Decolonial Approaches to Music Studies: Listening, Historiography, and the Politics of Audibility (ARLAC)

Organized by the ARLAC–IMS Working Group “Latin American Decolonial Musicology.”

Recent debates on coloniality, epistemic plurality, and situated knowledge have prompted renewed reflection on the foundations of music studies. While scholarship on migration, circulation, diaspora, and global music history has significantly expanded the geographical scope of the field, less attention has been given to the conceptual frameworks that determine what may appear as music, listening, archive, or history in the first place. This roundtable brings together three scholars working from distinct regional and methodological perspectives to examine how regimes of audibility and epistemic authority shape the production of musical knowledge today.

The session begins from a shared premise: a decolonial approach to music studies requires more than expanding the repertories, actors, or regions included in music history. It involves examining how the boundaries of the field have historically been constituted through disciplinary regimes of listening, historiographic narratives, and institutional infrastructures that regulate what becomes musically audible, legitimate, and historically meaningful. In this sense, the problem is also onto-epistemic: it concerns the conditions under which sounds, practices, and sonic worlds become intelligible, legible, and historicizable within musicological discourse.

The first paper, by Diósnio Machado Neto, introduces the intellectual agenda of the ARLAC–IMS Decolonial Musicology Study Group, outlining how decolonial perspectives interrogate the ontological and epistemic assumptions that have historically structured musicological inquiry. Drawing on Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s notion of ch’ixi coexistence and Leda Maria Martins’s concept of spiral time, this intervention reflects on how non-linear temporalities and plural regimes of listening may reorient musicological analysis.

The second paper, by Fátima Graciela Musri, examines the coloniality of musicological knowledge in the historiographic construction of Cuyo regionalism in twentieth-century Argentina. Focusing on figures such as Buenaventura Luna and Inocencio Aguado Aguirre, the presentation analyzes how sociocultural infrastructures—including oral transmission, print media, broadcasting, and educational institutions—mediate which musical practices become audible, legitimate, and historically preserved.

The third paper, by Mauricio Andrés Pitich, offers a critical genealogy of tango studies, questioning disciplinary imbalances that have privileged Global North ethnographic perspectives while marginalizing musicological work produced in the Global South. By combining decolonial theory with global music history approaches, this contribution examines how historiographic narratives and discursive categories surrounding tango reproduce enduring hierarchies of musical knowledge.

Together, these interventions frame a collective discussion on how regimes of listening, historiography, and institutional authority shape musical knowledge. The roundtable invites participants and audience members to consider how decolonial approaches may reconfigure the conceptual and methodological foundations of music studies today.