Music Theory Colloquium Series

Labelled as “cultural trash” because of its hypersexualized dancing, lyrics, and music videos, Reggaetón is a highly commercialized genre that has found immense success in recent decades (Negrón-Muntaner, 2009). Although, Hellín-García (2021) and Carballo Villagra (2006) have highlighted how women are not only used as symbols of social and financial capital but also dehumanized and viewed as animals to be hunted. Meave Ávila (2023), Díaz-Fernández (2021), and Martínez-González and García-Ramos (2024) have explored the recent shift in values of the genre to the “commercial opportunism” of inclusion, as seen in Bad Bunny’s “YO PERREO SOLA” (2020) and other quasi-feminist anthems. While Báez (2006), Goldman (2017), and Rivera-Rideau (2015) have discussed agency and sexual expression in Ivy Queen’s music, relatively little work has been published regarding more recent Reggaetoneras. Hoban (2021) and Robles Murillo (2021) have explored purplewashing (surface-level performative feminism) in Bad Bunny’s music, there’s been limited analysis of this concept in context of female artists. As Mulvey (1973) points out, women’s appearances in film are heavily coded with eroticism and their bodies serve the purpose of engaging the heterosexual male gaze. Similarly, in order for women to be successful in male-dominated fields they must adhere to a male-dominated agenda (Davies, 2001).

How do current Reggaetoneras navigate sexual expression, assert power, and reclaim narratives of female pleasure in a genre and perhaps even more broadly a world that commodifies women’s bodies for profit and heterosexual male satisfaction? Some have suggested that the genre of Reggaetón itself or its symbolic sexual dance, perreo, is a decolonial tool (Gentile Reyes, 2021). Others argue that queer artists use Reggaetón as a decolonial tool to interpret and navigate living under oppressive, hetero-normative systems (Pacheco Muñoz, 2023; López Castilla, 2018). This paper acts as critical commentary on commodification of women’s bodies, exploring the notion that “sex sells.” Instead of arguing the genre itself is a decolonial tool, using a decolonial lens, I shed light on how colonial values of capitalism, sexuality, and women as symbols of social status influence current artists in the genre. This lens acknowledges the embedded societal values imposed by colonialism while also exploring the ways that these values are reflected (or negated) in the music and performances of Reggaetoneras.

I analyze various performances by Karol G, Young Miko, and Chocolate Remix to show the varying approaches female artists take on feminist empowerment, to highlight how each artist is navigating, challenging and perhaps even at sometimes perpetuating colonial values through their lyrical, visual, and vocal performances. Karol G incorporates sexual pleasure in her lyrics and vocal timbre, emphasizing a powerful feminine experience that blends empowerment with marketable sensuality. Lesbian artist Young Miko subverts gender norms and provides space for queer narratives, though her performances often replicate elements of traditional machismo stereotypes. Through politically charged lyrics, Chocolate Remix uses Reggaetón as a tool for protest and homosexual pride, which can be unpalatable for mainstream commercial purposes. Using a decolonial lens, I critique the complexities of navigating empowerment within a genre that commodifies women’s bodies for profit. I examine the tension between resistance and perpetuation, questioning whether performances of empowerment in Reggaetón reinforce colonial and capitalist values or create meaningful spaces for feminist and queer agency.

Video game soundtracks prior to CD quality audio were encoded in game data and contain hundreds of individual audio musical cues, and therefore seem to be rich candidates for computational corpus analysis. This potential is obstructed by the difficulty of obtaining these soundtracks’ original data and the lack of official transcriptions. In this paper, I perform a computational analysis of the soundtrack of Earthbound (1995) for the Super Nintendo, using an accurate fan transcription of the game’s music encoded for study within the Python module music21. I argue that the soundtrack’s unconventional use of meter and prevalence of certain melodic motifs inform narrative and situate the soundtrack as explicitly transgressive within both its genre and early video game music more broadly. Through this analysis, I aim to encourage similar computational research on early video game soundtracks and reframe the value of fan materials in analytical research.

Kane (2011) suggests as a potentially fruitful study the analysis of the mathematics of transformation theory in the light of post-Husserlian phenomenology. This analysis has not yet been carried out in a satisfying way because scholars have either shied away from specific mathematical formalisms (Kozak 2015) or been concerned with transformation theory primarily as a tool for modeling instrumental spaces (De Souza 2017, 2018). Much of the research on transformation theory centers on the distinction between the transformational and intervallic “attitudes.” Lewin (1987) identifies the former with an embodied, first-person perspective and the latter with the third-person position of an observer, a conception reinforced by Klumpenhouwer (2006), Kozak (2015), and De Souza (2017, 2018).

I show that, when viewed in the light of post-Husserlian phenomenology, the intervallic and transformational “attitudes” are fundamentally entangled and both grounded in the body. The split between them is made possible by what Merleau-Ponty (1945) refers to as the “ambiguity of the body.” This phenomenon underlies the ability of a single embodied being to act simultaneously as both agent and observer, perspectives identified by Merleau-Ponty with personal and general existence, respectively. I apply this notion of the personal and general to Lewin’s (1981, 1987) analyses of Schönberg’s “Angst und Hoffen.” The replacement of specific chromatic pitches with generic ones (represented by unsigned letter names) at key moments in the song displays what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the repression of personal existence in favor of general existence.

The phenomena of repression and the ambiguity of the body also shed light on two other important formalisms in Lewin’s work: the non-commutative time-span generalized interval system (GIS) and the p-model. For Merleau-Ponty, the ambiguity of the body is founded on the ambiguity of time. The latter allows a being to view any moment of its conscious time-stream as a “now.” When a previous moment is taken as a “now,” a context is defined that causes the present to be viewed as a protention of the past. Both the time-span GIS and the p-model rely on the possibility of defining particular contexts in this way. By connecting Lewin’s mathematical and phenomenological works, I will open new horizons for the interaction of mathematical, phenomenological, and embodied research in music theory and show how transformation theory as an analytical tool offers unique affordances for talking about the ambiguities of musical structure.

Consider the third phrase of the English folk song “Scarborough Fair,” with text: “Remember me to one who lives there.” The setting is syllabic until the final syllable “there” which is sung over the final two notes. Most string performers who are familiar with the text would quickly select a bowing that similarly slurs the final two notes. Why is that the case? In the semiotic framework, the mental projection of the text onto the pitches of the melody would be defined as an indexical relation (Peirce 1955, 1992; Short 2007; and Turino 1999). In this case, those familiar with the melody via the song would “index” the text and the music – creating an unbreakable connection between the two and allowing for the bowing to be chosen with confidence. Without that textual index, a different set of relationships prevail which can frequently be led awry. This paper discusses the semiotic implications of folk-song citations and how composers’ articulations affect the “authenticity” of renditions by performers (un)familiar with the cited songs.

I discuss multiple such case studies. These include the use of the Russian folk song “The Birch Tree” in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, and Balakirev’s Overture on Three Russian Themes. I show comparisons between articulations performed by Western European / American and Russian orchestras and conductors. Despite the lack of articulation in Tchaikovsky’s setting and highly specific articulation in Balakirev’s setting of the “Birch Tree” tune, Russian orchestras perform both with the same articulation as native-speaker vocalists, while Western orchestras do not. I address criticisms of Beethoven’s setting of the Russian folk song “Slava” in his “Razumovsky” Quartet Op. 59 No. 2 (Ferraguto 2014, Taruskin 2008). Beethoven’s contrapuntal setting of the tune is compared to another contrapuntal setting by Arensky in his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 35. I apply the framework of Peircean semiotics, in particular, the icon and index relations (Turino 1999) to explore the analytical and interpretative choices that such citation prompts.

Recent scholarship on microtiming has suggested that very slight deviations from isochrony at the subdivision level may help musicians disambiguate metrically malleable passages (Polak 2010, London 2012). Colombian currulao frequently uses one particularly ambiguous pattern known as dosillo (“duple”), which is understood by musicians to be made up of four isochronous onsets. While the genre is conventionally considered to be in 6/8, many musicians unfamiliar with the genre have expressed their confusion over dosillo’s metric construal (Hernández 2010, 257), while even the most celebrated currulao musicians fondly refer to dosillo as “the rhythmic venom of the genre” (Candelario 2021, 37:54), noting that musicians use its four isochronous onsets to trick listeners into perceiving a simple duple meter instead of a compound duple one. In this paper, I argue that despite its perception as an essentially isochronous pattern, slight timing differences between the inter-onset intervals of dosillo may subconsciously help performers and enculturated listeners disambiguate the pattern. This slight non-isochrony suggests that the genre as whole—even when dosillo is not explicitly present—is structured around a less immediately audible non-isochronous subdivision, which contributes to its distinctive “rhythmic feel.”

Will Generative AI put musicians out of business? Or will music be immune to AI’s technological advances?  This talk outlines the numerous technical, social, and expressive challenges that make music a uniquely complex domain for AI research. These challenges include the lack of substantial commercial motivation, the intricacies involved in converting scores and audio signals into data that computers can process, the complex structures underpinning musical composition, and music’s deep-rooted connection to human emotion and experience. Overall, I argue that certain aspects of music are particularly vulnerable to AI interventions, while other aspects remain uniquely shielded from this burgeoning technology.

This year, 2025, marks the 150th anniversary of Maestro Julián Carrillo’s birth (1875-1965, México), the violinist and music theorist who discovered one-sixteenth tones in 1895 (El Sonido Trece) and composed tonal, atonal, and microtonal works in various genres. Despite the distinctive differences between his three musical languages, Carrillo’s substantial and approximately seventy-five-year oeuvre represents a single composer whose works unite under the umbrella of El Sonido Trece and through a compositional style that reflects both persistent continuity and metamorphosis over time. Carrillo collectively preserves and reworks ideas, gestures, themes, select passages, and entire openings and endings into different narratives that form compositional habits he carries from piece to piece, no matter which musical language he is writing in. In this celebratory talk, I will examine a number of these compositional habits through a selection of Carrillo’s musical works, ranging from early to later compositions.

Carrillo’s music reflects his life in Mexico and experience studying music both in Mexico and in Europe (Madrid 2015). With roots deeply embedded in his home, Carrillo envisioned his music, inventions, and theories to move Mexico forward and to holistically demonstrate to the world how the Americas were innovatively widening the musical sound cloud. 150 years later, Carrillo’s legacy and the impact from his life’s musical journey continues in fruition.