Alejandro L Madrid
Biographic Data
| ID | 109598 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alejandro L Madrid |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alejandro L |
| FAMILY NAME | Madrid |
| SIGNATURE | MADRID A L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1738-8518 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Listening through the Colonial Noise
Archives and the information they contain are designed, structured, and organized according to narratives that shape the type of knowledge their users are expected to obtain from them. Thus, the objects and documents in an archive usually tell and retell stories that performatively reproduce the larger ideological frameworks informing ongoing dynamics among its objects, documents, representations, and users. The central concern in this article is…
Rastreando las huellas de la escucha performativa
Este artículo plantea una revisión de la historiografía musical nacionalista mexicana tomando como punto de partida un análisis comparativo de dos libros publicados en Ciudad de México a principios de la década de 1930, Instrumental precortesiano (1933) de Daniel Castañeda y Vicente T. Mendoza y Hacia una nueva música/Toward a New Music (1932-1937) de Carlos Chávez. En el contexto de la reconceptualización de la noción de archivo musical o archiv…
Experimentalisms in Practice
This book problematizes the notion of experimentalism as defined in conventional narratives about experimental musical practices. Contributors take a broad approach to a wide variety of Latin@ and Latin American music traditions conceived and/or perceived as experimental. The adoption of a plural “experimentalisms” points at a purposeful decentering of its usual US and Eurocentric interpretative frameworks. The case studies in this book contribut…
Experimental Music and the Avant-garde in Post-1959 Cuba
This chapter examines how experimental music in the 1960s in Cuba reached wider audiences as a product of the cultural policies of the Cuban Revolution and of the aesthetic goals of a particular set of individuals who took advantage of the new cultural institutions to promote experimental music under the banner of vanguardia . As music advisor of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, Juan Blanco programed new music by international and Cuban composers…
Secreto a Voces
Juan Gabriel is arguably the most successful Mexican singer, songwriter, and producer of the last three decades of the twentieth century. One could begin measuring his success through the numerous Billboard, Grammy, Latin Grammy, and MTV awards, and more than fifteen hundred gold, platinum, and multiplatinum records. The excesses one witnesses in Juan Gabriel's commercial success are analogous to the stylistic excesses one observes in his vocalit…
"Landscapes and gimmicks from the "sounded city
By focusing on a soundscapes project started by Mexico City’s Radio Educación in 2006 and currently continued by Mexico’s Fonoteca Nacional, this essay investigates the social organization of urban spaces through sound and the use of sound. The discussion focuses on soundscapes as both descriptive as well as performative interventions that speak of socially informed models that organize urban space and our perception of it. In doing this I invoke…
In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13
In the 1920s, Mexican composer Julián Carrillo (1875–1965) developed a microtonal system he metaphorically called El Sonido 13 (The 13th Sound). Although his pioneering role as one of the first proponents of microtonality within the Western art music tradition allowed him to achieve a cult figure status among European avant-garde circles in the 1960s and 1970s, his music and legacy have remained largely ignored by scholars and music critics. Most…
Danzón
This book studies the emergence, hemisphere-wide influence, historical, and contemporary significance of the danzón. Influenced initially by the European contradance tradition, elaborated as a distinct music and dance form by black performers in nineteenth-century Cuba, and popularized thereafter throughout the Americas, the danzón is a fascinating genre that ties together the entire Atlantic region. It is fundamentally hybrid, reflecting the fus…
Transnational Identity, the Singing of Spirituals, and the Performance of Blackness among Mascogos1
This chapter takes capeyuye [spiritual singing] as a point of departure to study the Mascogos’ continuous struggle to define themselves as binational people, as Afro-Seminoles living in Coahuila, Mexico. By reflecting on the intersections of race, nationality, and the body within the specificities of Mascogo border culture and history, the chapter problematize Anne Anlin Cheng's notion of “racial melancholia,” suggesting that self rejection might…
Transnational EncountersMusic and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border
This volume maps out the continuous transnational dialogues that have informed culture and life at the U.S.‐Mexico border through the study of a wide variety of musical practices from the area. Without neglecting border musics that have been privileged in music scholarship (such as Tejano, corrido, and norteña) this book focuses on neglected indigenous, popular, and alternative musical practices in order to challenge biased understandings of the …
Studying U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century
Research Article| December 01 2011 Studying U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Charles Hiroshi Garrett CHARLES HIROSHI GARRETT is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. His book Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2008) received the Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music…
Reggaeton (Rivera, Marshall and Hernandez)
When certain products or practices attain a more secure place in a particular cultural landscape they tend to become naturalized in the minds of those who experience such landscapes; it is almost as if they had always been there, they become "authenticated". This seems to be the case with reggaeton. As I sit down to write this review I ask myself when I heard about reggaeton for the first time and I cannot find an answer. When pushing myself to r…
Seis casi-sonatas en cuartos de tono para violoncello solo (review)
Reviewed by: Seis casi-sonatas en cuartos de tono para violoncello solo Alejandro L. Madrid Julián Carrillo . Seis casi-sonatas en cuartos de tono para violoncello solo. Jimena Giménez Cacho, cello (QP 182, Quindecim Recordings, 2007). Although the name of Julián Carrillo's (1875–1965) most famous creation, the so-called Sonido 13, has found its way into Mexican cultural trivia, a veil of mystery spreads over the music and figure of this composer…
Nor-tec Rifa!
At the dawn of the 21st century, the Nor-tec phenomenon emerged from the border city of Tijuana and through the Internet, quickly conquered a global audience. Marketed as a kind of “ethnic” electronic dance music, Nor-tec samples sounds of traditional music from the north of Mexico, and transforms them through computer technology used in European and American techno music and electronica. Tijuana has media links to both Mexico and the United Stat…
Nor-tec Rifa!
Origins Revisited
The Singing of the New World
Pachangas. Borderlands Music, US Politics, and Transnational Marketing
Musical Ritual in Mexico City
This comparative study combines historical and ethnographic evidence to describe the uses of music and the shifting meanings of musical traditions across almost seven centuries of Mexican history (especially in Mexico City). Despite this colossal scope, Pedelty does not attempt to write a comprehensive history of Mexico through musical practices; in fact, his study is even more ambitious. Rather than providing a plain historical narrative, Pedelt…
Timba
Book Review| April 01 2007 Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis, Vincenzo Perna. Liliana González Moreno; Liliana González Moreno Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Alejandro L. Madrid Alejandro L. Madrid Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnomusicology (2007) 51 (2): 353–355. https://doi.org/10.2307/20174533 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Lin…
Dancing with desire
Nor-tec music was created at the Tijuana-San Diego border as a hybrid that incorporates the sounds of traditional music from the North of Mexico to computer-based styles of dance music. Through a distinct process of do-it-yourself distribution, Nor-tec quickly became a worldwide phenomenon in the underground electronic music scene. Based on extensive ethnographic work in Tijuana, Los Angeles and Chicago, this article compares different Nor-tec sc…
The Sounds of the Nation
For decades, political, social, and (lately) cultural historians have successfully challenged the orthodox history of the Mexican Revolution: a teleology of progress achieved through the beneficence of the postrevolutionary state. The official history of nationalist aesthetics and national identity — with its essentialist claims to mexicanidad or lo mexicano, its iconization of (male) cultural caudillos, and its close association of cultural nati…
Imagining Modernity, Revising Tradition
Based on extensive fieldwork in Tijuana, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Mexico City, this article explores the intersections of identity, modernity, desire, and marginality in the production, distribution, and transnational consumption of Nor‐tec music. Tijuana musicians developed Nor‐tec by combining sounds sampled from traditional music of the north of Mexico conjunto norteño and banda) with compositional techniques borrowed from techno music. The…
Navigating Ideologies in "In-Between" Cultures
When a friend invited me on 25 March 2000 to attend a concert of techno music at Mexico City's Zócalo, I was a little puzzled and did not know what to expect. A rave organized by the government of Mexico City and presented in the heart of the city's political life seemed bizarre. As it turned out, and in accordance with the history of the location, I was about to witness a true political act; not political in terms of overt "policy," but rather, …
The Singing of the New World
Studying U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century
Research Article| December 01 2011 Studying U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Charles Hiroshi Garrett CHARLES HIROSHI GARRETT is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. His book Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2008) received the Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music…
In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13
In the 1920s, Mexican composer Julián Carrillo (1875–1965) developed a microtonal system he metaphorically called El Sonido 13 (The 13th Sound). Although his pioneering role as one of the first proponents of microtonality within the Western art music tradition allowed him to achieve a cult figure status among European avant-garde circles in the 1960s and 1970s, his music and legacy have remained largely ignored by scholars and music critics. Most…
The Sounds of the Nation
For decades, political, social, and (lately) cultural historians have successfully challenged the orthodox history of the Mexican Revolution: a teleology of progress achieved through the beneficence of the postrevolutionary state. The official history of nationalist aesthetics and national identity — with its essentialist claims to mexicanidad or lo mexicano, its iconization of (male) cultural caudillos, and its close association of cultural nati…
Secreto a Voces
Juan Gabriel is arguably the most successful Mexican singer, songwriter, and producer of the last three decades of the twentieth century. One could begin measuring his success through the numerous Billboard, Grammy, Latin Grammy, and MTV awards, and more than fifteen hundred gold, platinum, and multiplatinum records. The excesses one witnesses in Juan Gabriel's commercial success are analogous to the stylistic excesses one observes in his vocalit…
"Landscapes and gimmicks from the "sounded city
By focusing on a soundscapes project started by Mexico City’s Radio Educación in 2006 and currently continued by Mexico’s Fonoteca Nacional, this essay investigates the social organization of urban spaces through sound and the use of sound. The discussion focuses on soundscapes as both descriptive as well as performative interventions that speak of socially informed models that organize urban space and our perception of it. In doing this I invoke…
Dancing with desire
Nor-tec music was created at the Tijuana-San Diego border as a hybrid that incorporates the sounds of traditional music from the North of Mexico to computer-based styles of dance music. Through a distinct process of do-it-yourself distribution, Nor-tec quickly became a worldwide phenomenon in the underground electronic music scene. Based on extensive ethnographic work in Tijuana, Los Angeles and Chicago, this article compares different Nor-tec sc…
Navigating Ideologies in "In-Between" Cultures
When a friend invited me on 25 March 2000 to attend a concert of techno music at Mexico City's Zócalo, I was a little puzzled and did not know what to expect. A rave organized by the government of Mexico City and presented in the heart of the city's political life seemed bizarre. As it turned out, and in accordance with the history of the location, I was about to witness a true political act; not political in terms of overt "policy," but rather, …
Imagining Modernity, Revising Tradition
Based on extensive fieldwork in Tijuana, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Mexico City, this article explores the intersections of identity, modernity, desire, and marginality in the production, distribution, and transnational consumption of Nor‐tec music. Tijuana musicians developed Nor‐tec by combining sounds sampled from traditional music of the north of Mexico conjunto norteño and banda) with compositional techniques borrowed from techno music. The…
Dancing with desire
Nor-tec music was created at the Tijuana-San Diego border as a hybrid that incorporates the sounds of traditional music from the North of Mexico to computer-based styles of dance music. Through a distinct process of do-it-yourself distribution, Nor-tec quickly became a worldwide phenomenon in the underground electronic music scene. Based on extensive ethnographic work in Tijuana, Los Angeles and Chicago, this article compares different Nor-tec sc…
The Sounds of the Nation
For decades, political, social, and (lately) cultural historians have successfully challenged the orthodox history of the Mexican Revolution: a teleology of progress achieved through the beneficence of the postrevolutionary state. The official history of nationalist aesthetics and national identity — with its essentialist claims to mexicanidad or lo mexicano, its iconization of (male) cultural caudillos, and its close association of cultural nati…
Pachangas. Borderlands Music, US Politics, and Transnational Marketing
Musical Ritual in Mexico City
This comparative study combines historical and ethnographic evidence to describe the uses of music and the shifting meanings of musical traditions across almost seven centuries of Mexican history (especially in Mexico City). Despite this colossal scope, Pedelty does not attempt to write a comprehensive history of Mexico through musical practices; in fact, his study is even more ambitious. Rather than providing a plain historical narrative, Pedelt…
Timba
Book Review| April 01 2007 Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis, Vincenzo Perna. Liliana González Moreno; Liliana González Moreno Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Alejandro L. Madrid Alejandro L. Madrid Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnomusicology (2007) 51 (2): 353–355. https://doi.org/10.2307/20174533 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Lin…
Nor-tec Rifa!
At the dawn of the 21st century, the Nor-tec phenomenon emerged from the border city of Tijuana and through the Internet, quickly conquered a global audience. Marketed as a kind of “ethnic” electronic dance music, Nor-tec samples sounds of traditional music from the north of Mexico, and transforms them through computer technology used in European and American techno music and electronica. Tijuana has media links to both Mexico and the United Stat…
Nor-tec Rifa!
Origins Revisited
The Singing of the New World
Seis casi-sonatas en cuartos de tono para violoncello solo (review)
Reviewed by: Seis casi-sonatas en cuartos de tono para violoncello solo Alejandro L. Madrid Julián Carrillo . Seis casi-sonatas en cuartos de tono para violoncello solo. Jimena Giménez Cacho, cello (QP 182, Quindecim Recordings, 2007). Although the name of Julián Carrillo's (1875–1965) most famous creation, the so-called Sonido 13, has found its way into Mexican cultural trivia, a veil of mystery spreads over the music and figure of this composer…
Reggaeton (Rivera, Marshall and Hernandez)
When certain products or practices attain a more secure place in a particular cultural landscape they tend to become naturalized in the minds of those who experience such landscapes; it is almost as if they had always been there, they become "authenticated". This seems to be the case with reggaeton. As I sit down to write this review I ask myself when I heard about reggaeton for the first time and I cannot find an answer. When pushing myself to r…
Transnational Identity, the Singing of Spirituals, and the Performance of Blackness among Mascogos1
This chapter takes capeyuye [spiritual singing] as a point of departure to study the Mascogos’ continuous struggle to define themselves as binational people, as Afro-Seminoles living in Coahuila, Mexico. By reflecting on the intersections of race, nationality, and the body within the specificities of Mascogo border culture and history, the chapter problematize Anne Anlin Cheng's notion of “racial melancholia,” suggesting that self rejection might…
Transnational EncountersMusic and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border
This volume maps out the continuous transnational dialogues that have informed culture and life at the U.S.‐Mexico border through the study of a wide variety of musical practices from the area. Without neglecting border musics that have been privileged in music scholarship (such as Tejano, corrido, and norteña) this book focuses on neglected indigenous, popular, and alternative musical practices in order to challenge biased understandings of the …
Studying U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century
Research Article| December 01 2011 Studying U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Charles Hiroshi Garrett CHARLES HIROSHI GARRETT is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. His book Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2008) received the Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music…
Danzón
This book studies the emergence, hemisphere-wide influence, historical, and contemporary significance of the danzón. Influenced initially by the European contradance tradition, elaborated as a distinct music and dance form by black performers in nineteenth-century Cuba, and popularized thereafter throughout the Americas, the danzón is a fascinating genre that ties together the entire Atlantic region. It is fundamentally hybrid, reflecting the fus…
In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13
In the 1920s, Mexican composer Julián Carrillo (1875–1965) developed a microtonal system he metaphorically called El Sonido 13 (The 13th Sound). Although his pioneering role as one of the first proponents of microtonality within the Western art music tradition allowed him to achieve a cult figure status among European avant-garde circles in the 1960s and 1970s, his music and legacy have remained largely ignored by scholars and music critics. Most…
"Landscapes and gimmicks from the "sounded city
By focusing on a soundscapes project started by Mexico City’s Radio Educación in 2006 and currently continued by Mexico’s Fonoteca Nacional, this essay investigates the social organization of urban spaces through sound and the use of sound. The discussion focuses on soundscapes as both descriptive as well as performative interventions that speak of socially informed models that organize urban space and our perception of it. In doing this I invoke…
Experimentalisms in Practice
This book problematizes the notion of experimentalism as defined in conventional narratives about experimental musical practices. Contributors take a broad approach to a wide variety of Latin@ and Latin American music traditions conceived and/or perceived as experimental. The adoption of a plural “experimentalisms” points at a purposeful decentering of its usual US and Eurocentric interpretative frameworks. The case studies in this book contribut…
Experimental Music and the Avant-garde in Post-1959 Cuba
This chapter examines how experimental music in the 1960s in Cuba reached wider audiences as a product of the cultural policies of the Cuban Revolution and of the aesthetic goals of a particular set of individuals who took advantage of the new cultural institutions to promote experimental music under the banner of vanguardia . As music advisor of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, Juan Blanco programed new music by international and Cuban composers…
Secreto a Voces
Juan Gabriel is arguably the most successful Mexican singer, songwriter, and producer of the last three decades of the twentieth century. One could begin measuring his success through the numerous Billboard, Grammy, Latin Grammy, and MTV awards, and more than fifteen hundred gold, platinum, and multiplatinum records. The excesses one witnesses in Juan Gabriel's commercial success are analogous to the stylistic excesses one observes in his vocalit…
Rastreando las huellas de la escucha performativa
Este artículo plantea una revisión de la historiografía musical nacionalista mexicana tomando como punto de partida un análisis comparativo de dos libros publicados en Ciudad de México a principios de la década de 1930, Instrumental precortesiano (1933) de Daniel Castañeda y Vicente T. Mendoza y Hacia una nueva música/Toward a New Music (1932-1937) de Carlos Chávez. En el contexto de la reconceptualización de la noción de archivo musical o archiv…
Listening through the Colonial Noise
Archives and the information they contain are designed, structured, and organized according to narratives that shape the type of knowledge their users are expected to obtain from them. Thus, the objects and documents in an archive usually tell and retell stories that performatively reproduce the larger ideological frameworks informing ongoing dynamics among its objects, documents, representations, and users. The central concern in this article is…
Art (19 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Music History and Culture (14 works) · History (13 works) · Musical (11 works) · Literature (10 works) · Diverse Musicological Studies (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Art history (7 works)