Conference Agenda

Emerging from ethnographic and performative research conducted with women’s musical ensembles in Argentina, this paper explores warmización* (Vega 2025) as a situated feminist and decolonial analytic framework for musicological inquiry. Rather than conceptualizing gendered musical participation in terms of representation, or access to historically male-dominated repertoires, the paper theorizes warmización as the process through which musicking (Small 2006) becomes: (1) a safe homeplace (bell hook 1990) for the recognition and circulation of inequalities, and (2) a site of gendered decolonial listening. Both dimensions contribute to the reconfiguration of ensemble hierarchies and musical subjectivities within the structures of patriarchal modernity.

Through a comparative analysis of Andean women’s sikuri bands and the all-women academic initiative Ensemble WARMI, the paper examines how warmización operates across distinct musical genres and performance contexts. In women’s sikuri practices, warmización processes emerge as a communal, territorially grounded mode of musicking that unsettles the masculine authority historically embedded in Andean panpipe traditions. In the case of Ensemble WARMI, warmización extends beyond critiques of gender exclusion to activate ancestrally grounded practices of communal listening. By intersecting with emotional, corporal and affective experience (Jud 2022), warmización instances result in the reconfiguration of hegemonic listening models. Grounded in memory, embodiment, and affectivity, it transforms dynamics of authorship, leadership, and voice.

Situated in dialogue with performance studies, feminist musicology, Latin American sound studies, and decolonial theory, this paper advances warmización as an analytical tool for understanding how women’s interventions transform musicking from within. These transformations occur not solely through the contestation of hegemonic systems, but through the articulation of alternative listening subjectivities and epistemologies. By foregrounding performance as a site of identity negotiation, the paper contributes to broader trans-hemispheric debates on women’s artistic production, gendered ensembles, decolonial performance practices, and the politics of musical modernity.

*Derived from warmi, Quechua term for woman, referring to the ancestral feminine strength and wisdom.

The figure of the soloist occupies a privileged position within Western art music, connoting virtuosity, authority, and public visibility. Although feminist musicology has documented gendered exclusions in compositional canons, conducting, and orchestral programming, far less attention has been given to how emerging women instrumentalists themselves understand the viability of solo careers—particularly within Latin American conservatory contexts, where scholarship on gender and instrumental leadership remains limited.

Focusing on graduates of the Universidad Nacional de Música in Lima, this paper investigates how women wind players conceptualize the possibility of becoming soloists in the contemporary Peruvian musical field. Drawing on phenomenological analysis of semi-structured interviews with recent graduates from both woodwind and brass specializations, the study examines three fundamental dimensions: first, perception and projection of the solo career, where this identity triggers intense self-imposed pressures and expectations that lead participants to discard this path. Second, gender perspectives, revealing persistent biases and differentiated evaluations above technical competence; here, female role models inspire holistic trajectories (work and family) but do not drive solo aspirations. Third, trajectory configuration and professional sustainability.

Results indicate that before graduation, clear aspirations lean toward teaching or orchestral performance. Faced with a music market offering insufficient formal opportunities and the implicit pressure to perform, teaching emerges as the safest, most profitable alternative. Consequently, the solo career is relegated due to structural instability, restricting professional options despite university training. By foregrounding musicians’ professional realities, this paper offers a Latin American intervention into musicological discussions of gender, performance, and the politics of visibility.

This study examines the affect of sung poetry and its ability to move the psyche in the poetic voices of the Arab-Andalusian qiyān, enslaved women poet-musicians who flourished in the Islamic Golden Age (8^th-13^th centuries). While their positionality bound them to compliance, this study argues that the affect of their sung poetry resulted in the subversion of their role from obedient slaves to an unattainable beloved, possessing immense social power over men.

A qayna was expected to possess the delicate skill of sensing her master’s emotional state and reflecting or responding to it in poetry or song. This forced her success to hinge entirely on performing an emotional state that mirrored the patron’s desire and fantasy, regardless of her genuine feeling, resulting in performative sincerity. This connection between performance and the emotional psyche highlights why Al-Jahiz, the 8^th and 9^th centuries polymath, described music’s connection as extending to the domain of psychology in his Epistle on Singing Girls.

In Al-Jahiz’s age, music’s psychological power could fundamentally subvert the social hierarchy of a court. While musicians were often socially inferior to the aristocrats they performed for, they were aware that their art had the power to psychologically manipulate the psyche of their superiors, creating a subversion of class. Al-Jahiz starkly warned that passion for singing-girls is dangerous, acknowledging the emotion they invoked as a malady which cannot be controlled.

The qiyān thus embodied a powerful paradox. Though owned and enslaved, they became the unattainable and ambivalent beloved, possessing immense social power over men, transforming the free into the lovesick. Their musico-poetic expression of love, though emotionally overt, was a brilliant yet compelled act of lyrical compliance; a calculated trap creating the foundation of their sung poetry upon insincerity, deceit, and affectation.