New Course on Global Popular Music

This spring, the HSA department is fortunate to be offering a course taught by classical guitarist and scholar of Latin American music, Hermann Hudde.

Having taught previously at Scripps, Professor Hudde is already known to 5C students. His course “Popular Music: A Global Vision,” one of the department’s most popular courses during spring preregistration, nicely complements our other offerings in music. We’re delighted to have him with us!

The HSA Blog asked Professor Hudde to share a bit about himself and his activities as a scholar and performer. Here is his response.

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As a cultural and social music researcher and pedagogue, I place music in dialogue with other fields in the humanities and social sciences because this approach generates holistic scholarship and pedagogy and enhances a diverse university community.

The range of my experience in higher education includes teaching diverse music courses at University of California, Los Angeles, Scripps College, Cambridge Centre for International Research (United Kingdom), New England Conservatory of Music and University of California, Riverside (UCR).

As an emerging respected scholar from Venezuela and the United States, my research articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals and reviews such as Journal of the Society for American Music, Current Musicology, Latin American Music Review, Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review, Revista Musical Chilena, Músicaenclave, Harvard Review of Latin America, Tempo, Nineteenth-Century Music Review and Resonancias. This research project has been supported by a grant from the Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation. Because of my expertise, the Latino Studies section of Oxford Bibliographies contracted me to write music entries and Current Musicology, a publication of Columbia University, invited me to participate on the editorial board (Vol. 111, 2023). I also have a forthcoming chapter, “Bernstein and Latin America,” in the Bernstein in Context volume (Cambridge University Press), invited by the editor, Elizabeth A. Wells.

My current book project, Modernism to Avant-Garde: Latin American Art Music at Tanglewood (1940–2020), examines the musical and cultural contributions of modern Latin American music to the Berkshire Music Center of the Tanglewood Music Festival. This research has been generously supported by the Center for Ideas and Society (UCR) and University of California Institute for Mexico and United States, where I served as a scholar-in-residence. Two writings related to this research topic received second prize and an honorable mention from the Otto Mayer-Serra Award for Music Research.

As an active performer (classical guitar), I have given recitals at prestigious concert venues including Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts, Graphik Museum “Pablo Picasso,” Casa de Estudios Latinoamericanos “Rómulo Gallegos,” University of Chicago Fulton Recital Hall, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MIT Guest Artist Concert Series and La Maison de l’Amérique Latine in Paris, among others.

As a performer, my vision goes beyond music and engages with cultural activism to promote their music that is historically underrepresented. As an example of this can be heard in my recordings Iberoamérica (Centaur Records, 2009) and Trivium (Dreyer & Gaido, 2003), not to mention the premieres of works by Uruguayan composer Miguel del Aguila’s Sambeando (2019) and Venezuelan composer Alex Rodriguez’s Continental Suite (2019). In short, my current mission as a performer is to promote Latinx/American composers’ music.

In recognition of my holistic work (scholar, pedagogue, performer, and public service), I was awarded a Future of Music Faculty Fellowship at Cleveland Institute of Music (2022-23).