Must the musicking body be marginal to historiographical inquiry? This is the question posed by the growing number of young people in China who have galvanized, over the past decade, a flowering of new historically-informed performance methodologies toward the reconstruction of the entertainment music-and-dance of the Tang court (618-907 CE). I argue these methodologies constitute distinctly embodied forms of music historiography, where knowledge about the past is produced not through textual interpretation but through the medium of the habituated musicking body. On the basis of my study with contemporary performers, I propose heterokinesis as an analytical framework for these forms of historiography. This framework takes music and dance together as composed of embodied gestures, articulated interactively in performance according to the affordances of each performer’s body schema (including musical instruments, dance props, etc.). Heterokinetic analysis would trace the cross-sensory transference of kinetic “vitality effects” (Sklar 2008) between notations, frescoes, and bodies through the exercise of “kinesthetic empathy” (Foster 1997, Hahn 2007) and the speculative cultivation of donglü, or gestural regimes. This work extends recent ethnomusicological thinking concerning the embodiment of the musical past in Asia in relation to concepts of heterophony (Abe 2018, Dyer 2020) and amplifies calls to reframe East Asian musical aesthetics as kinesthetic, and not sonic, first (Yung 1984, Momii 2020). In locating heterokinetic knowledge production at the center of the study of historiography, I aim to open up new ground for interdisciplinary dialogue between ethnomusicology, musicology and music theory, and dance and performance studies.

Theater’s claim to liveness has long been anchored in its ephemerality, yet contemporary productions increasingly blur the distinction between live and mediated presence. In the works of Ivo van Hove, sound and screen function as affective architectures that reorganize perception, intimacy, and embodiment. In Network (2017) and West Side Story (2020), van Hove’s sonic dramaturgy reconfigures audience proximity, collapsing the space between performer and spectator through amplified breath, mechanical reverberations, and diegetic urban soundscapes.

In Network, the close-miked breath of Howard Beale, layered with ambient newsroom static and mechanical hums, transforms sonic mediation into an instability of presence, where sound intensified both immediacy and estrangement. West Side Story submerges Bernstein’s score within the textures of a hyperrealized urban environment, embedding orchestration within an acoustic ecology of sirens, traffic, and reverberant speech. These productions integrate technological mediation and reconstruct the conditions of theatrical listening, where sound, image, and spatialized resonance function as material forces of immersion and alienation.

Bridging ethnomusicology, sound studies, and media theory, this study advances scholarship on theatrical sound as a site of embodied spectatorship, demonstrating how mediated sonic environments recalibrate perceptual hierarchies, musical affect, and spatialized intimacy. More than an extension of the stage, mediated sound operates as a conduit of embodied listening, where theatrical space becomes a site of sonic intimacy and estranged proximity. By theorizing theater as an auditory event, this study challenges dominant paradigms of liveness, positioning sonic mediation as a critical force in the dramaturgy of contemporary performance.

As a cultural symbol, mariachi embodies Mexico in every way. Mariachi music reflects cultural and social practices that represent both the country and its people. Therefore, mariachi musicians must uphold the traditions of an entire nation through their daily work. While Mexican people are recognized for their dedication to agricultural labor, mariachi as a musical career is one of the lesser-known occupations available to Mexican Americans in the United States. While there is a lack of scholarship on mariachi and musical labor, I analyze the works of academics such as Daniel Sheehy and Leticia Soto-Flores to analyze the ways in which the weight of tradition and national symbolization combine with the pressures of business in mariachi work to create a complex dynamic within the individual musician as well as the musical ensemble. Mariachi skillsets are unique, yet automatic to mariachi musicians and the vast quantity of memorized repertoire and other ‘blue-collar’ skills demonstrate a level of expertise on par with traditions in the Western canon. I argue that the transnational exchange of culture produced by these working musicians has established a musical working-class identity that consequently alters the identity of the Mexican nation. Musicians in the Mexican diaspora utilize this musical work to connect their cultural identity to their economic homebase in a foreign country. Mariachi work performs a transnational identity that transcends borders and political tensions during the currently tumultuous, civil condition of the United States.