Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music
Music Building PH3
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 nine books and a host of distinguished articles have established him as one of the foremost musicologists of his generation and 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, 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. He is currently writing a book about sound archives and the production and circulation of knowledge at the aural turn entitled The Archive and the Aural City: Gimmicks, Networks, Utopias, and the Logic of Archival Knowledge at the Sonic Turn; and a book about 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.
Photo Credit: Marina Madrid-Pirozhenko