Alejandro L. Madrid
Moderator
Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music Department Chair
Indigenous musicians on paper: Identities and labor in Viceroyal Perú (16th and 18th centuries)
Date and Time
November 12, 2026
07:00PM EST
Location
Barker Center, Room 133
Indigenous musicians played a central role in the communities of the Pueblos de Indios of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Historical documents often referred to them as “Indios cantores,” a term that encompassed a diverse group of individuals whose identities remain largely unknown today. This talk examines their labor and cultural practices, exploring how these musicians adapted to changing social and cultural environments while sustaining their musical traditions and livelihoods.
This event is presented in collaboration with Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard Barker Center
Laura Fahrenkrog
Speaker
Associate Professor of History at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile)
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. His ten books and a host of distinguished articles have established him as one of the foremost musicologists of his generation and one of today's leading scholars in Ibero-American music studies. He has received the Humboldt Research Award (Humboldt-Preis), a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal —given by the International Musicological Society and the Royal Musical Association for “outstanding contributions to musicology”—, top awards from the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), the ASCAP Foundation, the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) as well as Cuba’s Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas, and Chile’s Premio de Musicología Samuel Claro Valdés. His work, which engages popular, folk, and art musics from multi-methodological perspectives, has been described as a “model for future works that aim to cross boundaries between musicology and ethnomusicology” and as “scholarship that intervenes in a number of important critical conversations.”
His research has been funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Program, and the Ford Foundation, among others. His latest monograph, entitled The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening, examines sound archives and the production and circulation of knowledge at the aural turn. He is currently writing a book about Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez’s influential Nueva Trova album Días y flores. He is also working, in collaboration with the Momenta Quartet, on a 5-CD recording project of the complete works for string quartet by Mexican microtonal maverick Julián Carrillo for the Naxos label.
Professor Madrid serves as editor of Oxford University Press’s Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music series. He is frequently invited as an expert commentator to national and international media outlets and recently acted as music advisor to acclaimed filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose film, Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015), is set in early 1930s Mexico.
Laura Fahrenkrog, is Associate Professor of History at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile). Her research centers on musical practices in colonial Spanish America, examining their connection to social and cultural problems, labor, and colonial categories. Her book Los "indios cantores" del Paraguay. Prácticas musicales y dinámicas de movilidad en Asunción colonial (siglos XVI-XVIII) (Sb Editorial, 2020) is the 2021 winner of the Clarence H. Haring Prize in Latin American History from the American Historical Association. Her DRCLAS project focuses on studying Indigenous musicians in the Viceroyalty of Peru (16th–18th centuries) and considers three interrelated themes: identities, mobilities, and material culture.