AMPLIFY! A Festival of Asian American Music, Sound, and Scholarship 2026
Organized by the Music of Asian America Research Center
in partnership with Asian Improv aRts Midwest and Elastic Arts
In-Person Component: Chicago, September 24-26, 2026 (with livestream)
Virtual Component: Second Wednesdays at 7pm ET starting in July
Call for Proposals | Schedule | Registration | Invited Artists | Presentation Abstracts & Bios
Presentation Abstracts and Bios
Thursday, September 24
Session #1: Reimagining Asian Traditions (Chair: Peng Liu)–Livestreamed
Angelina Gibson, “The Underwater Orient of John Neumeier’s The Little Mermaid: A Choreomusicological Analysis of Yuan Yuan Tan and the Racialized Body”
A legendary name in American ballet, principal ballet dancer Yuan Yuan Tan experienced a rare 29-season career at the San Francisco Ballet until her retirement in 2024. Of her celebrated repertoire, Tan’s title role in John Neuemier’s 2010 The Little Mermaid brought her lasting critical acclaim and notoriety. Neuemier’s adaptation of the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale takes a far darker, at times violent, tone than others, emphasizing the mermaid’s emotional and physical suffering after choosing to transform into a human. Tan’s dancing was lauded as “tragic,” “grotesque,” and, ultimately, “a career milestone” (Rachel Howard, The Classical Voice). What emerges from the reviews and Tan’s performance is the rubric of racialized bodily achievement and an undeniable Orientalist lens. Reviewers note how Tan “overcame” her elegance and pushed her “delicate” body to the limits in the dark fairytale, bringing the feminization of her Chinese female body to light. It is by embodying the horrific, painful, and tragic, that Tan overcomes her physical racialization and makes her name known. This paper pursues a reading that puts Tan’s role, Neuemier’s exoticization of the underwater world, bodily violence, and its music into conversation with theories of Orientalism in fairytales, particularly of East Asia and Asians. The ballet’s score by Lera Auerbach is deeply considered in a choreomusicological reading, as purposeful musical coordination and aural unease is crucial to communicating the onstage emotions and events. Through these layered readings and considerations, an underwater Orient emerges both from the ballet’s source, stage design, choreography, score, and Tan’s body.
About Angelina Gibson:
Angelina Gibson is a musicology PhD student at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on Orientalism, exoticism, and stagings of magic in ballet and its music, while also studying Asian American ballet history and the Asian American Ballet Project. With a bachelors in piano and training in ballet, Gibson remains dedicated to advancing dance and music scholarship within and beyond musicology. Thus far, her work has been presented at the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance, Society for Ethnomusicology, Association for Asian American Studies, American Musicological Society Midwest, and the International Clarinet Association.
Craig Parker, “Unification of Indian and Western Musical Idioms in Reena Esmail’s Meri Sakhi Ki Avaaz (My Sister’s Voice)
Indian-American Reena Esmail (born 1983, Chicago) ranks among the most widely-performed composers of her generation. She recently concluded a five-year term as the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s Swan Family Artist-in-Residence. She has also served as composer-in-residence for the Seattle Symphony and Street Symphony of Los Angeles. Most prominent among her many awards are the $50,000 United States Artist Fellow and the Grand Prize Winner of the S & R Foundation’s Washington Award. Esmail is artistic director of Shastra, a non-profit promoting cross-cultural music connecting traditions of India and the West.
A graduate of Juilliard and Yale who studied Hindustani music in India, Dr. Esmail strives to bring communities together by creating equitable musical spaces in her compositions. This is evident in most of her works, especially in Meri Sahki Ki Avaaz (My Sister’s Voice) (2018-19) for Hindustani singer, soprano, and orchestra or piano quintet. Among her common techniques for merging idioms are utilizing Hindustani raags, rhythmic cycles, and structures alongside Western modulations, orchestrations, and mirror-image phrases.
Leo Delibes’ “Flower Duet” from Lakmé (1881-82), a popular “orientalist” opera, served as inspiration for “Meri Sakhi Ki Avaaz.” Esmail’s 20-minute piece (in Hindi and English) is about expanded sisterhood, when two women from different musical cultures allow each other’s voices to be heard. Esmail achieves this by allowing each singer to switch languages and solfège systems (Indian and Western) during their virtuosic jugalbandi (Hindustani musical competition).
This paper details Esmail’s numerous techniques in achieving this musical amalgamation. Extracts from the author’s interviews with Esmail and excerpts from live performances will be included.
About Craig Parker:
Craig B. Parker recently retired after 44 years on the faculty of Kansas State University, where he taught music history and played trumpet with the KSU Faculty Brass Quintet. A graduate of the University of Georgia and UCLA, he has done post-doctoral work at the University of Michigan and Harvard. The juxtaposition of Western and Asian elements in contemporary compositions, both by American and Asian composers, ranks among his primary research and performance interests.
Koeun Grace Lee, “Pansori Fantasy: Intersections of Korean Identity and Pianistic Innovation”
Texu Kim (b. 1980) is a leading Korean-American composer whose music bridges traditional Korean aesthetics and contemporary Western idioms with wit, vitality, and cultural depth. His piano works demonstrate a nuanced dialogue between heritage and modernity, inviting performers and listeners to engage with Korean musical identity through a cosmopolitan lens. This lecture-recital examines a representative work, Pansori Fantasy, which illuminates his inventive reimagining of Korean characteristics within contemporary pianistic expression.
In Pansori Fantasy (2024), commissioned by the Seoul International Music Competition, Kim further develops this intercultural approach by reimagining pansori, the Korean narrative vocal tradition. Rather than quoting directly, he evokes its structural and expressive traits, including jangdan rhythmic cycles, vocal ornamentation, and timbral elasticity. These gestures are transformed into virtuosic pianistic textures using extended techniques and extreme dynamic contrasts, suggesting the dramatic dialogue between singer and drummer. The work also resonates with influences such as Alberto Ginastera and Unsuk Chin, situating Kim within a global lineage of composers who engage vernacular traditions through modernist frameworks.
Pansori Fantasy situates Kim’s piano writing within a broader framework of transcultural composition and Korean modernism, expanding the expressive range and technical possibilities of the contemporary piano repertoire.
About Koeun Grace Lee:
Dr. Lee holds DMA in Piano Performance and a Post-Master’s Certificate in Music Theory Pedagogy from UNC Greensboro, with additional degrees from the University of Missouri–Kansas City and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has performed at New Music Chicago Presents, Roosevelt University, and CMS conferences, and appeared at the Korean Composers Festival, Composition in Asia Symposium/Festival, and the TUTTI Festival. Recipient of multiple grants, she is a recording artist featured on WFMT and other stations. An advocate for new music, she promotes works bridging Eastern and Western traditions while maintaining an active teaching and performing career in the U.S.
Session #2: Asian Improv aRts Midwest (Chair: Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena)–Livestreamed
Tatsu Aoki and Kioto Aoki: A Conversation about the Legacy and Continuing Practice of AIRMW with Eric Hung
MAARC Executive Director Eric Hung will have a conversation with AIRMW Executive and Artistic Director Tatsu Aoki and AIRMW General Operations Manager / Program curator / Tsukasa Taiko Leader Kioto Aoki about the legacy of AIRMW and their future plans.
About Tatsu and Kioto Aoki:
Tatsu Aoki is a composer, a performer of traditional and experimental music forms, a filmmaker, and an educator. He was born in 1958 into the Toyoakimoto artisan family, and performing by the age of four. In the early 1970s, Aoki was active in Tokyo’s underground arts movement with experimental arts and music. In 1977, Aoki left Tokyo and is now one of the most in-demand performers of bass, shamisen, and taiko, contributing to more than ninety recording projects and touring internationally over the last 35 years. He is noted for being the longest associated bassist for the late Chicago legend Fred Anderson. Aoki has initiated and managed several programs to advance the understanding of traditional arts and community through the arts, including the annual Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival, the Tsukasa Taiko Legacy, and the Toyoaki Shamisen arts residency projects. The concept of Legacy is very prominent in all of Aoki’s music and projects. He insists on demonstrating the authenticity of the Japanese Legacy using traditional instruments such as shamisen and taiko, especially with newer contemporary applications. He performs throughout the Chicagoland, the Midwest areas, and nationally, the driving point is to instill the importance of Legacy through in-house programs Tsukasa Taiko and Toyoaki Shamisen and his end of year Taiko Legacy production. These and other projects are all components and examples of his drive to establish artist guided community participation as well as projects that have exclusive artist involvement, which raise the bar for quality and awareness of the Japanese cultural arts here in Chicago. He continues to be based in Chicago, working internationally in a wide range of musical genres including Japanese traditional music, experimental, and creative jazz, his collaborative projects ranging from puppetry, neoclassical Japanese dance, and experimental dance films.
Kioto Aoki is the 5th generation of the Toyoakimoto house, an okiya (geisha house) performing arts family from Tokyo with roots dating back to the Edo period. Standing on the professional stage from the age of 7, and studying under father Tatsu Aoki (Toyoaki Sanjuro), she continues the family legacy as musician on taiko and tsuzumi, and using her stage name Toyoaki Chitose (豊秋千東勢) when on shamisen. Working within traditional and experimental contexts as a second generation Japanese American, Aoki sustains this traditional music lineage traversing geographical and cultural boundaries. Kioto’s playing is informed by the Japanese aesthetics of ma and emphasizes the melodic phrasing of space and choreography to challenge common perceptions of percussion as mere rhythm. Her stoic, durational explorations involve performative soundscapes that oscillate between the organic textures of live performance and sonic nuances of cyclical, droning sustain. Aoki maintains a balance of retaining the artistic and aesthetic integrity of traditional Japanese music with a contemporary sensibility that extends beyond the measures of cultural preservation bringing taiko to the contemporary artistic ecologies of music, sound and performance.
Eric Zheng and Kioto Aoki, “Don! Affective Language and Sound in Asian American Performance”
This paper examines the function of onomatopoetic drum syllables (Kuchi shōga) and Japanese colloquialisms in Asian American musical performance, centering on the taiko practice of multidisciplinary artist Kioto Aoki and her trio, comprised of herself, Mai Sugimoto, and Haruhi Kobayashi. Their album, miminari, premiered at the 30th Annual Asian American Jazz Festival in Chicago in November 2025.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, informal interviews, and close listening I argue that these artists use Japanese language to contribute to the experimentalism catalyzed by Chicago avant-garde jazz first developed in the 1960s. In this case, language acts as a conduit for modernist atmospheres that transgress conventional musical grammars (Gallope 2024). These atmospheres demonstrate affective and cultural engagement that index intergenerational memory and diasporic identity.
Beginning with the vocalized strike-word “don,” I trace how language can hold multisensory, historical, and communal resonance simultaneously. Using the concept of “intermusicality” in jazz practices (Monson 1996), I situate miminari within broader frameworks of Afro Asian musical aesthetics.
About Eric Zheng:
Eric Zheng (he/him) is a PhD student in ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan. Prior to Michigan, Eric earned a BM in Saxophone Performance and a BA in Economics from Northwestern University. He then completed an MM in Saxophone Performance at Michigan State University and undertook fellowship at Bard’s U.S.-China Music Institute where he experimented with the saxophone in Chinese music and studied the suona. He is currently interested in avant-garde jazz in Chicago and Asian American performance.
Session #3: Activism I (Chair: Byron Au Yong)–Livestreamed
Hippocrates Cheng: All of US: An Anti-Asian Hate Chamber Opera (Performance and Discussion)
This session begins with a performance of the 30-minute opera, and is followed by discussion. See the schedule for the list of performers.
Synopsis
Yi Xiao Guan and Min-Ji Seondeok, two strangers brought together by defending teenager Emiko Ko-Hime, share a moment and then face leaving and going back to their own lives. Each realizes that they share something with the others that they shouldn’t let go of.
Performance History
All of US (2024), a chamber opera composed by Hippocrates Cheng in collaboration with librettist Maya Kanazawa, was originally commissioned as the winning work by the Allied Solutions Center for the Performing Arts. It celebrated its world premiere in June 2024 in Carmel, Indiana. In May 2026, the opera was featured and performed as a winning work by the Atchley Opera in Fort Worth, Texas. Now, All of USmakes its Illinois debut with a performance on September 24 for the AMPLIFY! Festival 2026 organized by the Music of Asian America Research Center, followed by another performance on September 25 at the Northern Illinois University School of Music.
About Hippocrates Cheng:
Dr. Hippocrates Cheng 鄭靖楠 is a composer, theorist, ethnomusicologist. He is currently an assistant professor of music theory and an affiliated faculty of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University. As a composer, he writes contemporary classical music, new music for Asian instruments, and Jazz. As a researcher, he researches the music of Hong Kong composer Doming Lam, East Asian music, piano rolls and player piano in early Jazz history and Braille music notation.
Recently, collaborating with musicians and scholars, he founded a creative-research initiative East Asian Music in the Contemporary World (EAMCW) initiative to promote new music for East Asian instruments and to provide a dynamic platform where performers, scholars, students, and community members can experience, reflect on, and engage in dialogue about East Asian music in contemporary contexts.
Joyce Kwon, Lecture-Demonstration, “Going Home to the Moon”
What does it mean to make folk music from the future? Joyce discusses reaching back and being present in the future through Jungian thought and native slipstream. She looks at the moon through Korean and Brazilian songs and through the wisdom of the Munduruku. She gushes about Iemanjá, explains why she prefers to call j*zz (mer)folk music, and adopts an other-than-human identity of the cyborg as an Asian American woman. Drawing from a joyful, syncretic faith, Joyce shares art-making as prayer.
About Joyce Kwon:
Joyce Kwon is a singer, songwriter & gayageum player making folk music from the future. Her practice has been built on a series of discipleships under culture bearers and supported by the California Arts Council, Alliance for California Traditional Arts, and UC Berkeley. She holds a degree in jazz performance from the Manhattan School of Music.
Friday, September 25
Session #4: Music Education (Chair: Eric Hung)–Livestreamed
Jonathan Sang-Joon Lee, “Critical Implementation of K-Pop in School Music Education”
Asian populations represent one of the fastest-growing racial groups in North America; however, their musical traditions and learning contexts remain largely underrepresented in school music curricula in both Canada and the United States. This exclusion can contribute to feelings of marginalization among Asian music students, whose cultural identities are rarely reflected in North American music education practices.
The purpose of this presentation is to examine how school music educators can more meaningfully incorporate Asian musical traditions—particularly K-pop—into classroom instruction through the lens of critical multiculturalism. The presenter (a) begins by outlining critical multiculturalism as the theoretical framework guiding the discussion, (b) explores the cultural, social, and industrial contexts of K-pop, with particular attention to the ways gender stereotypes are constructed and negotiated within the genre, and (c) explains potential pedagogical benefits and challenges of integrating K-pop into school music education, including issues of authenticity, representation, and cultural complexity.
By engaging with these perspectives, this session aims to provide practical and reflective strategies for music educators seeking to foster more inclusive and culturally responsive music classrooms. This presentation will be of interest to music educators, musicians, and students who wish to expand their approaches to teaching Asian music and to enhance culturally responsive pedagogy in music education.
About Jonathan Sang-Joon Lee:
Jonathan Sang-Joon Lee is a K-12 music teacher in Vancouver, Canada and a doctoral candidate in music education at Boston University. His research interests encompass cultural diversity, popular music education, and special music education. He has delivered workshops and research presentations at conferences across North America and Europe. As a musician, he has performed music at venues in Canada, USA, Argentina, and his home country, South Korea and released two records as a band leader.
Angela Chong, Tina Huynh and Joyce Kwon, “Three West Coast Asian Americans Bring Their Heritage Music to Rural Midwest Children”
Journey with three Asian American music educator-artists over the past two years (2025-2026) as they create K-2 video-based music lessons with Smithsonian Folkways Music Pathways, featuring music from their respective heritages – Korean American, Taiwanese American, and Vietnamese American – and then meet in person in Oberlin, Ohio to perform selections as part of a Children’s Concert for 300 rural Midwest schoolchildren.
Smithsonian Folkways Music Pathways is the education arm of the Smithsonian Folkways record label, recently launched in January 2025 as “an innovative new teaching tool designed to illuminate lesser-known corners of music history using the sounds and resources available in the label’s iconic catalog” (Folkways press release, Jan. 29, 2025). Tina Huynh (University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA), Joyce Kwon (Los Angeles-based gayageum artist, vocalist, and composer), and Angela Chong (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA) are working with Smithsonian Folkways Music Pathways and many other AANHPI educators/artists on a unit of online lessons designed for teachers, parents, and the general public called, “Hear Us Out! Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and Their Music (K-2nd),” which will be officially released in late 2026.
In November 2025, Oberlin Conservatory invited Joyce, Angela, and Tina to perform a Children’s Concert for local 3rd and 4th grade students. The concert, organized by Jody Kerchner, Professor of Music Education at Oberlin Conservatory, and undergraduate students in her Music and Community Engagement course, included not only the three featured artists performing their Smithsonian music on traditional instruments, but also many interactive elements – such as schoolchildren singing from the audience to Joyce’s gayageum composition, “Little Bird”; undergrads on stage helping to perform and elicit schoolchildren’s improvisation to Tina’s Vietnamese children’s song, “Ra Mà Xem (“Come Out and Look”)”; and schoolchildren selected to play circle games on stage to Angela’s Taiwanese Indigenous folk songs.
The three panelists will share their insights on how bringing Asian songs, instruments, and sounds to children in the rural area impacted the performers, university students, and the elementary students in myriad ways, including understandings of world music education, the intermingling of Asian and Asian American identity, and K-12 music education in rural areas.
About the panelists:
Tina Huynh has enjoyed over 20 years of experience in the private, public, community, and studio settings as a music educator. Tina is Associate Professor of Music Education at the University of Puget Sound, author of Remembering Vietnamese Childhoods: 1931-1975 (2024) and The Vietnamese Children’s Songbook (2023, 2025), creator/co-producer of the documentary film Songs of Little Saigon (2021), and producer of the short documentary The Resting Place (2022). Tina’s scholarly works can be found in JRME, Music & Science, Update, IJECM, and other publications. Tina performs locally as a flutist.
Joyce Kwon is a singer, songwriter & gayageum player making folk music for folks of the diaspora. She’s currently working on a futurist album inspired by the ocean. Her practice has been built on a series of discipleships under culture bearers and supported by the California Arts Council, Alliance for California Traditional Arts, and UC Berkeley. She holds a degree in jazz performance from the Manhattan School of Music.
Angela Chong is a doctorate student at the University of Southern California in Music Teaching and Learning, with minors in History, Musicology, and Piano Performance. She is a 2001-2 Fulbright Scholar and a 2024 Boren Fellow to Hungary, where she studied at the Kodály Institute and researched at many archives. She has an A.B. and J.D. from Harvard. In her first career as a community lawyer, she taught Freire-based arts pedagogy in the Politics Department at Oberlin College. Her current research focuses on musical parenting among racial and ethnic minorities in Hungary, the U.S., and Taiwan.
Session #5: Beyond Assimilation (Chair: Nic Vigilante)–Livestreamed
Naomi Niskala and An-Lin Bardin, “Adaptation and Identity as Asian Americans: Stories through Yiheng Yvonne Wu’s Three Adaptations for Cello and Piano”
Three Adaptations for cello and piano was commissioned in 2021 from Taiwanese American composer Yiheng Yvonne Wu for the Bardin-Niskala Duo. Each movement is based on a folk or children song: one from China, one from Taiwan, and one from Japan; drawing on the heritages of the composer and commissioning performers. Through her writing, Wu emphasizes the uniqueness of each culture, eschewing a pan-Asian feel, while also altering and re-molding each folk song to personify the adaptations and challenges immigrants and those of bi-cultural backgrounds go through on a daily basis. This lecture-recital looks at the various techniques Wu uses to imitate spoken language and traditional instruments, and the texts and original melodies of the folk and children songs. With this piece, Wu is able to draw attention to the various unique cultural values of each of these three Asian countries, while the use of folk song and children song resonates with listeners of all cultures and communities as these often recall our own intimate memories from childhood.
About the Bardin-Niskala Duo:
The Bardin-Niskala Duo (cello/piano) uses music to explore identity, fight racism, promote cultural awareness, and celebrate humanity. Exploring themes common across all humanity – including identity, homeland, loss, mourning, hope, and healing – they commission ALAANA composers to write pieces incorporating the folk and children’s songs of the composer’s particular cultures. The Bardin-Niskala Duo performs on concert series, at universities, K-12 schools, and community centers. Since their founding in 2021 they have commissioned 18 composers and performed in 22 states. The Duo has also been awarded four residencies at Avaloch Farm Music Institute and are recipients of a New Music USA Grant.
Cellist An-Lin Bardin teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and freelances in the greater NYC area. As the cellist of the Vinca Quartet, she performed extensively throughout Europe and the US, including Carnegie’s Weill Hall. She is a laureate of several international quartet competitions, including the Paolo Borciani Quartet Competition in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and the Fischoff, Yellow Springs, and Chesapeake competitions in the United States. She holds a B.S. from Yale University in Geology and Geophysics, and an M.M. from the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Aldo Parisot and played with the Yale Cellos.
Pianist Naomi Niskala is a soloist and chamber musician who has appeared in Europe, North America, Russia, Israel, Thailand, and Japan, with performances broadcast on BBC Radio, Deutschlandradio, RTV Germany, and NPR’s Performance Today. Niskala performed for ten years with Spectrum Concerts Berlin, one of Germany’s leading chamber organizations, and has recorded for NAXOS, Bridge, and Albany labels. Born to Japanese/Finnish-American parents, Niskala holds degrees from the Yale School of Music, Stony Brook University, and the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Claude Frank, Gilbert Kalish, and Patricia Zander. Niskala is Professor of Music at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania.
Chao Tian, “Relationality: Improvisation, Jamming, and Grassroots Diplomacy in From China to Appalachia”
I examine From China to Appalachia, a long-term intercultural music collaboration between Chinese and American musicians, as a site where grassroots diplomatic capacity develops through sustained co-presence. Rather than treating diplomacy as state policy, I argue that workable relations across difference emerge as unintended effects of repeated interaction and that the measure of this process is not the music produced but whether the relational structure between participants has been transformed.
Not all intercultural collaboration achieves this transformation. Cosmetic fusion borrows surface sonic features from another tradition to produce the effect of exchange. It can reproduce existing hierarchies while appearing to transcend them. What distinguishes genuine collaboration is whether participants leave with altered ways of listening, to their own traditions and to each other, rather than simply having performed alongside difference without being changed by it.
In From China to Appalachia, the jam session is the primary mechanism through which this distinction comes into focus. Without centralized authority, leadership emerges situationally, and ensemble coherence depends on shared listening. As musicians negotiate divergent tonal priorities, ornamentation, and assumptions about direction, friction surfaces not as breakdown but as the productive condition through which each tradition’s commitments become legible to the other. Over time, these negotiations gradually redistribute musical authority, reshaping whose priorities guide the ensemble and whose listening sets its direction.
Grassroots diplomacy, in this account, is sustained through this ongoing redistribution: a relational transformation that is neither frictionless nor symmetrical but generative because participants remain responsive to each other across difference.
About Chao Tian:
Chao Tian is a Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology at Boston University. She investigates musical improvisation as a practice connecting intercultural collaboration and relational diplomacy. An alumna of Art Omi, a Strathmore Music Center artist-in-residence, a NextLOOK artist at the University of Maryland, and a Folklife Apprenticeship fellow with the Maryland State Arts Council, she develops this inquiry through Unheard Sounds, which explores artistic transformation among immigrant musicians, and From China to Appalachia, a collaboration with Grammy Award winners Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer examining how Chinese and American musical traditions are mutually reshaped through performance.
Micah Huang and Michele Cheng, “Chasing Shadows: Resurrecting YingXi Shadow Puppetry at the L.A. Hungry Ghost Festival”
“Chasing Shadows: Resurrecting YingXi shadow puppetry at the LA Hungry Ghost Festival” is a 15 minute documentary short detailing the work of co-presenters Micah Huang and Michele Cheng to revitalize the practice of shadow puppetry as a vehicle of cultural memory in and beyond the community of LA chinatown. In the context of pronounced cultural and economic marginalization, the co-presenters adopt a DIY ethos, working collaboratively with community members to actualize a version of traditional shadow-puppet performance (including live music) which is practical, accessible and radically inclusive. The screening will be followed by a short discussion of puppetry as method, as well as the role of underground music values such as DIY and radical inclusivity in building Asian American futures.
About Micah Huang and Michele Cheng:
Micah Huang is a musician and interdisciplinary performance artist whose work explores community, art and ritual through lenses including shamanic practice and underground music. Projects include the Los Angeles Hungry Ghost Festival and Blood on Gold Mountain. Micah has been featured in media outlets including ABC7 Los Angeles, KCRW, Now This News, KPBS, Spectrum 1 News, LA Downtown News, USC Annenberg media and numerous others. Projects have received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, UCLA Chancellor’s Award Initiative, Kellogg Foundation Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Grant, and others. Micah is a PhD candidate at Harvard University.
Michele Cheng is an interdisciplinary composer, multi-instrumentalist, improviser, and puppeteer intertwining music, visuals, and theatre to engage with social issues and cultural identities. She collaborates with artists across cultural practices and builds custom instruments and puppets. She has received commissions, grants, and scholarships from the JACK Quartet, National Sawdust, I Care If You Listen, New Music USA, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her work has been featured at Roulette (US), CCRMA (US), LMCML (Canada), ICMC (Chile), ESPACIOS (Argentina), ISSTA (Ireland), Sonorities (UK), NTCH (Taiwan), and TMAO (Thailand), among others. Michele is a PhD Candidate at Harvard University
Session #6: Asians and Black Creative Music (Chair: Bess Xintong Liu)–Livestreamed
Daniel Lin, Taylor Ho Bynum and Jeffrey Song, “Black Creative Music: Interrogating Categories toward Transcendence”
This session will tease out various tensions around jazz and Black Creative Music pedagogy and practice. We understand this music as an essential spiritual, communal, and human, sonic practice of existence. On that backdrop, we will discuss the dynamics and usefulness of genre and identity (jazz and Asian/American-ness) as categorizations of the dominant culture, and how, eventually, we hope to see a world where neither is relevant. While this kind of musical universalism toes the line of neoliberal multiculturalism and a colorblind “melting pot” narrative, we explore what it means to accept the confines of those categories for what they are now in order to transcend to something better. To do so, we take cues from elder practitioners like Bill Dixon, Bill Cole, and Don Cherry, all of whom understood this music as folk music, or the music of people. Using a lens of “integration versus separation,” we unpack dynamics of free/avant-garde jazz versus “straight-ahead” jazz and what it means to be Asian American playing this music. We will reflect on the already established legacies of the late 1970s-80s Asian American jazz movement and how the community has evolved since then (and where it might go in the future). As a special format session, we will intersperse the intergenerational roundtable style discussion with playing as a trio, to foreground the importance of communal soundmaking.
Taylor Ho Bynum and Jeffrey Song have long histories of lifting up and collaborating with Asian American artists, from co-producing the Boston Asian American Jazz Festivals in the late 1990s to playing with the likes of Tatsu Aoki, Tomas Fujiwara, Fred Ho, Jason Kao Hwang, Francis Wong, and many more. Daniel Lin follows in that lineage.
About the panelists:
Taylor Ho Bynum is a musician, teacher, and writer, with a background including work in composition, performance, interdisciplinary collaboration, production, organizing, and advocacy. His expressionistic playing on cornet and other brass instruments, his expansive vision as composer, and his idiosyncratic improvisational approach have been documented on over twenty recordings as a bandleader and over a hundred as a sideperson. Bynum enjoys playing with friends in collective ensembles like Illegal Crowns (with Tomas Fujiwara, Benoit Delbecq, and Mary Halvorson), Geometry (with Kyoko Kitamura, Tomeka Reid, and Joe Morris), and as a sideperson in Fujiwara’s Triple Double and Shizuko, Reid’s Stringtet and Septet, Jim Hobbs & the Fully Celebrated Orchestra.
Jeffrey Song is a musician, composer, singer, actor, visual artist, and scientist. Primarily a bass guitarist, cellist and singer, he has also performed and recorded on guitar, piano, oud, and kayagum, with credits at various music festivals around the globe and on over a dozen recordings. Alone and with collaborators, Jeff has worked to develop a musical language that is not readily labeled or defined. His collaborations with various artists include Taylor Ho Bynum, Ute Lemper, Cuong Vu, Dave Bryant, Jason Kao Hwang, George E. Lewis, Matt Turner, Leroy Jenkins, Neil Leonard, Bill Lowe, Olivia Block, David Tronzo, Bob Moses, Bruno Fontaine, David Doms, Michael Zerang, Tom Hall, Jane Miller, Joe Daley, Miya Masaoka, Curt Newton, Tatsuya Nakatani, Charlie Kohlhase, Dean Laabs, Ken Field, Francis Wong, and Leni Stern.
Daniel Lin (he/him) is a multi-disciplinary musician, improviser, composer, music director, actor, and memory worker. Daniel is active in jazz and Black Creative Music communities, most recently performing with Bill Cole, Taylor Ho Bynum, Ras Moshe, Warren Smith, Bill Lowe, Tomeka Reid, Alexander Hawkins, Joseph Daley, Althea SullyCole, Lisette Santiago, and Eli Hecht. His practice emphasizes collective improvisation and deep listening, drawing inspiration from the music’s histories of liberation, social justice, and radical organization and solidarities. Daniel recently spent two years at the Dartmouth Libraries as a Digital Library Fellow, where he developed a digital collection of Black Creative Music at Dartmouth and cultivated interests in digital cultural heritage, time-based media preservation and access, and organizational workflows.
Session #7: Activism II (Chair: Nancy Yunhwa Rao)–Partially Livestreamed
Lei X. Ouyang, “Asian American Artists in Action” (Lightning Talk)
Asian American studies and Asian American movements insist on a deep engagement with oneself while sustaining continuous attention to our relationships with the world. How do Asian American and Asian Canadian activist artists’ participation in recent socio-political moments– such as the anti-ICE demonstrations of 2025-2026– connect to broader movements in Asian American and Asian Canadian social, political, and musical activism? In this lightning talk, I examine the direct and indirect actions of artists Treya Lam, Young Park, and Jennifer Weir through an Asian American feminist lens. I consider how their work not only responds to immediate political conditions but also reimagines collective resistance, inviting us to “break through the winter’s chill and melt the ice” (Treya Lam, Sapphire Skies).
About Lei X. Ouyang:
Lei X Ouyang is Associate Professor of Music and Program Coordinator of Asian Studies at Swarthmore College where she co-directs the Chinese Music Ensemble and teaches ethnomusicology courses centering East Asia, Asian America, race and racism, politics, and memory. She previously taught at Skidmore College where she co-founded a social justice program, Intergroup Relations, and she recently co-founded the Tri-College Asian American Studies program with colleagues across three campuses in the greater Philadelphia area. Her book Music as Mao’s Weapon: Remembering the Cultural Revolution was published in 2022 and she was honored to participate in the 2024 Sound Fest at the Wing Luke Museum.
Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena, “(Re)Fusing Cultural Keramaian: Social Activism in Reflexive Improvisations of Balinese American Noise” (Livestreamed)
The Indonesian concept of keramaian (broadly, social boisterousness and active noise) has been only peripherally represented in scholarship on Balinese performing arts. This framework of noise exists in many cosmological events that constitute a quotidian cultural practice in Balinese spaces yet is seldom discussed in studies of performance. Furthermore, keramaian fosters embodied improvisations that are required for the success of a ceremony or community existence. Using autoethnographic inquiries into three Indonesian American arts practices (Balinese experimental duo, ghOstMiSt; Balinese-American solo act, aQarawaQ; Indonesian arts collective, ParasWani Kvlektif), I argue that keramaian and reflexive improvisation are poignant performative agents in international and intracultural social politics that empower Balinese Americans to practice arts without compromise. In this presentation, I look at political and cultural failure in Balinese American arts spaces using Jeremy Wallach’s concepts of (re)fusion to highlight identity politics of noisy Indonesian American socialities and sonicities. In doing so, I hope to introduce a new wave and paradigm of Indonesian American scholarship that centers on performance, ethics, and activism.
About Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena:
Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena is an Indonesian artist-scholar serving as Assistant Professor of Music (Performance and Creativity), where he directs the Balinese Sound Ensemble and teaches courses on Heavy Metal Music, Sounds of Peace and Conflict, and Collective Noise and Movement. He is a founding member of Balinese Experimental duo, ghOstMiSt, and Indonesian Arts collective, ParasWani Kvlektif. Hiranmayena’s academic, performance, and compositional research focuses on the intersections of Cosmology, Indigeneity, Environmental Activism, and Performativity in Balinese Gamelan, Heavy Metal, and Noise. His work constitutes equitable forms of knowledge production in the form of public-facing academic articles and Glocal creative artistic pieces.
Paul Cosme, Kaelyn Howard and Lorelei Harrel, “By Gongs and Songs: Constructing Filipino American Subjectivities through Philippine Traditional Performing Arts” (Livestreamed)
Filipinos have a strong and persistent role in American history from being the first Asians to arrive in the Americas in 1565 to serving key roles in Asian American movements in the last century, yet Filipinos have historically been underrepresented in the traditional performing arts even within the Asian American demographic. At the turn of the century, many Filipino Americans begin learning and performing traditional artforms coming from the Philippines from the art song kundiman to the Indigenous gong cultures from Bangsamoro and the Cordilleras as ways to reclaim their Filipino-ness and make sense of what that label means in the context of the diaspora (Trimillos 1986; Talusan 2022; W. Quintero 2011; D. Quintero 2023).
This panel examines how diasporic Filipinos engage Philippine performing arts traditions to reclaim, negotiate, and amplify their identities as Filipino Americans. The first speaker, Paul Cosme (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa), navigates the history of kulintang, a gong-chime instrument from Southern Philippines, in Hawaiʻi since it first played in the islands in the middle of the twentieth century. His paper illustrates how Hispanicized Filipinos in Hawaiʻi have utilized the kulintang in myriad ways to either re-sound a nationalized Filipino identity or reclaim an imagined and Indigenized precolonial past through engaging these gongs through various institutions such as universities and community groups. The second speaker, Kaelyn Howard (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa), investigates how the Philippine art song, kundiman, mediate and help diasporic Filipinos in constructing a cultural identity through the genre’s performance. Howard explores how and why Filipino American singers, typically trained in the Western canon, choose to program the kundiman repertory, and she delineates how their performance practice and learning of kundiman are distinct from performers from the Philippines and ultimately how diasporic bodies and voices negotiate unique technical priorities of this genre while being shaped by and viewed through the lens of their training in American schools and conservatories. The third speaker, Lorelei Harrel (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa), problematizes multicultural and world music pedagogy in higher education by revealing disproportionate access and resource allotment to Asian American musical traditions particularly those from the Philippines, despite the implementation of world music in American classrooms for the past century. Drawing from university curriculum surveys and her experiences as a practicing music pedagogue in both Hawaʻi and Texas, Harrel argues for a more culturally responsive pedagogy that allows both Filipino educators and students to engage materials that are relevant to their backgrounds inside their own classrooms.
The three papers in this panel explore how Philippine musical artforms are being engaged in the diaspora to reclaim cultural identity through physical embodiment, performances, and in educational settings. While these discussions only scratch the surface of the resurgence of Filipino American performing arts and cover a limited number of genres and locations, it is precisely for this reason why this panel hopes to spark discussion on how Filipino Americans, a historical group in the United States, are coalescing and constructing a unique diasporic identity through the lens and engagement of Philippine traditional music.
About the panelists:
Award-winning Filipino composer/scholar Paul Cosme innovates sound worlds across traditions with artists like New Jersey Symphony, Pulitzer-winning composer Raven Chacón, Kenny Endo, and JACK Quartet. His works are recognized by the Philippine National Commission on Culture and Arts, Asian Composers League, Edward T. Cone Institute at Princeton University, and Beth Morrison Projects in New York. Cosme pursues a PhD in Composition at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa as an East-West Center Fellow. His research involves popular music, gong-chimes, hybridity, and modernities in Asian performing arts, which are presented and published in international conferences and journals like Asian Music. For more information, visit: https://paulcosme.com
Kaelyn Howard is an Afro-Filipino vocalist, music educator, and ethnomusicologist whose work connects performance with cultural heritage. She appeared in productions including Into the Woods, Iolanthe, and performed in chorus with Andrea Bocelli. Her repertoire prioritizes Philippine art song and African American spirituals. A NATS Festival award winner and Orvis Vocal Scholarship Residency recipient, she premiered Dr. Norah Duncan’s arrangement of “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel” with the San José State Symphonic Orchestra. She holds degrees from Riverside City College, San José State University, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in ethnomusicology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Lorelei Harrel is a Filipino American music teacher, singer, actress, dancer, and researcher from Frisco, TX. She is a recent graduate of University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa with her MA in Ethnomusicology. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Music Education from Texas Woman’s University along with a minor in Education and Musical Theatre. Harrel is also a practitioner of Indigenous and Folk Philippine dance and music. She is passionate about World Music in classrooms and bringing more Asian women musician narratives to light.
Saturday, September 26
Session #8: Racial and Identity Politics (Chair: Michael Sy Uy)–Livestreamed
Nic Vigilante, “Happy Lunar New Year and Happy Black History Month, Y’all!”: The Racial Politics of House Music in Gaysian Los Angeles”
House music is Black music. Despite the whitewashing of house and the broader electronic dance music (EDM) scene, “the history of house… is overwhelmingly Black” (Assefa 2022). Nevertheless, house in the contemporary United States occupies an ambiguous position, deployed in a variety of contexts that go far beyond the genre’s origins in queer, Black parties in Chicago. In this paper, I draw on seventeen months of ethnographic research with Los Angeles’ queer Asian American nightlife communities to explore how “Gaysian” nightlife in LA is dependent upon Black aesthetics and infrastructures. I argue that we must resist glossing house as broadly minoritarian rather than specifically rooted in queer Black life; at the same time, however, we should not reduce Asian American engagements with house to “simply” cultural appropriation. Instead, I offer a framing of Gaysian house that roots it in the specific contexts of interracial solidarity work and minoritarian worldmaking in 21st-century Los Angeles, highlighting how these practices engage with rather than move past the genre’s Black histories. I build upon studies of house, Blackness, and queer performativity (Currid 1995, Salkind 2019) alongside existing research on Afro-Asian relationality in music (Powell 2020, Roberts 2016) and on Asianness in EDM (Murthy 2007, Park 2015) to argue that, particularly for those in the scene who are both Black and Asian, Gaysian house facilitates a generative aesthetic opacity and enables queer of color coalition.
About Nic Vigilante:
Nic Vigilante (they/them) is a PhD Candidate in Music & Sound Studies and Don M. Randel Fellow at Cornell University, where they are also affiliated with the Media Studies and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies programs. They teach and publish on topics including ethnographic and digital humanities methods, queer Asian American performance, music and video games, and sonic violence. Nic’s recent and forthcoming publications can be read in Women & Music, The Oxford Handbook of Online Music Cultures, The Journal of Extreme Anthropology, and Liminalities.
Adai Song, “Making Carmen in Chinese EDM Style: From Orientalist Listening to Plugin-Mediated Agency”
In Carmen 2025, I remake Bizet’s “Habanera” into a Mandarin, club-oriented track that sits between citation and refusal: a danceable Chinese EDM adaptation whose sonic “Asianness” is built almost entirely inside the laptop. The piece reframes the familiar exoticism attached to Carmen’s “Habanera” by relocating it into digital production decisions—EDM form (builds, drops, continuous 4-on-the-floor), virtualized East Asian timbres (guzheng, pipa, Peking Opera percussion, janggu), and micro-timbral gestures shaped through MIDI, automation, and sample-library articulation. Rather than treating the use of traditional instruments as a straightforward return to roots, the track foregrounds how contemporary “heritage” can be manufactured, edited, and made culturally legible through plugin interfaces and platform-ready mix aesthetics.
Building on ethnomusicological critiques of world/global music marketing and theories of strategic essentialism, this paper argues that digital tools enable a double movement: they make cultural signifiers cheaper to access and easier to circulate, while also intensifying the expectation that non-Western artists should sound recognizably “traditional.” I connect the compositional process of Carmen 2025, including its digitally made-possible guzheng chromaticism, spatialized percussion, and hybrid orchestration, to the Western institutional frame of “Global Music” categories, where cultural difference is both rewarded and tokenized. By tracing how virtual instruments become proxies for authenticity, I propose “plugin essentialism” as a practical tactic: a temporary embrace of audible markers of Chineseness to enter global listening regimes, paired with deliberate distortion, digitization, and genre sabotage from within. The result is a case study of how Chinese popular music is being re-authored through digital platforms, neither pure preservation nor simple fusion, but a contested, feminist, technologically mediated reimagination. Link to the song: https://ingrv.es/carmen-2025-y4e-t
About Adai Song:
Adai Song is a singer-songwriter, producer, and PhD student in Music at the University of Virginia. Her research examines how digital technologies, software design, and streaming platforms shape contemporary popular music aesthetics and global cultural circulation. As an artist-scholar working across Mandarin pop and electronic music, she combines creative practice with research in sound studies, ethnomusicology, and digital media culture. With over a decade of professional experience in the music industry, she has collaborated with major organizations including Universal Music Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and Tencent Music, working as a singer, songwriter, and early consultant on music AI generation.
Peng Liu, “Rescripting Racialized Vulnerability: Asian American Children and Older Adults in Musical Activism during COVID-19”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian violence in the United States circulated through images of vulnerable bodies—particularly children and older adults. While professional artists such as MC Jin and Jessica Sanchez mobilized music to protest this violence, this paper shifts attention to children and older adults as agents of sonic resistance. Expanding scholarship on Asian American musical activism that centers professional musicians (Shao 2025), I examine how age-coded subjects challenge dominant scripts of passivity and apolitical victimhood. This paper analyzes two contrasting case studies: the all-girl youth punk band The Linda Lindas’ “Racist, Sexist Boy” (2021) and Chinese American older adults’ multilingual “Gai Mou Sou Rap” (2021). Drawing on Samia Hesni’s concept of “social script disruption” (2023), alongside close musical and performance analysis and digital ethnography, I argue that musical performance extends script disruption beyond immediate interpersonal encounters by providing an arena for contesting racialized age scripts and performing alternative social roles. In these two performances, punk and rap offer repertoires of loudness, confrontation, rhythmic authority, and humor that enable the performers to inhabit roles that dominant scripts render improbable. This rescripting occurs through lyrics, timbral aggression, rhythmic insistence, and embodied gestures, recasting subjects positioned as vulnerable as angry girls and authoritative grandmothers. Online comments registering surprise, admiration, and solidarity reveal how audiences respond to these disruptions. By making alternative social roles audible, visible, repeatable, and circulable, these performances demonstrate music’s potential to spotlight dominant scripts, empower others, expand the social imaginary of Asian American childhood and older adulthood, and contribute to broader processes of social script change.
About Peng Liu:
Peng Liu is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Southern Methodist University. Previously, he taught at Truman State University and the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his Ph.D. in musicology. His research focuses on nineteenth-century piano music and performance culture, women musicians, and Asian American music. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Musicology and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. His chapter “Music of Asian Americans” is forthcoming in the edited volume Teaching Global Music History: A Resource Book.
Session #9: Music and Wellbeing (Chair: Tina Huynh)–Livestreamed
Leezel Tanglao, Mark Calaguas, Valter Gueverra, “‘Between Blinks’: Composing Sonic Pathways for Community Care
In brief respites between work shifts, the rueful pangs of text messages left unsent, and interminable evenings when fatigue blurs into silence, the distance separating caregivers from their loved ones can feel insurmountable. Yet during those “blinks,” the suspended moments of longing and reflection, there lies the possibility for connection and renewal. Vltr’s song “Between Blinks” basks in this liminal space with tender honesty: the ache of wanting to be present, the rhythm of absence and return, and the persistent wish to find the words that never quite arrive.
This 60-minute roundtable brings together Valter “Vltr” Guevarra, along with Leezel Tanglao and Mark Calaguas, co-founders of the Filipino American health and media literacy platform Tayo, to discuss how “Between Blinks” unfolded as both an artistic expression and a vehicle for community care. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue bridging art, narrative, and health, this panel explores how creative collaborations across sectors can channel subjective emotion into collective healing, with particular focus on the experiences of Asian diasporic care workers navigating the intertwined crises of pandemic, burnout, and systemic neglect.
The project emerged during Vltr’s participation in Asian PaCIVICS, The Slants Foundation’s artist-accelerator program that uses music to help drive civic engagement and social impact. As a healthcare worker, Vltr conveyed their personal experiences of demanding labor and missed moments with loved ones into song, composing soft, synth-layered vocals that speak intimately to the quiet exhaustion, haunted by the specter of illness and death, carried by so many in the care professions. The track resonates beyond the individual: it mirrors how a community stretched thin between work and family obligations, striving to more than just survive, continues to find ways to show up for one another, even with imperfect words.
At Tayo, co-founders Tanglao and Calaguas recognized how these emotional truths could strengthen their mission. Launched during the early pandemic as a media literacy platform to counter online misinformation in the immigrant diaspora, Tayo has since evolved into a resource hub that combines health education with cultural storytelling. By partnering with Vltr, Tayo expanded its outreach beyond traditional public health messaging, using sound and story to create resonance rather than overwhelm. The partnership became a case study in what happens when artists and community organizations center empathy as both method and outcome.
Panel Focus Areas:
-Music as Public Health Narrative: Tanglao will share how Tayo integrated art into its media strategy, translating health information into accessible, emotionally grounded forms that meet communities where they are – through story, rhythm, and shared experience.
-The Art of Care and Fatigue: Vltr will reflect on the songwriting and production process, describing how overlapping roles as caregiver and creator shaped the sonic palette of “Between Blinks.” Through refrains of absence, apology, and presence, the song invites listeners to consider what “care” sounds like in longing and real time.
-Collective Agency Through Collaboration: Calaguas will connect these artistic and grassroots organizational efforts to larger movements in the Asian American media and civic engagement landscape, situating the project within broader frameworks addressing visibility, public policy, and cultural equity.
The roundtable itself will blend listening and dialogue. After playing a short excerpt from “Between Blinks,” speakers will engage in guided conversation, exploring how cross-sectoral partnerships can reinforce trust and transform despair into resilience. Attendees will learn concrete strategies for designing mutli-stakeholder projects that fuse creativity, health literacy, and community storytelling, including how to navigate power dynamics, funding models, and shared authorship.
Ultimately, the session reveals that the “time we can’t seem to find” is less about scarcity and more about reimagining togetherness. When organizations and artists collaborate, they potentially expand the emotional vocabulary through which communities process healing. In this way, “Between Blinks” is not simply a song but an invitation—to pause, listen, and recognize one another’s humanity within the rush of everyday precarity in this current era of polycrisis.
By the end of the session, participants will leave with a template for collaboration that embodies both the practical and poetic: to create art to articulate what data alone cannot, and foster community trust to amplify what art begins.
About the panelists:
Valter Guevarra or “Vltr” is an indie songwriter, singer, and healthcare worker whose music fuses sonic experimentation with acts of care. A participant in Asian PaCIVICS 2025 through The Slants Foundation, they explore how creativity transforms exhaustion into empathy. Their song “Between Blinks,” created in collaboration with Tayo, channels the emotional landscape of caregiving, time scarcity, and quiet resilience. Vltr’s projects invite audiences into a shared exploration of rest, renewal, and community solidarity through sound.
Leezel Tanglao is co-founder of Tayo and project director. She is a journalist committed to bridging technology, media, and trust. Formerly with the Associated Press, CBS News, and HuffPost, she designs platforms that make information accessible and human. Leezel leads Tayo’s efforts to integrate data, storytelling, and cultural context for diasporic audiences seeking clarity for complex health and civic issues. Her partnerships with artists like Vltr exemplify Tayo’s mission to connect digital innovation with community compassion.
Mark Calaguas is co-founder and legal counsel for Tayo, a diasporic data hub that harnesses narrative change to foster information literacy skills on an intergenerational level through multimedia content creation, community-based participatory research, and in-person activations. A Midwest-based attorney, cultural steward, and responsible tech advocate, Mark is board chair of the Alliance of Filipinos for Immigrant Rights and Empowerment (AFIRE) in Chicago and was a 2025 member of the Michigan Central x Newlab Art + Technology Creative Residency, an experiential platform for artists, researchers, and makers to explore critical questions, develop transformative projects, and cultivate sustainable practices within Detroit’s socio-technological landscape.
Session #10: Black-Filipinx Intimacies (Chair: Paul Cosme)–Livestreamed
Elaine Andres, Mark Redondo Villegas, Melvin Villaver, “Black-Filipinx Encounters and the Limits of Identification and Solidarity”
Foregrounding music and performance as central sites where place, space, and belonging are produced, this panel conceives of Black and Filipinx affinity as contingent, uneven, and sometimes contradictory—emerging through practices of musical affiliation, collaboration, and reception. Across the papers, music operates as both aesthetic expression and coalitional practice that both creates and unsettles categories of race, gender, sexuality, genre, and geography. Music is thus understood as both an expression and precondition for Black and Filipinx intimacy: a way of organizing relations that are at once sonic, spatial, and visual, enabling new forms of encounter while exposing and working on the limits of identification and solidarity.
Elaine Kathryn Andres examines the jeepney sound system project of Afro Filipinx artist, Toro y Moi (Chaz Bear). Focusing on Bear’s audiovisual album, Mahal (2022) and a series of pop-up listening parties centered around a restored and customized jeepney that took place throughout Northern California’s Bay Area, Andres argues that this jeepney sound system materialized Filipinx histories of war, labor, and migration while simultaneously functioning as a site of musical experimentation and intimate gathering. These mobile performances and performances of mobility staged the flows of U.S. popular music alongside the afterlives of U.S. empire, revealing how Afro Filipinx musical life is continuously imagined through transits and adaptations.
Mark Villegas theorizes the figure of the “geek.” First, he observes Filipino American idolization of the hip hop organization the Universal Zulu Nation and its figurehead, the late Afrika Bambaataa. Despite the UZN’s out-of-this-world displays and ideologies, many (mainly Gen X) Filipino American hip hop leaders turned to this group as a cultural proxy for a nebulous or absent Filipinoness. Even with the public knowledge of Bambaataa’s criminal sexual abuse, some leaders remain “geeked” over his legacy. Next, continuing the “geek” motif’s racialized and gendered affinities, Villegas examines the rise of Blerd (Black nerd) culture. The “Black otaku” (Japanese obsession) embodies the Blerd charisma, with rapper Megan Thee Stallion currently Blerds’ most enthusiastic proponent. These parallel and cross-racial “geek” modes of thinking, Villegas shows, reveal the liberatory but limited desire for the Other.
Melvin Earl Villaver Jr. examines Afro Asian musical collaboration as a form of diasporic solidarity and epistemological exchange. Focusing on Hip Hop and contemporary popular music, Villaver theorizes sound as an archive of shared struggle and creative possibility between Black and Asian communities. Drawing from examples such as Silk Sonic and Filipino American participation in West Coast Hip Hop scenes, his work interrogates how sonic practices encode histories of colonialism, migration, and racialization while also imagining new forms of affiliation. Situating Hip Hop as a technoscientific art form, Villaver emphasizes the role of production, performance, and cultural context in shaping authorship and authenticity in an era increasingly defined by digital mediation.
Collectively, the panel argues that music and sound organize cross-racial relations by producing spaces of encounter, shaping affective attachments, and mediating the conditions under which affinities emerge. In doing so, it insists upon Afro Asian relationality as an ongoing process of negotiation that is not politically stable; but rather one that is continually composed through performance and the shifting geographies of diaspora and empire.
About the panelists:
Elaine Kathryn Andres is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at San Diego State University. Her research and teaching engage music and performance studies, transnational American studies, critical geography, and popular cultures of U.S. empire. In addition to her scholarship, she is a member of the Reimagine Collective, where she provides research and narrative strategy to organizations building power for working-class people of color. She earned her Ph.D. in Culture and Theory from UC Irvine and her B.A. in Rhetoric with honors from UC Berkeley.
Mark Villegas is an associate professor of American Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. His book, Manifest Technique: Hip Hop, Empire, and Visionary Filipino American Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2021), examines Filipino Americans’ decades-long commitment to crafting, worldmaking, and collaborating in hip hop culture. His new project, tentatively titled “Geek Hop: Study, Science, and Orientalism in Hip Hop Culture,” observes hip hop’s “geeky” elements reflected in comic book culture, martial arts, anime, and science fiction.
Melvin Earl Villaver Jr. is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Folsom Lake College in Sacramento and a scholar of music, race, and culture. His research focuses on Afro-Asian musical collaboration, Hip Hop as a technoscientific art form, and sound as a site of diasporic knowledge production. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University and holds a B.A. in American Studies and Ethnicity with a minor in Music Industry from the University of Southern California. Dr. Villaver’s work bridges scholarship and creative practice, drawing from his background as a recording artist.
Session #11: Creating Music Today (Chair: Nick Hwang)–Livestreamed
Ky Nam Nguyen, “Ky Nam Nguyen’s So That Adventuring the Four Oceans Is Worthwhile for solo organ: A Vietnamese Woman’s Reimagining of “A Man’s Will”
In this presentation, I want to present the compositional techniques and conceptual framework of my composition for solo organ, So That Adventuring the Four Oceans is Worthwhile (Cho phỉ sức vẫy vùng trong bốn bể). The recording of the work was performed by Adam Ravain and featured on the album ANONYMOUS VEIL, produced by Navona Records in collaboration with the Society of Composers, Inc. (SCI). This album is the result of an anonymous call-for-recordings.
This composition is inspired by A Man’s Will (Chí Làm Trai) by Nguyễn Công Trứ (1778–1857), a Vietnamese poet, scholar, and military general known for his defiance of the rigid Confucian society and his pursuit of freedom. The poem was originally composed by a man who encouraged other men to withstand hardship and pursue their ambitions “so that adventuring the four oceans is worthwhile.” Centuries later, a Vietnamese woman like me can also pursue my music dream so far away from home. However, my privilege and the challenges that come with it do not make me blind to the sexism that is still haunting my homeland, and I know firsthand many Vietnamese women who bravely go through extraordinary sufferings to be free from the old confinements. Therefore, as I composed this work, I hope that my listeners—especially young women who may be doubting their path among the wide “four oceans” of the world—could also believe a little more in their ability to venture and claim their own space.
About Ky Nam Nguyen:
Ky Nam Nguyen (b. 1996) is a Vietnamese composer whose work bridges her cultural heritage with Western classical and contemporary musical techniques. Her music has been performed and conducted by internationally acclaimed artists, including Ian Pace, Liliya Ugay, Julia Davids, Robert Kyr, the Popebama Duo, and many more. She earned her Doctor of Music in Composition and Music Theory from Florida State University in 2025 and is currently based in Chicago, Illinois.
gordon fung, “from musicircus to mediacircus”
In this presentation, gordon fung will discuss his artistic practice.
About gordon fung:
gordon fung (b. 1988, San Francisco, CA; lives in Chicago, IL) is a transdisciplinary artist-curator who works with large-scale curatorial/collaborative practices, experimental audiovisual performances, new media installations, noise music, experimental film/video, media archaeology, participatory works, and happenings.
Expanding the traditional caretaking role of the curator, he applies stewardship to artworks, artists, history, culture, and the community at large to ensure constructive dialogue between them. Recognizing the cultural significance of media and technology, his curations bring equilibrium to art scenes where media arts are underrepresented. Serving as a mediator and facilitator, he builds a heteroglossic bridge to foster a more supportive environment that elevates both institutions and independent DIY scenes.
Inspired by the unique Chicago video/media arts lineage and collectivity in Fluxus, gordon forms and directs the experimental time-based arts collective //sense to showcase large-scale experimental community theater performances, exhibitions, and screenings. Counteracting the marginalization of experimental time-based arts, he curates and fosters a collaborative common ground for sound, video, performance, and media artists to create gesamtkunstwerk through synergy. By democratizing media tools, he empowers and mobilizes the community to rectify media injustice imposed by corporations.
As a firm believer in collectivism, his large-scale curation cultivates two maxims: “making good communities better” and “finding arts in all things.” Referencing Fluxus and happenings, he creates brave spaces for participants to unleash their imagination in artmaking through deskilling and unlearning.
gordon has presented experimental community theaters at the International Museum of Surgical Science (2024), No Nation Art Lab (2023), Comfort Station (2023), and MacLean Ballroom (2023). His curated exhibitions include: (re)understanding media: extension of agency in the global village (Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition 2024 in Austria), prismatic (re)ality (2024), and //show what you can (2023). He launches neomediapolis, an experimental and community space in Chicago, to support video, media, and performance arts.
Virtual Sessions (all sessions are at 7pm ET / 4pm PT)
Date
July 8
August 12
September 9
October 21
November 11
Session
Tina Huynh, “Songs of Little Saigon” (moderator: Eric Hung)
Chiara Cox, “Belonging: Asian American Perspectives in the Opera Industry” (moderator: Ivy Martin-Zhou)
Creating Cross-Cultural Belonging through Music (moderator: Allan Zheng)
Yiqi Guo, “Transnational Musical Exchange and Community Building through Pe̍h-ōe-jī “
Zechary Phouthavong, “Constructing Lao American Identity Through Music and Performance at Lao New Year Festivals Across the United States”
Christine Kaford, “Between Two Stages: Vietnamese American Identity, Music, and the Quiet Journey Toward Nursing Education”
Asian American Collegiate A Cappella
C. Shen Yuan, “Community Making and Creative Expression in East/Southeast Asian-Interest Collegiate A Cappella Groups”
Interview with Elizabeth Ipe, Music Director of Anokha, University of Maryland’s all-gender South Asian American A Cappella