Alejandro L. Madrid (Cornell University)
"Labels [Are] Selling Short What the Whole Thing Is About": On Identity Politics, Representation, and Legacy in Tania León’s Biography

This presentation reflects upon the ways in which composer Tania León’s life and works have been portrayed to create the idea of an artistic legacy. The examination unfolds around three concepts: representation, identity, and legacy. The first part is an exploration of the ways in which Tania León has been represented in literature about music in the United States and Latin America, often within the logics of identity politics. The second part is devoted to León’s discourse of self-identification and provides a detailed exploration of the ways in which she rejects identity labels and the implications of this rejection. In the final section, I assess León’s current legacy as a musician, artist, educator, and community organizer in relation to the way processes of canonization of León and her work have unfolded for several years.

Alejandro L. Madrid is a cultural theorist whose historical, ethnographic, and critical work focuses on music and expressive culture from Latin America and Latinxs in the United States. Working at the intersection of musicology, ethnomusicology, and performance studies, his work explores questions of transnationalism and diaspora; gender and embodied culture; and historiography, narrative, and alternative ways of knowledge production in music from the long twentieth century. Madrid is the author of over a dozen books for which he has received numerous national and international awards, including the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association and the International Musicological Society; the Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas; the Mexico Humanities Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association; the Béla Bartók Award from the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Awards; the Woody Guthrie Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music; the Premio de Musicología Samuel Claro Valdés; as well as the Robert Stevenson, Ruth Solie, and Philip Brett awards from the American Musicological Society. His most recent book, Tania León’s Stride. A Polyrhythmic Life is forthcoming this year with University of Illinois Press. Madrid is editor of Oxford University Press’s award-winning series Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music, and co-editor of the journal Twentieth-Century Music. He is professor of musicology and ethnomusicology as well as Chair of the Department of Music at Cornell University.

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