tunefully direct approach, including traces of Hungarian juvenile repertoire, winter-solstice chants, and the melodies of his native Transylvania. At the same time, Ligeti self-consciously avoids reverting fully to what he calls the folk-rooted, “Hungarian-Bartókian” idiom of his pre-migration pieces. Instead, he embraces a cosmopolitan blend of musical styles that better represents his experiences as a perpetual foreigner. Indeed, Ligeti seems to address his life as both an aging Holocaust survivor and an artist in exile through an indirect mode of engagement that Svetlana Boym dubs “diasporic intimacy.” In two Chinese-themed numbers, he allies his experiences with the collective struggle of an imagined immigrant community, expressing his pain through the anguished cry of a downtrodden rickshaw driver.

I read Ligeti’s nostalgic visions of childhood elsewhere in the cycle as a musical balm for this deep-rooted trauma—a means of integrating his identity through a process resembling songwriting techniques advocated by music therapists. Moreover, my evaluation of manuscript sources for Síppal, dobbal suggests that the work’s eccentric instrumentation evokes strains of sonic folk medicine, including the trance-inducing drums and healing ocarinas of Hungarian shamanic myth.

In both scholarship and public perception, musicmaking in U.S. prisons is largely seen as a male endeavor. While scholars have recently given increased attention to the music of incarcerated women, the literature is still small and, with a few exceptions, focused on contemporary contexts. Thus, the history of women’s prison musicmaking remains underexplored. This paper expands the body of historical research on the topic by focusing on the Reformatory for Women at Framingham, MA.

In the 1930s, warden Miriam van Waters sought to shift Framingham’s mission away from punishment and towards reform and education. She spearheaded recreational clubs and invited interns from Radcliffe University to conduct research at the Reformatory. Under these auspices, an International Club was formed in 1932 by the many foreign-born and second-generation-immigrant women incarcerated at Framingham. The club, supervised by interns, staged musical entertainments featuring folk songs from its members’ homelands. While these performances were not sonically preserved, archival documents show they served multiple purposes. For the Reformatory’s administration, they were part of a rehabilitative agenda: In accordance with contemporaneous trends in the Americanization of immigrants, administrators saw the singing of international folk songs as a way to dissolve conflict between women from different countries and—paradoxically given the foreign provenance of the songs—educate the women into “American group life.” For the incarcerated women, meanwhile, these performances were a pastime, a sonic link to home, and an activity to be leveraged into post-release employment. Finally, for the Reformatory’s interns, the International Club served a research purpose, allowing them to study connections between immigration, culture, and crime.

By addressing musicmaking at Framingham, this paper seeks to rectify historical neglect, but also to expand understandings of themes central to scholarship on music and incarceration: The multifaceted agendas music can serve in prisons, the different ways in which music has been used to discipline, the leveraging of prison music for research, and the dynamics music fosters between people in carceral contexts. As I argue in the conclusion of the paper, fully addressing these themes necessitates expanded attention to the history of music of women’s prison musicmaking.

Based on musical testimonies circulating social media, undocumented Mexican migrants are sharing a collective ghost story marked by themes of persecution, devotion, and survival centered on an apparition who migrants testify smuggles them across the U.S.-Mexico border. Since 2007, this phenomenon of Mexican corrido (ballad) composition, which I define as ghost smuggling ballads, narrates the near-death experiences of migrants and their miraculous encounters with the ghost of Saint Toribio Romo. Saint Toribio Romo, who migrants have adopted as El Santo Coyote (The Holy Smuggler) and unofficial Patron Saint of Immigrants, was a priest killed in Jalisco during La Cristiada, the 1926-1929 Cristero Rebellion. Cristeros were post-Revolutionary Mexican Catholic rebels who participated in an armed revolt against the Mexican government in response to the militant enforcement of anticlerical laws and perceived deliberate encroachment on religious liberty.

The Catholic Church canonized Saint Toribio in 2000 alongside other Cristero martyrs but has never recognized him as the Patron of Immigrants, a secondary canonization bestowed on him by migrants. For migrants unable to return on pilgrimage to Saint Toribio’s shrine in Jalisco in thanksgiving for his intercession, corridos serve as musical votives that they share with devotees and future transborder survivors on YouTube, a space that defies geopolitical borders.

Drawing on Derrida’s terminology and conceptualization of “hauntology” (1993), as well as contributing to theoretical discourse on immigration politics in migrant religious expression (Hagan 2008, Calvo-Quirós 2023) and on iterations of trauma and survivor’s music (Cizmic 2012, Pilzer 2015), I analyze how these corridos transcend temporal and physical boundaries, marked by multiple layers of hauntings beyond Saint Toribio’s ghostly intercessions. I explore how these corridos – a musical tradition most associated with Mexico's revolutionary past – embody cultural memory of historical traumas of persecution that extend to the current struggles of undocumented migrants, serving as haunting testimony of individuals forced to live invisibly as “ghosts” to avoid apprehension and survive.