Higher education in music in Brazil has evolved through a historical process marked by coloniality, a legacy that continues to shape undergraduate music programs today. As a consequence of this trajectory, structural racism has emerged as one of the significant challenges the country must confront to build a model of music education aligned with its social demands and cultural potential. In response to this reality, this paper presents findings from a research project that examined undergraduate music programs at 30 universities across the country. Conducted between February 2019 and January 2025, the project investigates how Brazilian undergraduate music programs incorporate Afro-Brazilian music and Black individuals, highlighting the tensions between institutional inclusion policies and the persistence of colonial structures. The study adopts a qualitative approach grounded in bibliographic and documentary analysis. The results indicate that the inclusion of Afro-Brazilian cultures and the participation of Black individuals remain underrepresented within music programs, particularly given the significant strength and impact of Afro-Brazilian cultural production in Brazil, as demonstrated by research in Brazilian ethnomusicology and music education (Araújo, 2006; Pereira, 2020; Queiroz, 2023; Sandroni, 2001). This tendency reinforces the logic of structural racism, historically rooted in the country. Based on this diagnosis, as well as on ethnomusicological and educational initiatives developed nationwide and on studies and proposals systematized in the country since the 2000s, the paper outlines brief decolonial pathways for rethinking and overcoming structural racism in music curricula and pedagogical practices in this context.

Over the past decade, San Miguel de Tucumán (Argentina) and Curitiba (Brazil) have become prominent examples of music cities, partly due to the role of lutherie influencing their cultural and urban identities. Drawing on key sources on music cities (Finnegan 1989, Cohen 2007) and scenes (Straw 1991, Bennett 1999), this paper argues that the presence of comprehensive public lutherie programs alongside affordable private courses has been influential in establishing both cities as key hubs for regional and national musical instrument making. The incorporation of lutherie into public university curricula elevates the craft to an academic discipline, changing a master-apprentice tradition into an interdisciplinary and collective knowledge integration (Godemann 2008). Meanwhile, affordable private courses broaden opportunities for aspiring luthiers. These rich learning environments have contributed to establishing a large and collaborative population of luthiers, whose instruments, workshops, and events influence and help to maintain local music scenes. Such actions are reinforced by local initiatives, cultural institutions, and the participation of musicians, students, and audiences, creating a cycle that boosts cultural identity and economic growth (Soja 1996). By examining the interactions among education, production, and practices, this paper shows how lutherie, often overlooked in urban music studies, serves as a foundation for musical milieus in each city. The case studies also reveal how lutherie education and infrastructure can elevate a city’s status as a music city. As a result, these cities serve as valuable models for other urban centers seeking independent music cultures rooted in craft, innovation, and community participation.

What kind of collectivity do we listen with when sensing the river in this or that way? Who is interested, and when, in hearing this song, breath or voice as something that exists and knows? As social educator, environmental activist and researcher Ana Laide Soares Barbosa observed, thinking from a river brutally devastated by a mega-dam: “There is an abyss of not-listening, and because of people not listening to those at Volta Grande do Xingu, the destruction is voracious” (2023). Ontological thresholds of listening mark divides between modes of living and knowing (Ochoa 2014). In contexts of territorial conflicts and advancement of megaprojects on ancestral lands, these divides shape what is recognized as alive, valuable, and worth being preserved. This paper theorizes the sensory abyss as a central mechanism of socio-environmental destruction and "ontological occupation” (Escobar 2015) in the Brazilian Amazon. Based on ethnographic research and inter-epistemic dialogues with interlocutors in Pará, I examine the intersection between sensory alienation and extractive logic, where the devastation of ecosystems is sustained by a dissociation of agency and perception. In resonance with analyses of neoliberal and settler-colonial sonic governance in Indigenous territories (Robinson 2020; Veeraraghavan 2024; Cárcamo-Huechante 2026), I theorize extractivism as not merely an economic process, but a regime of listening. This regime produces sensory alienation and material devastation while organizing whose voices count, whose worlds are audible, whose territories can be rendered available. This paper contributes to ethnomusicological debates on the colonial and political implications of aurality in socio-environmental struggles.