SOAS Public Music Research Seminar Series: 'Hearing Travel: Sonic Pathways through the Bosque del Agua, Mexico'

The SOAS Public Music Research Seminar Series is a valuable forum for ethnomusicology and related fields in London, bringing rising and established scholars to share innovative music research with SOAS audiences.

Abstract

Many popular songs describe journeys to and through the Bosque del Agua, a forested mountainous region just south of Mexico City. The clean air and water produced by this region’s forests are so vital to life in Mexico’s capital that it is colloquially described as the city’s ‘lungs’. Songs about the Bosque del Agua sentimentally extol the region’s colours and natural abundance, and describe journeys through this region. Indeed, their connection to place is so close that songs are frequently described as ‘maps’ or ‘guides’. Yet these songs-as-maps are not merely representational: in a fast-changing region, they also produce the pathways that they describe. In this presentation, I explore songs-as-maps as palimpsestic, over-layered compositions of matter, meaning and sonority on the pathways traversed through this zone.

Speaker

Andrew J Green is an anthropologist of music and sound, and Lecturer in the Anthropology of Music at King’s College London. His work explores acoustic engagements with activism and the natural environment in Mexico City and southern Mexico. He has published work in peer-reviewed journals including Cultural Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, Cultural Sociology, Cultural Studies, Twentieth-Century Music, Media, Culture and Society, and Ethnomusicology Forum, and is the author of Making Mexican Rock: Censorship, Journalism, and Popular Music After Avándaro (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024).

Image: Fey Marin (Unsplash)