Recent calls to confront the epistemological and ontological biases upon which normative American music education is based are plentiful in our discipline. In this presentation I will share my attempts to engage these issues through a freshman music ontology course called ‘Speaking of Music’.

What counts as music, who says so, in what settings, and by what parameters are favorite starting points for any world music class. But they are equally relevant to all types of musical training (in a composition, appreciation, studio lessons, etc.) as they forefront the social and aesthetic boundaries that each sub discipline creates. Designed for first-year undergraduate students, this class deploys novel assignments that engage the peripheries of the music concept, translation of sound into visual, tactile, or choreographic modes, multi-species sonication, and the social and biological positionality of listening. This course is an attempt to mark the unmarked structures that guide university music education and open such conversations to students. It infuses ethnomusicological and sounds studies ideas into a foundational first year experience. The class aims to reassess what counts as music rudiments (Ewell 2020), to embrace multiple epistemologies (Robinson 2019), to confront ideological supremacy (Kajikawa 2019, Brown 2020), and to foster a more inclusive music curriculum. The class is an experiment… with successes and failures to be reviewed and shared for those interested in new pedagogies. This presentation will outline the class goals and assignments and will also share some strategies for politicking such a course into the undergraduate music curriculum.

Between 1970–1990, the Festival of Political Songs took place annually in East Berlin, the former capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany). During these events, artists, activists, and scholars from dozens of countries around the world descended on the city for a week of cross-cultural exchange and connection. While ostensibly functioning as a site of free and unmediated interaction, all forms of cultural and political activity occurred within an environment that relied heavily on notions of political, racial, and geographic difference. With the majority of activities occurring just a few hundred meters from the lived, physical realities of Berlin Wall, as well as within the broader philosophical and ideological nexus between the East and the West in the twilight of the Cold War, this paper takes the festival as stage upon which a variety of bordered expressions were articulated. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this paper examines the various ways that borders were enacted, reified, and challenged on musical stages in the former capital. Rather than arguing that the festival operated as a either a site of political contestation or as a device for political propaganda of the East German state, this paper aims to frustrates the binary logic of Cold War geography by considering the musical manifestations of both realities and the ways they interacted within both the real and perceived experiences of borders during the Cold War.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the city of Tbilisi, Georgia received a sudden influx of over 200,000 Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. At present, while a few articles have been published about the overall demographic trends and political beliefs of these rapidly-formed communities, there has not been any literature published about their practice of arts. To that end, this paper draws on the researcher’s two years of fieldwork with these war-initiated communities, including in-depth interviews with more than a dozen displaced artists. It looks at the stories and experiences of these artists in exile, asking how they adapted their practice of art to respond meaningfully to their new reality. Artistic form analysis is performed on several artworks and enactments, looking at how their culturally-formed systems of artmaking continue to be meaningful in the artists’ new context. Rather than considering only professional artists, it includes community-centered practices such as folk choirs, sacred arts, and underground punk concerts. These are then analyzed with theoretical concepts such as Peircean semiotics, liminality and social drama, and the stability-malleability theory of cultural change.

This paper is a summary of the author's dissertation research, which will be defended in March 2025. It will present a brief introduction to the communities and a summary of the research findings. Photographs and short video clips characterizing the city and artistic practices being described will be integrated with the paper.