Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:58:00am EDT
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Activism, Advertising, and Promotion in Social Media Session Chair: Barbara Dietlinger, University of North Texas Discussant: Paula Harper | |
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Gabriela Montero’s Creative Dissent Improvisations on Venezuela: Promoting Human Rights and Democracy in the Digital Age UCLA, CSU Fullerton and UC Riverside Gabriela Montero is a world-renowned pianist and political activist who has revisited and revitalized Western art music improvisation. While the Internet contains videos of Montero improvising for audiences all over the world, depicting a variety of musical styles or themes, such as the “Harry Potter Theme,” or “Amazing Grace,” there is a completely different selection of improvisations focusing on the political situation in Venezuela. Montero, who belongs to a group of musicians engaged in human rights activism, displayed an active persona as a political activist during the dictatorship initiated by Hugo Chávez (1951-2013) and maintained by Nicolás Maduro (1962). As such, Montero has actively utilized social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and X (former Twitter) to record and distribute her improvisations concerning the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis. Montero’s improvisations represent a discourse about ethics, human rights, democracy, and freedom. Throughout this presentation, I aim to demonstrate Montero’s use of cultural activism, glossing, intertextuality and dialogism in her improvisations to articulate a political discourse in cyberspace. As a result, I will focus primarily on Monteros’ improvisations of the Venezuelan National Anthem (VNA) “Gloria al bravo pueblo” (“Glory to the Brave People”), which demonstrate her ability to create generic mutations of musical works that can be performed utilizing different genre musical characteristics. Namely, Montero’s mediation and intervention as an improviser manifests the concept of generic mutation in the VNA—a process by which artists can alter a particular genre of music into a different one through their agency. Ergo, Montero’s digital activism represents part of her attempt to maintain a sense of belonging and memory to Venezuela while, at the same time, improvisations allow her to challenge the destructive regime’s zero-sum and Manichaeism discourse. In the same manner, this presentation explores how Montero’s improvisations on Venezuela function as a healing ritual for her and her followers in cyberspace. In sum, this presentation examines Gabriela Montero’s musical construction of symbolic meaning as a discourse that reimagines the art of improvisation and transforms it into a political discourse for human rights and democracy in Venezuela. | |