Conference Agenda
| Session | ||
Sounds of the Contemporary City: Music and Musicking in Urban Spaces at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Session Topics: Popular Music, Global / Transnational Studies, Sound Studies, AMS
| ||
| Presentations | ||
Sounds of the Contemporary City: Music and Musicking in Urban Spaces at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Cities have become key sites for interrogating the entangled crises of the Anthropocene and Postmodernity. Since the early twenty-first century, the postmodern urban condition—characterized by intensifying homelessness, gentrification, social stratification, migration, and ecological precarity—has reconfigured urban planning discourses around sustainability, equity, and justice. Within this landscape, music and musicking, as socially embedded practices, occupy a complex position: they can serve both as instruments of neoliberal transformation and as mediums of resistance to the political, economic, and cultural forces shaping the “global city.” Yet despite their relevance, sonic practices remain undertheorized in dominant urban studies discourses. This panel reconsiders the spatial and political dimensions of music and musicking in urban life, foregrounding their capacity to mediate, reflect, and contest the lived contradictions of contemporary cities. Engaging Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of space as a producer and a product of social relations connecting economic and political processes that reproduce relations of power, and Yi-Fu Tuan’s concepts of “affective memory” and “topophilia,” this panel situates musicking and listening as key modalities through which urban subjects produce meaning, claim presence, and negotiate governance. Through case studies from Houston, Hanoi, and Medellín, we explore how sonic practices intersect with spatial imaginaries, class formation, and local-global tensions. Thus, these papers illuminate how music becomes a terrain where hegemonic visions of urban modernity—articulated by state actors and elite institutions—are both echoed and contested in the everyday experiences of city dwellers. In so doing, the panel positions musicking not simply as cultural expression, but as a critical spatial practice that renders audible the affective and political textures of urban transformation. Together, these contributions invite dialogue between musicology and cultural geography, proposing that sound is not only a marker of place but an active force in shaping urban subjectivities, contesting spatial injustice, and imagining alternative futures. Presentations of the Symposium NEW GENRE PUBLIC OPERA: CRITICISM AND AESTHETICS IN "ANOTHER CITY." “To search for the good and make it matter: this is the real challenge for the artist,” wrote poet Estella Conwill Májozo in 1995; “not simply to transform ideas or revelations into matter, but to make those revelations actually matter.” Here, Májozo summarized the goal of many involved with New Genre Public Art, or works that often involve political and/or social justice activism. To speak of any NGPA project or its offshoot, New Genre Public Opera, raises an array of difficult questions regarding ethics, the role of art and artists as agents of social change, and the limitations and inherent complications surrounding representation, spectatorship, and profit. Several years ago, Houston had the sixth-highest homeless population in the United States, prompting over 100 different agencies to come together and form The Way Home. Subsequently, homelessness in Houston has decreased 64%, bringing national attention to Houston’s rehousing strategies. In 2023, composer Jeremy Howard Beck and librettist Stephanie Fleishmann collaborated on Another City, commissioned by Houston Grand Opera. The 76-minute chamber opera takes, as its starting point, the “other” inhabitants of the city: the numerous and often overlooked or deliberately ignored unhoused population of Houston. The libretto was crafted after weeks of research, including over sixty hours of interviews and conversations with people experiencing homelessness in Houston, and the score reflects sounds considered “beautiful” by many of Houston’s unhoused population. Using Another City as a case study, this paper introduces and analyzes broad issues surrounding criticism and aesthetics of New Genre Public Opera. HEAR MỊ OUT: REMIXING ETHNICITY/CIVILIZATION IN V-POP Vietnamese pop singer Hoàng Thuỳ Linh’s 2019 music video “Để Mị Nói Cho Mà Nghe” (“Let Mị Tell You”) follows a young woman named Mị as she ventures from her highland village to the big city, Hanoi. Her rural-urban trajectory features a double displacement: of identity, as she takes on recognizably ethnic minority attire, and of time period, as the action takes place during the French colonial era in Vietnam. Mị’s momentum builds to a spectacular dance number on the bustling boulevard – screeching to a halt as she (or is it Linh now?) wakes up in the same present-day classroom where her musical daydream began. In my talk, I will demonstrate how Linh’s video “remixes” ethnic minority identity in the Vietnamese mediascape by putting it into relation with a historically complex set of associations evoked by the discourse of văn minh, or civilization. It does so in part by paying homage to older Vietnamese sources, such as A Phu and His Wife (1961), featuring a minority couple that joins Vietnam’s anti-colonial struggle against France, and Vũ Trọng Phụng’s novel Dumb Luck (1936), a colonial-era satire of urban Vietnamese society. These and other allusions inform a choreographed, heterotopic audio-vision in which ethnic, class, and gender distinctions are layered into an emerging musical subgenre. Linh’s video contributes to a growing movement of V-Pop artists who have spectacularized minority ethnic identity in recent years, including Bích Phương and Đen Vâu. I argue that “Để Mị Nói Cho Mà Nghe” offers both a self-aware camp performance of this contemporary trend and at the same time an implicit critique by means of a series of resounding longue durée conflations, most notably between colonial-era and present-day Vietnam, and between ethnic minority representation and civilizational discourse. MEDELLINIFICACIÓN: GENTRIFICATION, TOURISTIFICATION, AND THE URBAN AURAL SPHERE Over the past two decades, Medellín, Colombia, has undergone a dramatic transformation through integrated urban planning and innovative social and cultural policies. Once labeled “the World Capital of Drug Trafficking” and “the Colombian Capital of Murder,” the city has been rebranded—by local authorities and international media—as a model of progressive urban change, popularly dubbed the “Medellín miracle.” This narrative celebrates Medellín as an exemplar of how holistic development and arts-based social initiatives can revitalize public space and civic life. It has also rendered the city increasingly attractive to tourists, digital nomads, and migrants who often self-identify as “expats.” Yet the influx of newcomers, coupled with shifting consumption patterns and real estate speculation, has driven up living costs and intensified processes of gentrification and touristification. Medellín has thus emerged as a paradigmatic case for analyzing these entangled urban phenomena in Latin America. Despite the centrality of cultural production to Medellín’s transformation, the roles of music and musicking remain underexplored in musicology, ethnomusicology, and urban studies. This paper examines two contrasting sonic representations of the city: Karol G’s reggaetón hit Provenza, which reinforces its image as a leisure-oriented global brand, and AlkolirykoZ’s Medellinificación, which critiques the social inequities and spatial displacements accompanying redevelopment. Through this comparison, the study argues that music contributes to the affective labor of urban transformation—shaping imaginaries, commodifying space through emotional resonance, and cultivating place-based desire. Simultaneously, music serves as a medium of dissent and collective memory, making the aural sphere a contested space where competing urban futures are negotiated. Ultimately, this analysis positions sonic practices as critical tools for understanding how cultural and spatial narratives are constructed, mediated, and resisted in contemporary Latin American cities. | ||