Peter Breithaupt
Peter Breithaupt is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a Master of Music degree in percussion performance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2013) and a Master of Arts in music research (2011) as well as a Bachelor of Music in percussion performance (2010) from Western Michigan University. His dissertation
research examines the alternative music scene in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, focusing on issues of labor and development. Peter is currently a lecturer at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Peter has presented papers at the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) Annual Meeting (2018), the SEM Southern Plains Chapter Conference (2017 and 2018), and the University of Texas at Austin’s New Directions in Anthropology (2017). His article “Entering the Conversation: Finding Information in the Library and Online for Percussion Research” appeared in the May 2019 volume of Percussive Notes. Peter’s research has been supported by Fulbright-IIE and the Presser Foundation.
Complementing his scholarly work, Peter maintains an active professional life as a drummer, percussionist, composer, and songwriter. He tours internationally with Msafiri Zawose, one of Tanzania’s foremost Gogo musicians, and performs regularly with Rattletree, an award-winning Afro-dance band, and Hecho a Mano, an Austin-based salsa band. He also composes music for
film; most recently, he composed, produced, and scored the soundtrack to Maasai Remix (2019), a documentary film that follows three Maasai individuals from Tanzania who are trying to defend their community’s rights to land and a pastoralist lifestyle. An old-time music enthusiast, Peter is a dedicated clawhammer banjoist. He is also an avid mountain biker.
John Bimbiras
Email: johnbimbiras@gmail.com
John Bimbiras is Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology. He holds a B.M. in jazz and classical guitar performance from Towson University (2011), as well as an M.A. in composition from The City College of New York (2016), where he studied with David Del Tredici. His research focuses on politics, transnationalism, and the music of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. He is also interested in Lithuanian polyphonic songs and Algerian Chaabi. After graduating from CCNY, John became a Research Associate at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and helped the Institute secure a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an interactive website entitled A History of Dominican Music in the U.S. During his time at CUNY DSI, he also transcribed and arranged an entire collection of original manuscripts from the composer and bandleader Rafael Petitón Guzmán (1894-1983).
As a guitarist and vocalist, John began performing in bars and nightclubs in Baltimore City at the age of twelve. He released a CD of original material with his band Everyman in 2011, produced by Mike Pope. In New York City, he performed regularly at venues such as Rockwood Music Hall, The Bitter End, Pianos, and the Shrine. Here in Austin, John has been performing with the UT Hispanic Caribbean Ensemble, Tambores Del Pueblo, and other groups. Recently, he also wrote music for the Tiny Banger, a play by Alice Stanley that was premiered by Trinity Street Players.
Heather Couture
Her topics of interest include music of the Chinese literati, music of minority peoples in China, minority representation, tourism and authenticity, and commodification and the cultural industries.
Constanza Fuentes-Landaeta
Email: constanzafl@utexas.edu
Constanza Fuentes Landaeta is a Ph.D. Student in Ethnomusicology, where she is a student of Dr. Robin Moore. She is a music educator, arrangement, composer, and ethnomusicologist specializing in Chilean cumbia analysis and notation in popular music. Constanza graduated with honors from the Universidad Andrés Bello, receiving a bachelor’s degree in music education (BA). In addition, she holds a diploma in Instrumental Arrangements and Composition of Popular Music at Escuela Moderna de Música, distinguished with unanimous excellence. She also obtained her master’s degree in Musicology and Music Education at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Constanza has presented her work about Chilean cumbia at conferences at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music–Latin American Brach (2020) and Chilean institutions. She has won various awards, such as Doctorado Becas Chile 2022 by the National Agency for Research and Development – Chile and Fondo para el Fomento de la Música Nacional by the Ministery of Cultures, Arts and Patrimony in Chile, in order to publish her first book about Chilean cumbia. Additionally, she enjoys playing clarinet at the Hispanic Caribbean Ensemble.
Seokyoung Kim
Seokyoung Kim is a Ph.D. student in musicology at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her bachelor’s (2017) and master’s (2019) degree in musicology at Seoul National University. Kim’s research interests include contemporary music, the use of eastern materials in American experimentalism, opera studies, and music criticism.
She published “A Study on Tan Dun’s The First Emperor: Through the Lens of Cultural Hybridity and Identity” (2019) in The Journal of the Musicological Society of Korea; with this article, Kim won the Next Generation of Musicologist Excellent Paper Award from the Musicological Society of Korea. Since 2018, she has contributed critical essays to a co-authored book series of Korean Contemporary Music: Between Criticism and Interpretation.
Kim has presented her research in various institutions: “Is There No Opera Without an Audience in the Concert Hall? Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives (1984) and Potential Operatic Forms in Digital Age” at the Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music (2020), “A Tipping Point of Breaking Down Versus Inheriting Orientalist Opera: In the Case of Heartbeat Opera’s Butterfly (2017)” at the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (2022), “Polemic Argument on Modes of Pansori: Timbre as Differentiation in Korean Music” at the Music Department of Harvard University and Griffith University (2022).
Anna Lopez
Anna Lopez is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin in Historical Musicology whose research focuses on American wind bands/ensembles and its place in American culture. She is the recipient of the 2022 Outstanding Graduate Student Scholarly Creative Activities and Research Award for her thesis “David Maslanka’s Symphony No. 4 and the Wind Band/Ensemble as an American Institution.”
Lopez has presented her work at numerous conferences around the nation: “Of Our New Day Begun: The Importance of The American Wind Band and Its Repertory in the Western Classical Music Canon” at the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (2022), “David Maslanka’s Symphony No. 4 and the Wind Band/Ensemble as an American Institution” at the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society Chapter Meeting (2022), and “(In)Visible Strings: The Filipino American Identity in Classical Music” at the Asian Classical Music Initiative International Conference (2023). She also gave numerous pre-concert lectures for the wind ensembles at California State University, Fullerton.
Her other research interests include film music, popular music, specifically the music of Taylor Swift, and musical theater. She is currently the Historical Musicology Colloquium Representative of the Association of Graduate Ethno/Musicology Students (AGEMS) at UT Austin and the Assistant Editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music.
She completed her master’s degree in Music History and Literature from California State University, Fullerton (2022), where she also obtained a bachelor’s degree in Flute Performance (2020).
In her free time, Anna likes to watch movies, read, try out new coffee shops, and spend time with her loved ones.
Amelia McElveen
Amelia McElveen is a PhD candidate in Musicology. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music General Concentrations in flute from Truman State University in 2017. Amelia’s main research interest is contemporary medievalism in modern Catholic monasteries and symphonic metal music. Her Master’s Report topic is on English chants written since the Second Vatican Council in North American monasteries. Her report will be based around her fieldwork at six monasteries and their development of vernacularism and tourism perspective.
Victoria Mogollón Montagne
dissertation explores the convergences among music, sound, and violence in the lives of
espiritistas marialionceros (religious practitioners) and afro-venezuelan tambor musicians in
contemporary Caracas, Venezuela. Her work advances a Caribbeanist perspective within
Venezuelan studies through the lenses of affect theory, sensory ethnography, and sound studies.
Sistema. She was a member of the National Flute Orchestra of Venezuela and the National
Children’s Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela (2010), and served as a music educator for El
Sistema programs in Venezuela and Denver, Colorado for three years. Additionally, she
completed one year of training at the Herencia tambor school in Caracas, Venezuela.
and a MMus in Advanced Musical Studies (2017) from Royal Holloway, University of London.
At the University of Texas at Austin she worked as assistant instructor and teaching assistant for
several courses in the Butler School of Music. She was also assistant editor for the Latin
American Music Review, and editorial assistant for Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
As Latino Museum Studies Program fellow at the Smithsonian (NMAL), Vicky created “Queens
of Latin Music” a free, online accompanying material for the Entertainment Nation exhibit at
NMAH.
Harrison Montgomery
Harrison Montgomery is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at UT Austin. Their dissertation
project investigates Austin’s urban transformation from the ‘90s to the present, focusing
particularly on the modalities across which experimental musical and sonic communities have
listened and responded to this change. They are also an active sound artist, working primarily
with the interdisciplinary O.S. Collective, a group which explores the intersections of sound art
and ethnographic practice.
Hannah Neuhauser
Hannah Neuhauser is a musicologist, teacher, stage manager, and performer based in Austin, Texas. Her research lies at the intersection of musicology, children’s literature, and sociology.
She earned her B.M. in Vocal Performance and Arts Certificate in Entrepreneurship at Millikin University in 2018 and M.A. in Music History at California State University Long Beach in 2020. She is the honored recipient of the American Musicology Southwest Chapter Hewitt Oberdoeffer Award for Best Student Paper (2021) for “Lost Without a Cue: Music and Masculinity in Detective Film Noir,” which will be published in Music and the Moving Image Vol. 16 no. 1 (2024). Past publications of Hannah’s work also include a Children’s Literature Research Guide for the Harry Ransom Center, which she completed as part of her Curatorial Assistantship and book reviews for the Society for American Music Bulletin journal concerning American musical scholarship.
Hannah’s research has been presented at numerous conferences, most recently the American Musicological Society (2022), Music and the Moving Image (2022), and Popular Culture Association. Outside of her scholarly pursuits, she is an active service member, acting as the Student Representative (2021-23) of the AMS Southwest Chapter, the Student Co-Chair for the Society for American Music (2022-24), and the current intern for the AMS Childhood and Youth studies Group She strives to improve communication between academic and independent scholarship, demonstrating the intrinsic need for connection and accessible education in all circuits of our communities. In her spare time, she works as the Academy Associate for Ballet Austin at the Jewish Community Center. performs regularly at the Hideout Improv Theatre, stage manages local concerts, creates new worlds for my Dungeon & Dragon Campaigns, bakes earnestly, and paints to her heart’s content.
Andrew Normann
Matthew Ovalle
Kevin Parme
Kevin Parme is a PhD student in the Department of Ethnomusicology. His research interests include nationalism and music, tourism and music, cultures initiatives in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, and indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica. He has received the Rainwater Innovation Grant, E.D. Farmer Fellowship, Tinker Field Research Grant, and Foreign Language Area Studies Grant, among other awards. His dissertation project explores the participation of indigenous Oaxacan brass bands in nation-building initiatives of the Post-Revolutionary period. It considers the effects of such participation in the contemporary contexts of tourism, activism, and private celebrations. Kevin is currently conducting fieldwork in Oaxaca City.
Xuan Qin
Xuan Qin is a doctoral candidate in Musicology at the University of Texas, Austin. She received her Master’s Degree from the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami in 2015, after earning a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Central Conservatory of Music in China. Her primary research interests include nineteenth century opera and gestural performance.
Xuan won the Eileen Southern Travel Grants from AMS in 2013 to attend the annual conference at Pittsburgh. Her paper “Alienation between Music and Poetry: On Cultural Misunderstanding in Alexander Tcherepnin’s Musical Setting of the Chinese Poem Drink Song” was accepted by International Graduate Student Conference in 2014 under the auspices of the International Musicological Society. Her Master’s Thesis titled “Ornament and Gesture – Approaches to Studying Bellini’s Norma and Giuditta Pasta’s Performance.” She presented one part of her thesis in the AMS Southern Chapter in 2014.
Mercedes Alejandra Payán Ramírez
Mercedes is a scholar of music education and ethnomusicology, specializing in brass bands from indigenous communities in the Mixe region in Oaxaca, México, and non-academized music traditions or in the process of academization, like mariachi and rock music. Since 2014, her research has been focused on the teaching and learning processes from the anthropological perspective in the community-based system of these ensembles.
She attended the Universidad Veracruzana, where she received a Bachelor’s degree in Music Education (BA), the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (MA), where she studied a Bachelor’s degree in Performance – Flute (BA), and she earned a Master’s Degree in Ethnomusicology in the same institution. Mercedes is pursuing doctoral studies in Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin (2021) under the supervision of Dr. Robin Moore.
Currently, her work addresses issues of decoloniality, transnationalism, media representation, indigeneity, gender, politics, and the relationships between traditional and popular music in the expressions of female-based brass bands. She is part of a transnational project between indigenous women musicians from Oaxaca who live in the United States and México as she collaborates with them as a member of the Red de Mujeres Músicas Transfronterizas. In addition, Mercedes is a member of the collective Las Montoneras, a group of Mexican female musicians, researchers, and educators who seek to make visible and disseminate the contributions of women to music.
Hannah Salmon
Hanna Salmon is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation research combines literatures from affect and atmosphere studies, sound studies, voice studies, and performance studies with ethnomusicology to study Arabic music and hakawati storytelling with a special focus on the voice. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Classical Piano Performance from Temple University in Philadelphia in 2017; now, she focuses most of her musical energy on the oud.
Golriz Shayani
Email: Golriz.Shayani@utexas.edu
Ashley Thorton
Ashley Thornton is a PhD student in ethnomusicology at UT Austin. She holds a Bachelor of Music in Percussion Performance (2018) and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology (2018) from Southeast Missouri State University. Her research focuses on Kurdish and Turkish music, specifically the roles of gender and identity among women who play daf and erbane, both are types of frame drums. Other research interests she has include nationalism, transnationalism, migration, violence, representation in films and literature, applied ethnomusicology, and medical ethnomusicology.
Outside of her academic work, Ashley directs UT Austin’s Middle East Ensemble, Bereket’s, percussion section. In addition to that, she is a volunteer for UT Austin’s Refugee Student Mentorship Program with the Austin Independent School District (AISD) where she works with “English as a Second Language” students.
