Conference Agenda

In November 2019, during Colombia’s national strikes, classical musicians took to the streets, instruments in hand, in what became known as the Cacerolazo Sinfónico. This act of resistance was not only unprecedented but also a turning point in Colombia’s protest culture, demonstrating that classical music -typically viewed as elite or politically neutral- could serve as a powerful political tool of collective resistance. Since then, classical music has become an increasingly central element of protests in Colombia, expanding beyond classical musicians to include folk, rock, hip-hop, and other genres. This paper examines how the Cacerolazo Sinfónico influenced later musical protests, exploring how multiple musical traditions have been used to unite demonstrators, reclaim public spaces, and amplify political messages.

Drawing from media coverage, video documentation, and statements from musicians and activists, this study traces the evolution of music in protests from 2019 to the present. It highlights how classical performances helped legitimize the presence of musicians in demonstrations, while other musical styles brought different layers of engagement and meaning. My findings show that music shifted from being a symbolic gesture of protest -such as performing well-known classical works in public spaces- to an intentional and organized strategy of resistance. These classical performances were used to challenge authority by recontextualizing familiar repertoire in politically charged settings, asserting solidarity and agency through sound, and contributing to the construction of a collective identity among protesters.

By examining this trajectory, this paper underscores how music has transformed Colombian protests, demonstrating its ability to transcend the boundaries of disinterested artistic expression and become a vital force in social movements. The case of Colombia offers valuable insight into the growing role of classical music in global activist movements, illustrating how sound can be used as both a form of resistance and a catalyst for change. It also challenges traditional notions of classical music as autonomous or apolitical, showing how this genre can be reimagined as a tool for civic engagement and social transformation.

Dmitri Shostakovich once contended, "Imagine a person who did not cook the eggs and does not eat them but talks about them—that is a musicologist" (Fanning 1997). Attempts at understanding Shostakovich and his music have generated tumultuous debates, both during his lifetime and in the decades since his death. Politically driven readings often reduce his work to the appealing story of a heroic artist resisting oppression under the Soviet regime, even though key facts contradict this narrative (e.g., Ho and Feofanov 1998). For instance, one of the violinists who premiered Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 (1960), and who collaborated in its composition, publicly advocated for the dismissal of political interpretations (Fanning 2004).

This paper examines the fourth movement of Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 through historical and theoretical analyses that reorient the conversation toward the role of trauma and memory in shaping the movement's expressive language. Rather than framing the movement solely through the lens of politics or despair, I argue that the movement can be understood as a musical space where memory is recalled, distorted, and fractured—a process reflected in the work's motivic reinforcement, harmonic drones, orchestration, and fragmentation. This alternative narrative integrates overlooked details and challenges dominant interpretations which frequently view the work in black-and-white terms—either as autobiographical despair or quiet resilience—leaving little space to engage with the music's various shades of interpretation.

This anslysis builds on recent scholarship that resists reductive political readings in favor of more layered, human interpretations (Fay 2000; Fanning 2004). Drawing on program notes, press coverage, and other performance materials, I present an interpretive framework in which musical memory and its distortion function as an expressive mechanism. Incorporating these neglected details allows us to move beyond conventional framings.

Ultimately, this paper challenges the fourth movement's reception and its presumed autobiographical narrative by centering themes of memory and distortion. Moving beyond simplistic narratives invites both scholars and performers to engage more deeply with the music—encouraging interpretations that prioritize musical nuance, historical uncertainty, and emotional complexity, rather than inherited assumptions.

Shortly before his death in 1949, Richard Strauss famously remarked to his daughter-in-law, Alice: "Dying is just the way I composed it in Tod und Verklärung"–a tone poem he wrote in 1899 at the age of twenty-five. Indeed, Strauss's prominent musical quotation of Tod und Verklärung at the end of "Im Abendrot," the final lied of the Vier Letzte Lieder (1948), is thought by many to be a return to his earlier ideas of death and the afterlife brought on by old age. However, this interpretation fails to consider dramatic shifts in his philosophy, aesthetics, and worldview in the nearly six decades between the composition of Tod und Verklärung and "Im Abendrot" which dispel the notion of parallelism between the beliefs of the young and the elderly Strauss.

Drawing on accounts and studies of Strauss's engagement with nineteenth century German philosophy (Schuh 1982; Youmans 2005), this paper traces the composer's intellectual development throughout his life. Although he initially believed in the possibility of transcendence through death and music, Strauss later adopted an anti-spiritual aesthetic which embraced the physical world and explicitly contradicted his earlier views. With Strauss's evolving philosophical perspective as context, I compare the meaning conveyed by the combination of music and accompanying text in Tod und Verklärung and "Im Abendrot." By analyzing narrative form through recurring motifs (Harrison 1993), this paper presents Tod und Verklärung as an earnest expression of Strauss's early metaphysical ideas of death and the afterlife. Then, taking into account Strauss's abandonment of musical transcendence and his mourning of the reputation of German high culture following the Second World War (Walter 2010), I argue that his outwardly spiritual depiction of death in "Im Abendrot" cannot simply reflect the idealism of his youth, but is instead colored by his cynicism toward spirituality itself and his apocalyptic prediction of the future of music after his own death. This reevaluation allows for a more complete and critical understanding of Strauss's oeuvre by simultaneously engaging both biographical and analytical research.

During Brazil’s transition from Empire to Republic (1870-1920), Brazilian Indigenous peoples held contrasting roles in arts and their enactment of Brazilianness. On the one hand, Romantic artists presented Europeanized archetypes of indigeneity that can be traced back to Rousseau’s bon sauvage; on the other hand, Modernists aimed for “real world” portrayals of the natives by adhering to positivist-naturalistic conceptions and tapping into the “primitive” nature of the indigenous peoples. This paper intends to present and compare the Romantic and Modernist exploitative uses of indigeneity in Brazilian music through case studies of Carlos Gomes’s and Heitor Villa-Lobos’s works.

Gomes’s opera Il Guarany (1870) presented tropes of Brazilianness drawn from the mid-nineteenth-century literary movement called Indianismo. Its authors perceived the Indigenous as a quasi-mythological and homogenous group of people that could embody the country’s “essence”—provided that they were willing to be “civilized,” i.e., to abandon their customs and adhere to European societal standards. Such romanticized imaginings of indigeneity overlooked real Indigenous peoples, who endured colonial violence since the 1500s. The hero of Il Guarany, the tribal leader Peri, sang in the “high style” of Italian opera and represented the ideal “civilized” native crafted by Indianismo rhetorics.

In the early 1900s, modernist and nationalist movements gained traction in Brazilian arts. In February 1922, the Week of Modern Art took place in São Paulo. This watershed event sought to break from Romanticism and reject European influences in an effort to (re)invent Brazilian arts. Villa-Lobos, for example, employed real-world Indigenous musical themes collected through ethnographic work and used them as “raw” sonic resources in compositions such as Chôros no.3 and Chôros no.10. Instead of the bon sauvage, he sought the “untamed,” distancing the Indigenous from “civilized” society.

Both generations’ attitudes toward Brazilian indigeneity stem from Eurocentric colonial conceptions, reducing the natives to exploitable natural resources through misrepresentation and the casual appropriation of their “exotic” musics. Rather than targeting individual composers, this study aims to shed light on problematic systemic practices that have been historically normalized in Brazilian society and remain relevant today as Indigenous populations still suffer the consequences of exploitative discourses.