SEM Northeast Chapter
Spring 2026 Chapter Meeting
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Panel 1: Power, Access, and Control in Popular Music
May 1
4:00 p.m.– 5:30 p.m.
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All Faders Up: Conducting Ethnomusicological Fieldwork in the Popular Mainstream
David B. Pruett, University of Massachusetts Boston
As a fieldwork-based discipline, ethnomusicology comprises numerous approaches to researching and documenting musics of varying soundscapes. Fieldwork methodologies seem to equal the growing number of fieldwork opportunities available to ethnomusicologists, including those in popular music studies. Unfortunately, due to limited access to the upper echelons of the entertainment industry, including major artists, research in popular music has been largely limited to analysis based on secondary sources or to studies among local scenes. This paper demonstrates how access to mainstream artists and industry executives is not only possible, but also necessary to better understand the system of popular culture.
In this paper I engage from an ethnomusicologist’s perspective my more than twenty years of fieldwork experiences among folks at the uppermost levels of the entertainment industry, specifically that of commercial country music in Nashville. I discuss how my field strategies that I employed during my earlier work with seminal artists such as Hank Williams Jr, Kid Rock, Big & Rich, and Gretchen Wilson have informed my current research among artists such as Rascal Flatts, Alabama, Jewel, Mike Love (The Beach Boys), and industry executives like Joe Galante (former chairman, Sony/RCA), O.B. Osceola (Hard Rock International), Greg Oswald (senior partner, William Morris Endeavor), and Marc Oswald (president, Oswald Entertainment Group). I demonstrate how fieldwork in the popular mainstream is not only possible, but such research, heretofore dominated by the popular press, contributes to the ongoing development of ethnomusicology.
Currently Associate Professor of Music at UMass Boston, David Pruett is the author of MuzikMafia: From the Local Nashville Scene to the National Mainstream (University Press of Mississippi, 2010). He is a former president of NECSEM and has articles in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, the journal Ethnomusicology¸ Encyclopedia of Appalachia, and the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. In his free time, he enjoys fishing and drinking New England IPA beers and single malt Scotches. He is currently finishing up his forthcoming monograph entitled, All Faders Up: The Inspiring Story of an Impossible Life.
This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: An Analysis of Capitalist Realism, Neoliberal Feminism, Hyperindividualism, and Parasocial Relationships in Popular Music
Erika Chen, Wellesley College
Popular music has been an increasingly critical facet in how we view ourselves with the world around us, and women have been dominating the field in recent decades. My general understanding of music and the industry it serves has been greatly shaped by the social behaviors - both positive and negative that influences our perceptions of artists and celebrities alike commonly on a platform. This study focuses on female trailblazers in the industry: understanding the iconography behind their respective legacies coinciding with the increasingly common socioeconomic patterns that withstand growth. Ongoing discourse on tabloids and social media platforms surrounding artists such as Taylor Swift, whose sheer magnitude of fame smashes numbers alone while simultaneously invoking speculation and outrage regarding her personal life. This is a recurring pattern amongst today’s top and up-and-coming artists where fans especially feel a sense of entitlement in knowing every facet of their favorite artist’s personal lives and any potential trace of them, often resulting in parasocial behavior marked by delusion. There is competition in which social capital can be achieved by the number of shows attended, merchandise purchased and collected, to even meeting the artist as the “peak” of all, making “devotion” an occasional financial risk. I argue that due to the changing perceptions of women in media in the span of just a few decades as well as actively changing consumerist attitudes actively contribute to this paradigm shift resulting in behaviors and attitudes that seem outrageous in nature.
My name is Erika, and I am a current senior at Wellesley College studying Media Arts and Sciences with a minor in Music. In the latter half of my undergraduate career, I have become fascinated in the study of popular music and musicology in understanding how the music that we listen to today, combined with social and economic trends coincides with current events. My focus has been on American popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the evolution of societal norms in regards to generational shifts. Outside of academics, I play the oboe and enjoy trying new restaurants.
Performing the Human: Artificial intelligence and popular music in the United States
Katherine Miner, Boston University
In this presentation, I will challenge common understandings of generative-Artificial Intelligence (AI) performed music as a new musical phenomenon by centering its place within critical social and historical accounts of the U.S. music industry. What shifts about our understanding of music created by/with Artificial Intelligence if we view usage of this technology within a music industry which has repeatedly commodified Black music and extracted from Black musicians? Through a critical account of genre construction as an organizing principle, I argue that AI music and musicians represent new ways in which historical phenomena of censorship, violence, and extraction are enacted upon performers of color and women performers in the music industry. This presentation will highlight the unique opportunity ethnomusicologists have to analyze AI music in necessary ways in order to ensure ethical practices.
Research for this presentation was conducted through experimentation with Suno and other AI music creation platforms, critical listening to AI-written and produced music, and critical research in regard to the histories of power and domination in the US music industry. I will invite the audience to reconsider the roles that consent, race, gender, and power play in our experiences of AI-music through case studies of Xania Monet, Titi Taktumi, and FN Meka.
Katherine Miner is a second-year PhD student in Ethnomusicology at Boston University from Manchester, Connecticut. She researches Artificial Intelligence and Music, specifically how gender, race, and power impact AI performances, generative performers, and listening. She has also conducted research on biases in music streaming platforms. Katherine completed her BA in Music at Northeastern University in 2024, where she worked as a primary researcher on an action-oriented research project entitled Desegregating Access to Music Education in Boston, MA.
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Panel 2: Global Popular Music, Identity, and Resistance
May 2
10:30 a.m.– 12:00 p.m.
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The Vandal’s Claim: Hip Hop and Icelandic Culture Beyond Touristification
Isabella Zohreh Gutierrez, Trinity College
This paper examines Icelandic hip hop as a form of cultural resistance against American commercial dominance and the pressures of a tourism-dependent economy. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Reykjavík, interviews with local artists, and scholarship in global hip hop studies, postcolonial theory, and cultural preservation, the paper traces the development of Icelandic hip hop from its origins in American mimicry to its current role as an expression of national identity. Drawing on Svanhvít Lilja Ingólfsdóttir's three-stage framework of hip hop indigenization and Imani Kai Johnson's distinction between appropriation and the process of cultural initiation, the paper argues that current Icelandic hip-hop has moved beyond imitation toward something genuinely its own. The dominance of Icelandic-language rap on the nation’s music charts, the underground graffiti community, the community-centered hip hop venue Prikið, and its pro-bono record label Sticky Records all demonstrate a scene that prioritizes Icelandic culture over global commercial appeal. The paper also interrogates the tensions inherent in a majority-white nation adopting a form rooted in the African diaspora, acknowledging moments where cultural literacy falters. Ultimately, Icelandic hip hop illustrates how communities can utilize a globalized culture and art form and redirect it toward local resistance, using the tools of American cultural export to push back against American cultural dominance.
Isabella Zohreh Gutierrez is an undergraduate ethnomusicologist and composer at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Her research focuses on contemporary music-making in Iceland—specifically how music functions as a vessel for national identity amid the country's current sociopolitical climate. More broadly, she explores the intersections of cultural and postcolonial theory with music's role in society.
“Every Day We’re Grilled on an Iron Plate”: The Peculiar Success of “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun
Tristan Wilson, The New School
In December 1975, the song “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun” (“Swim! Fish-Shaped Cake Boy”) became the first single to debut at number one on the Oricon Singles Chart, and eventually sold over 4.5 million copies, making it the best-selling physical single in Japanese history. This is even more remarkable for a “gloomily allegorical” insert song (Drexler 2024) initially written for Hirake! Ponkikki, a children’s television program comparable to Sesame Street.
In this paper, I propose that the unprecedented success of “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun” resulted from its dual function: as a children’s song and a leftist, anti-corporate statement. Indeed, an article in the widely circulated newspaper Mainichi Shimbun described the song as “[appealing] to adults’ desire to set themselves free from the life of a white-collar worker” (“Taiyaki-kun rikieichū” 1976; translation mine). This strongly suggests an identification of the titular taiyaki (fish-shaped cake) with the working class, an idea which I will explicate through analysis. I argue that the song’s subversive undertone distinguishes it from typical children’s songs—the music’s formal aberrances and use of the minor mode, alongside the singer’s crooner-like performance, reinforce a reading of the lyrics as a complaint about aggressive workplace practices.
Despite being neglected by existing scholarship, the unprecedented success of “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun” made it a landmark song in Japanese music history. Incorporating James C. Scott’s idea of hidden transcripts, this paper will reveal how the song resonated with left-wing viewpoints, and offer a blueprint for coding political messaging into popular culture.
Tristan Wilson is a composer, violist, and musicologist from Detroit, Michigan. As a musicologist, his work focuses on expressions of and intersections between gender, sexuality, and class in Japanese popular music of the 1950s through the 1980s. He holds a Bachelor of Music awarded with honors from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and is currently pursuing a Master of Music at The New School's Mannes School of Music.
Barriers to Entry: Chinese Artists' Struggle in the U.S. Music Industry
Kexin (Tiffany) Ren, Wellesley College
As the global music industry continues to expand, many international artists seek to enter the United States music market to gain broader recognition and commercial success. Despite increasing cultural globalization and transnational media circulation, Chinese popular music artists remain largely absent from the U.S. mainstream music industry. This presentation, which is part of an honors thesis, examines the factors that contribute to this gap. I argue that structural, political, and cultural conditions create unequal access to the American music market rather than a lack of talent or audience interest. Through comparative analysis of the music industries of the United States, mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, I explore how language, industry infrastructure, and cultural perception shape transnational musical circulation. Case study of the career of Mitski illustrates the limited circumstances under which Asian identity achieves mainstream visibility in the U.S.. I will analyze the potential reasons behind Mitski’s success against the backdrop of the U.S. music industry through online ethnography, choreographic analysis, and textual analysis. I hope by examining this topic will help to reveal how racial identity and cultural stereotypes can affect the reception of artists who originate outside the dominant Anglo-American framework in the U.S., which contributes to broader discussions about racial representations within global music industries.
My name is Kexin (Tiffany) Ren. I am a senior at Wellesley College majoring in Political Science and Music. My primary area of interest in the field of music includes examining how racial identity and cultural context shape the music industry and inform artists’ expression. I pay particular attention to questions of artists’ authenticity and global circulation. I am also interested in how artists engage with cross-cultural markets and position themselves within transnational music industries. More broadly, my work considers how global power structures influence whose voices are heard. Outside of academics, I love traveling, crafting, and video gaming.
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Panel 3: Music, Community, and Social Worlds
May 2
1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
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Network Formation and Sustenance in Boston’s Underground Techno Scene
Corin Duey, Boston University
In the wake of recent attempts by Boston city officials to rejuvenate the nightlife economy, this paper examines one subculture with a foundational role in global nightlife culture, yet a seemingly strained relationship with the city of Boston—that is, techno. Through the lens of techno music, I investigate how the city’s infrastructural, material, and legal constraints have shaped the formation and sustenance of the local scene, highlighting the critical role of collectives. Despite a transient population not-yet-of drinking age, a relative lack of infrastructure, and strict noise regulations and alcohol curfews, the scene has grown in the past several years. While existing scene studies commonly deal with social identity, aesthetics, or urban geography, this paper analyzes how subcultural scenes are formed through assemblages of human and non-human actors. By identifying the emergent self-organization of these networks, we can reframe genres, collectives, and scenes as dynamic processes rather than static categories. Drawing from participant observation and interviews with organizers, DJs, and dancers, I argue that subcultural scenes materialize through the repetition and iteration (both key sonic aspects of techno) of networks—the same process by which space becomes place. As humans confront increasing isolation alongside a rapidly shifting technological horizon, understanding the forces that keep people connected becomes crucial for navigating what comes next. Ultimately, it is the momentary 1-to-1 connection between two individuals confirming each other’s realities that seeds any network, which through repetition and iteration, reaches temporary states of stabilization that we register as genres, collectives, and scenes.
Corin Duey is a third-year PhD student in Ethnomusicology at Boston University. Prior to attending BU, he received a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies/ Performance (Guitar) from Temple University, and a Master of Arts in Humanities from the University of Chicago, where he completed his thesis on genre hybridities and social networks in modern jazz. His current research involves the social production of space in underground techno music, and deals with themes of materiality and exclusivity. He has worked on a variety of projects in the past, including religiosity in the improvisations of John Coltrane, organology and historiography of Indonesian kroncong, and musical censorship during Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Metaphors and Movement: Song and Status in Oman
Bradford Garvey, Brandeis University
In the Sultanate of Oman, a small country in the Southeastern Arabian Peninsula, Arabic speakers sing public praise poetry to forge and ratify socioeconomic relationships with local political figures and regional elites. In this paper, I demonstrate how poets and singers use ‘āzī, a choral ode, to imagine, create, and stabilize economic relationships with political leaders and invest those relationships with normative content. I show this in two ways: first in the use of language, images, addressivity, and a rich vocabulary of relational implications, and second, in the arrangement of physical space, choreography, and the control of motion through the performance. When solo singers declaim their praise poetry to leaders, they begin over a hundred meters from their praise target and each line and half-line of poetry is accompanied by the entire chorus taking a raucous step closer to the addressee. These steps, symbolically “earned” through praise, are accompanied by cheers, drumming, and celebratory gunshots, indicating their achievement of collective. In analyzing this deliberate control over direct movement closer to status superiors, I show how musical frameworks dramatize and realize social relationships in performance, accomplishing social ends in song.
Bradford Garvey is an Assistant Professor of Music at Brandeis University. In 2020-2021, he was a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow through the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and is currently turning his dissertation into an ethnographic monograph entitled Praise to Open Palms: A Moral Economy of Praise in the Sultanate of Oman. He studies the role of publicly performed sung praise in producing and shaping cross-class relationships that are simultaneously communicative, social, normative, and economic. His work on Iraqi Maqām and Omani Arab performance has been published in Asian Music, The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, HAU, Ethnomusicology, and the Yale Journal of Music & Religion.
Negotiating the Social Life of a Cambodian Classical Ensemble in Lowell, MA.
Stephanie Khoury, Tufts University
In March 2025, Lowell-based Angkor Dance Troupe (ADT) and the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association (CMAA), with support from Tufts University and UMass Lowell, held the first MA-based professional workshop and live performance of pinpeat, a royal and religious music that soundtracks all classical Khmer dances and religious ceremonies. This all-day event inaugurated the newly community-acquired state-of-the-art set of instruments, made by different renowned makers across Cambodia. The network of relations that made this acquisition possible, the dignitary insignias pressed on sound boxes, and the fact there were not enough knowledgeable people to actually play it, render the ensemble even more special. Aging pinpeat masters were flown in from different parts of the US to assist the two locally based musicians, who had been professionally trained in Cambodia prior to moving to the US. Held in-person and streamed on social media, the event generated quite some excitement. Momentum had been met. Drawing from the somewhat recent academic move towards new organology, I offer preliminary reflections on the dynamics that led to this workshop event and the positionality occupied by the instruments since. How does the acquisition process bring to light intersecting levels of meaning and relation between the instruments and their surrounding social space? What is the social life of such objects and the agency they have both by themselves and in interaction with people?
Dr. Stéphanie Khoury is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Ethnomusicology at Tufts University. Stéphanie’s work examines Cambodian performing arts in relation to genocide, diaspora, collective memory, and the concept of intangible heritage. Her work also touches on urban soundscapes and the musical construction of place, digital humanities and sound archives. Her research has been supported by the Center for Khmer Studies (Cambodia), the Quai Branly Museum (France), a postdoctoral fellowship from the Sorbonne University, and more recently grants from Tufts University. Her work is published in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and anthologies, in both English and French.
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Panel 4: Attunement, Pedagogy, and Mediated Listening
May 2
3:15 p.m.– 5:15 p.m.
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Tuning in Inclusively: Intercultural Music-Making at Silkroad’s Global Musician Workshop
Shirley Mak, Brown University
The Global Musician Workshop (GMW) is a one-week summer intensive where participants with different musical and cultural backgrounds collaborate in bands led by a diverse faculty of professional musicians. Founded through Silkroad in 2015 and hosted at the New England Conservatory, GMW reflects the organization’s mission to create a “more hopeful and inclusive world” through collaborative music-making that “engages difference,” or what I call intercultural music-making. In this paper, I examine GMW jam sessions as a site where Silkroad’s intercultural music-making and goals of inclusivity converge and conflict. Unlike jam sessions more generally, GMW participants often do not share a common framework of etiquette and repertoire for jamming. Furthermore, they play instruments that are not normally paired together, raising distinct acoustic challenges. Yet participants frequently describe the sessions as enjoyable and fulfilling. Drawing on observations and seventy-plus interviews conducted between 2023 and 2026, I ask how participants navigate and make sense of GMW jam sessions in the absence of shared guidelines and musical knowledge. Beyond learning new musical genres, participants must also navigate sonic and material constraints (such as amplification, tuning, and instrument capability) that shape who can participate and how. Rather than hindering community-building, I argue that the tension between intercultural and inclusionary goals in GMW jam sessions operates productively. By navigating the factors shaping collective musical participation, GMW musicians develop a form of participatory attunement—a shared sensitivity to the sonic, material, and cultural conditions that enable more inclusive music-making.
Shirley Mak is a Musicology/Ethnomusicology Ph.D. candidate at Brown University. Her dissertation research focuses on intercultural collaborative music making within the Silkroad Ensemble and Global Musician Workshop. Her interests also include issues of music and identity, the impact of globalization on music (including the diasporic and transnational in music studies, and world music), and the inclusion of postcolonial theories and global discourses in Western classical music pedagogy. She received her M.A. in Musicology from the University of Amsterdam, and her B.A. in Music from Queens College, CUNY.
Voicing the ‘Camera-Ravaged’ Pamir: Music and Audiovisual Sovereignty in
Soviet Central Asian Minority Cinema
Katherine Freeze Wolf
During the liberalizing Soviet Thaw of the 1960s, many Central Asian filmmakers rejected the assimilative aesthetics and half-truths of socialist realist cinema and sought to depict more authentically their lands and peoples. Yet, as in the past, they faced constraints: while their cameras might capture “truer” images of local subjects, all dialogue was ventriloquized or voiced over in Russian by (usually) Russian actors. Music, on the other hand, was generally left intact, and could thus deliver the “real” sound of Central Asian voices and languages to Soviet audiences. This paper explores this dynamic through the Tajik cinematographer Davlat Khudonazarov’s (b.1944) pioneering efforts to portray his native Pamir Mountains and Pamiri indigenous minorities in his “ethnographic” documentary Lullaby (1966) about contemporary rural village life in the Pamir. I examine one cue—a local-language traditional lullaby—to consider Khudonazarov’s avowed use of music to ground the film’s dramaturgy and to counter the Pamir’s visual over-exposure in Soviet media. I argue that Khudonazarov’s explicit embrace of what he called ethnography as an authoritative mode of filmic representation called for musical performances that enacted—not merely simulated—actually existing vernacular Pamiri music culture. As (ostensible) field recordings, they served both to authenticate the film’s visual material and to intervene poetically in the discursive space of the film. My analysis draws on fieldwork in Tajikistan alongside consultations with Khudonazarov, and builds on (ethno)musicology’s longstanding and interdisciplinary attention to voice, language, and the strategies by which people make themselves visible—and audible—on their own terms.
Katherine Wolf studies colonial histories, musical modernization, and the politics of representation in the mountainous borderlands of Central Eurasia, with a special focus on these dynamics among indigenous communities of the Pamir Mountains. She completed her PhD in Ethnomusicology at Brown University in 2023 and, after teaching there for one year, began pursuing her research as an independent scholar. Currently, she is working on several publications, including a monograph on music in late Soviet Central Asian minority cinema. Her research has been supported by Fulbright, American Institute for Afghanistan Studies, American Councils, American Philosophical Society, and Society for Asian Music.
Music as Erotic Education: Gurus and Shishyas in the Age of #MeToo
Ahona Palchoudhuri, Brown University
As per the gharana system, Indian Classical Music (ICM) is best taught within the precincts of the domestic. Scholars have argued that it is the amidst kin-based relationalities of eating, sleeping and tending to the household, that a shishya (disciple) best inherits a guru’s musical temperament. My paper asks how ICM’s historical emphasis on pedagogic intimacies between guru and shishya comes to be re-evaluated within the forms of professionalization and public vocabularies of complaint brought forth by #MeToo. I locate this question within an ethnography of music academies in Kolkata, India during the ICM fraternity’s first spate of #MeToo allegations.
Rather than foreclosing guru-shishya intimacy as a given moral risk, my paper calls for a reopening of the role of erotics in music pedagogy. First, I look to scholarly literature on music and sexuality (Cusick 1994, Guck 1996, Taylor 2012, Wong 2015) that has argued for an erotic potential built into musical form. Next, I place this literature in conversation with scholarship that has examined gendered dimensions of musical pedagogy without necessarily acknowledging a “musico-sexual” beyond identity politics. In pointing out this scholarly lacuna, my paper asks a more difficult question of what kind of pedagogic ethics it takes to safely teach and learn an inherently erotic form. I elaborate this question through a study of how the pedagogy around a specific musical movement in ICM transformed during the #MeToo Movement: a meend, that as per Indian aesthetic theory, unleashes “the force with which one might twist a lover’s arm.”
Ahona Palchoudhuri is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology and Music departments at Brown University. Her research focuses on forms of musical aspiration in rural and urban West Bengal, India. Her dissertation, Music as an Earthly Concern: Attunements to a Better Life in Contemporary India ,tracks the movement of an Indian classical raag across agricultural rituals, music academies, reality shows and electoral agendas.
Listening to Protests: Film as Engaged Scholarship with Hong Kong as a Case Study
Winnie W. C. Lai, Dartmouth College
Situated within the “semi-authoritarian” context (Tai 2020) of Hong Kong’s new “lawscape” (LaBelle 2021), a reoriented sonic milieu has emerged from political resonances, intensifying everyday dynamics within newly politicized infrastructures. Listening has come to articulate a state of affective sense-making that sustains the “bodies politic” (Protevi 2009) through “situated listening” (Feld 2015)—a process of “tuning” shaped by affective entanglements and conditioned by territorial boundaries. Reoriented listening to delimited soundings is thus performed, understood, and conditioned through what I call political aurality: an audible immersion in the flux of agential forces that determines, situates, and maintains the bodies politic.
Building on the ontological turn in anthropology and sensory ethnography (Pink 2009), this
presentation, featuring a brief introduction and a nineteen-minute video essay, takes Hong Kong as a case study to treats medial forms such as film as sites of external memory and theorizing, and pedagogy itself as a practice of cultivating ethnomusicologists’ capacities to evaluate alternatives, negotiate meanings, and respond ethically to social issues. In particular, the presentation explores how ethnographic documentaries can translate the affective sphere and politics of listening into a historical archive that would otherwise lose in Hong Kong’s censored present and future. Ethnomusicological works juxtapose sensory experiences from the field with the interplay of materials and media to create experiential and “multilayered archive[s]” (Feld 2020) that challenge the “logocentric” (Dovey 2023) nature of traditional written ethnographic representation (Clifford 1986) while translating modes of perception. Film offers a sensory, intermedial space and a decolonial approach for music studies, enabling engagement with social justice issues through the sensing of affect.
Winnie W. C. Lai is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Dartmouth College. Her research ranges from Hong Kong protest sounds to performed vocalities in pop singing, interspecies communication, and interpersonal communication. Dr. Lai is completing a multimodal monograph, Unsounding Hong Kong: From Protest to Silence, which theorizes the dynamics of sound in Hong Kong’s urban spaces where protests once took place and have since disappeared, as well as the sonic and affective currents circulating through the Hong Kong diaspora and transnational protest movements. She earned her PhD in Music (Ethnomusicology) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024 with two graduate certificates in digital humanities and experimental ethnography.
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