Sonorous Present: Songs of Border Crossings, Sunrises, and Mournings

Alex E. Chávez addresses how his work crosses the sunburst surreal of America’s musical and cultural borderlands, refiguring the borders of both performance and intellectual engagement to strategically reimagine the possibilities of how a studio album can sound and the forms scholarship can take.

An immersive poetic and musical passage, Alex E. Chávez’s critically acclaimed album Sonorous Present extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and memory across America’s borderlands as physical place and liminal space. What began as an experimental and improvised performance—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (2017)—was subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores featuring luminaries from the worlds of traditional Mexican son, poetry, and jazz. Through integration of a range of scholarly disciplines and communities of artistic practice, this multi-modal scholarly work uniquely integrates regional Mexican and Latin American sonic elements with field recordings and ethnographic songwriting drawn from years of research across the U.S.-Mexico border and Chávez’s personal experiences of loss.

Scholar-artist-producer, Alex E. Chávez is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies. His research explores articulations of Latinx sounds and aurality in relation to race, place-making, and the intimacies that bind lives across physical and cultural borders. He is the author of the multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing—recipient of three book awards, including the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2018)—and has published widely, including in American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of American Folklore, Latino Studies, and Latin American Music Review.

He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of academic research and publicly engaged work as an artist and producer. Chávez has recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores for Emmy Award-winning films, worked closely with Smithsonian Folkways, and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated artists.

He is co-editor of the volume Ethnographic Refusals/Unruly Latinidades (2022), which grows out of an Advanced Seminar he co-chaired at SAR, and the recently published special issue in American Anthropologist titled, “Amplify.” A Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, in 2020 he was named one of ten Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. His current book project, Sound City: Place, Poiesis, Xicago, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Recording Academy (Grammys).

Photo credit: Treylegit

Host or Publisher School for Advanced Research