About the Zine

After Project Spectrum’s 2020 Symposium, we thought deeply about our positionality as a US/Canada-based entity working within the established professional fields of musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology. To diversify academia, we needed to step outside of ourselves. The graduate student committee committed to learning and re-learning about discourses of decolonization and transnationalism, what it meant to be gatekeepers of knowledge, and how we could do better for our communities given our position.

The zine is one of our endeavors to diversify music academia. It does not aim to address or answer the aforementioned discourses, but in our process we hope to serve as a model toward a better, more inclusive discussion.

You may read through the zines as you please, and we’ve tried to design our webspace to allow that kind of freedom, but linearity is often inevitable. We’ve found that our arbitrary ordering (alphabetical by last name) has revealed a certain narrative contour, moving from the work of the research to the intimate feelings and vulnerability of the researcher themselves. Research A’chaqwen E’hichene in a Good Way asks us to center and question what research “in a good way” might even mean, what it could look and feel like. SKACORE brings us “into the field,” as they say, guiding the reader through the worlds that give their intimate publics that feeling of “the good way.” Working Class Musicology then asks us to consider the obstacles that prevent those from feeling a good way when in spaces of musical meaning—what kind of problems and problematics does classical music’s intimate public represent? Termites, Monsters, and Other Outsiders continues this inquiry, bringing the narrative lens onto the self of the minoritized researcher, who is on the outside of the majority’s discourse / of the mainstream. Masked Loves brings us even further inward, to a space of a self stretched across worlds, attempting to build bridges into and out of classical music’s intimate public.

The zine brings together a range of voices that are not typically foregrounded in academic discourses: those without doctorates or equivalent terminating degrees, ranging from graduate students to practitioners and keepers of musical traditions. Through this plurality, we aim to counter the hegemonic nature of traditional publication of music studies by instead turning to the discussions of the more expansive and inclusive study of music across multiple practices and disciplines.

Huge thanks to our contributors for taking a chance on us to publish their work: Jessica Margarita Gutierrez Masini and collaborators William Madrigal, Josh Gonzales, Cuauhtémoc Peranda, and Joshua Thunder Little; Lorali Mossaver-Rahmani; Amanda Paruta; Andrew Ty; and Sora Woo. The entire graduate committee served as reviewers and respondents: Clifton Boyd, Anna B. Gatdula, Hyeonjin Park, Carlo Aguilar González, Sinem Eylem Arslan, Gerry Lopez, Brian Veasna Sengdala, and Renata Yazzie. A special thanks to the design team who worked extra to transform the Zine for the interwebs: Carlo Aguilar González, Sinem Eylem Arslan, Anna Gatdula, and Hyeonjin Park.