In the following interviews, Alejandro L. Madrid and Emily Abrams Ansari discuss their research published in the spring 2025 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (vol. 78, no. 1).
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Alejandro L. Madrid is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is a cultural theorist of sound and music working in Latin American and Latinx studies. He has published nine books and a host of distinguished articles and is one of the leading scholars in Ibero-American music studies. He has received the Humboldt Research Award (Humboldt-Preis), a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal, top awards from the AMS, the Latin American Studies Association, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the ASCAP Foundation, and the Society for Ethnomusicology, as well as Cuba’s Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas and Chile’s Premio de Musicología Samuel Claro Valdés. He is currently completing a book about sound archives and the production and circulation of knowledge at the aural turn entitled The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening; and a book about Silvio Rodríguez’s influential Nueva Trova album Días y flores.
Emily Abrams Ansari is an Associate Professor of music history and Assistant Dean of Research for the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western Univesrity. Ansari’s research explores politics and identity as they pertain to music, particularly focusing on national identity and music, protest song, and music and feminism in the second half of the twentieth century. She has won major prizes for her work, including the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award, the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, the Kurt Weill Prize, and the Society for American Music’s Cambridge University Press Award. Many of her journal publications and book chapters and her first book, The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War (OUP, 2018), consider the effect of the Cold War on American classical music. Ansari is currently participating in a collaborative, interdisciplinary, historical memory project, Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador, which seeks to document the experiences of subsistence farmers during that country’s civil war in the 1980s.
Jake Johnson is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. His writing and teaching explore the interweaving of music, literature, art, and media in American life. Jake is the author of Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America (2019) and Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America (2021) and editor of the volume The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas (2023). He has three new books in 2025. The first, Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America, delves into film and television musicals of the 1960s to examine their place in networks of grieving in America. His contribution to the Oxford Keynotes series is Harline and Washington’s When You Wish Upon a Star, a biography of the well-known American anthem. Finally, and also with Oxford University Press, comes The Music Room: A Story of Art, Friendship, and Gathering in Betty Freeman’s Beverly Hills Home.
