Conference Agenda

Frameworks for the application of the arts in community settings tend to focus on the development of individuals’ empathy or social bonds. A commensurate level of consideration tends not to be given to the socio-economic, political, and institutional forces that shape such development and to how the arts might help build capacities to manage the impact of such forces. Especially in clinical or social interventions, unrecognized institutional dynamics may introduce or maintain imbalances of power in community and professional practice.

Through fieldwork, interviews, questionnaires, and theoretical analyses of collaborative songwriting projects in community and clinical sites in NYC (2018 – 2020) and San Mateo County (2023 – 2024), I examine how the locus of inquiry shifts from an individual level of development of empathy as a skill—an area of focus in the medical humanities and other arts programming reflecting a liberal conception of empathy—to the institutional level of social interactions that shape an environment for empathy.

The application of an ethnomusicological and performance studies orientation to the medical humanities expands the potential of the arts and humanities to address justice-oriented approaches to the culture of healthcare and the social determinants of health. Participatory music from a performance studies orientation also situates the activity within the community clinical space rather than solely the University or classroom space, defamiliarizing social relations and power hierarchies as co-creation in community praxis. Such praxis with local communities positions art- and music-making themselves as constructivist methodology for participatory action research.

In 1834, the Parisian music journal Le Pianiste dismissed commonplace notions of instrumental education, describing “anyone who needs to study 8 hours a day” as a worker [ouvrier] rather than a musician. Music critics in periodicals like Le Pianiste frequently saw the flourishing genre of the étude as a potential remedy to excess time spent at an instrument. But they simultaneously perceived the étude as a dangerous tool causing young students to look and sound like laborers. This contradiction stemmed, I argue, from a focus on gender, as critics directed their writings primarily toward young women. For these critics, études necessitated a form of bodily entrainment through continual repetition that transformed women into workers.

In this presentation, I examine the class-based discourses surrounding women’s use of the étude in Britain and France during the 1830s. I contextualize this strain of criticism through the writings of contemporary physiologists, surgeons, and exercise scientists like Antoine Martin Bureaud-Riofrey, James Johnson, and Donald Walker. Concerned with the impact of repetitive motion on women’s bodies, they describe in intricate detail how forms of labor were made visible. While defending judicious exercise as a means to increase women’s beauty, these scholars charged that overuse of études could result in excess muscularity. Such a physical change caused decreased beauty and a shift in perceived class status, with bourgeois and upper-class women “chained to the piano,” in Johnson’s words, becoming “the aristocracy of the ‘FACTORY GIRLS.’”

These étude-centered discourses were not merely theoretical. I reveal their direct impact by looking to études celebrated by the same critics as the antithesis of repetitive, labored motion. Their support helped canonize works by Bertini, Chopin, and Cramer, among others, which now rest at the center of the genre. By uncovering this strand of physiology and music pedagogy focusing on diminishing potential physical harm to young women, my paper offers a new approach to understanding the effects of nineteenth-century pedagogues and critics delimiting corporeal difference in gendered terms.

In her book Images of Women in the Folk Songs of Garhwal Himalayas, Anjali Capila documents songs sung by women in ritual and their daily lives. She highlights that women are the life of folks songs, and the carriers of the oral traditions in rural India (2002). This paper examines the songs sung by women involved in the Chipko movement, India’s foundational forest conservation movement, acknowledged globally as a hallmark of ecofeminism. These songs not only express women’s resilience but also serve as tools of agency and activism against both patriarchal and environmental exploitation. I argue that these songs reveal a relational ethics of care, linking women’s responsibilities in the home and community to their roles as protectors of the forests.

Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in summer of 2024 and 2025 provides a unique basis for my argument, as I examine a songs sung by Chipko participants who I met in Chamoli, India. The song, Meeting Jaula, (let’s go to the meeting), reflects women’s willingness to participate in the movement, and their environmental awareness including the care they provide to both the human and non-human worlds. I analyze Meeting Jaula using a theoretical analysis grounded in care, as women’s social and physical responsibility. This approach critically engages with ethics of care and embeds the action of “taking care” within a capitalist patriarchal framework. I contend that the characterization of care, the natural world and feminine as completely emotional risks undermining women’s agency. In the context of the Chipko movement, the idealization and glorification of women’s resistance in ealry ecofeminist literature, often overshadowed their everyday labour that fundamentally motivated their actions.

Expanding upon my analysis, I argue that songs of the Chipko movement served as a call to action emphasizing that the protections of the environemnt was essentially the protection of themselves, erasing boundaries between people and nature. This paper provides valuable insights into how the Chipko movement’s musical legacy continues to inform gendered understandings of care and environmental justice, and highlights the importance of integrating women’s perspectives into ecological policy and discourse.