Querying Vulnerability

This series offers a site for self-reflexive conversations about precarity, racism, mentorship, and community. We open the series by asking the question: “What does an anti-racist music studies look like to you?” but welcome prods, nudges, and prompts to develop the conversation.

Queer Affects and Big Feelings: On The I Saw the TV Glow Soundtrack

By Dan DiPiero

https://doi.org/10.63473/MNNX1074 Big Feelings and Critical NostalgiaReleased in January 2024, I Saw the TV Glow (ISTTVG) caused an improbable sensation for an arthouse film that never quite coheres into a recognizable genre. Though horrifying, it can’t be called a horror movie; at the same time, though highly stylized and full of teenaged existentialism,… Read More

Vicente Fernández, Not Just for Latinx Students but for All

By Heeseung Lee

https://doi.org/10.63473/YNKE7548 “Y Volver, Volver~, Volver!” (And Come Back, Come Back~, Come Back!): as the explosive chorus of his signature song still mourns, Vicente Fernández Gómez, known as Chente, died on 12 December 2021 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, after 60 prolific years as a singer, actor, and film… Read More

Errantry in Three Folds

By Anne Monique Pace

https://doi.org/10.63473/GOZG3656 Reflections on the Errant Voices Conference, April 2022 Consider the adjective “errant.” The word might describe a misbehaving child careening through the galleries of the Uffizi in Florence, Italy, or a knight cresting the peak of a mountain in search of his dragon. An errant traveler might be… Read More

Listening, Histories, and the Anthropocene

By Cana F. McGhee

https://doi.org/10.63473/WBQO6729 Conferences are inflection points: moments where energies come together and reflect outward in new directions. The following is a report of the May 2022 “Ruptures and Convergences” Conference, hosted by the Music Studies and the Anthropocene Research Network. In the following recap of conference proceedings, I frame the… Read More

Is Country Music Quintessentially American? Or White?

By Nadine Hubbs

https://doi.org/10.63473/NWTZ4884 The phrase “quintessentially American” arises frequently with reference to country music. In Ken Burns’s 2019 Country Music documentary series and many other instances, it reiterates an established truism—but is there any truth to it? In what sense might country, long known as white music, be quintessentially American… Read More

More Troubling Failure(s): Situating Bodies and Research in Art

By Tomie Hahn

https://doi.org/10.63473/VYRM8234 Ed. note: This essay is an offshoot from a lecture originally presented as the AMS Committee on Women and Gender Annual Endowed Lecture. Fred Maus and Tes Slominski read responses to that spoken delivery. These are also available to read (Maus; Slominski). I am grateful for… Read More