Faculty Profiles

Ludim Pedroza is Associate Professor of Musicology in the School of Music at Texas State University, San Marcos. Ludim studies the crossroads between music and various forms of Western idealism. Their article “Merengue Meets the Symphony Orchestra” (American Music, 2014) investigates the place of Latin American dance genres in the Progressivist idealism of the Los Angeles Hollywood Bowl. Their pieces on El Sistema examine the history of Venezuela’s system of orchestral education and its parallel platforms with the Romantic Idealism of the U.S. music academy [“Music as Life-Saving Project,” Symposium, 2014; “Of Orchestras, Mythos, and the Idealization of Symphonic Practice,” Latin American Music Review, 2015]. “Music as Communitas” (JMR, 2010) traces the historical formation of the concept of the musical work to Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann’s individual brands of Romantic Idealism.

At present, Ludim investigates the words and metaphors musicians and scholars invest on the experience of musics rich in percussiveness. Aiming at expanding our understanding of how the American music academy conceptualizes such musics, Ludim continues to study the structural parameters that keep these musics at the margins of mainstream socio-academic structures (i.e. programs, textbooks, fundamental concepts, and so on). In their presentation “Of Pantofonía, Psychology of Music, and The Heterogenous Sound Ideal” (AMS 2022), Ludim argued that many Afro-Caribbean musics epitomize textures in which plurality of timbre is a pivotal aesthetic result. Musicians build this pantofonía with a broad spectrum of sound—piano, strings, winds, brass, voices, skins, woods, metals, shouting, clustering, and more. Salsa lore documents metaphors—masacote, stew, washing machine—suggestive of how salsómanes (salsa genre aficionados) reformulate these acoustic scenes as irreducible auditory scenes—as composite tone color mosaics, in the words of composer and musicologist Olly Wilson (1937-2018). Ludim’s work continues to examine the scientific discourses the academy projects onto percussiveness and timbral heterogeneity, as well as the creations of music practitioners, consumers, and scientists that both bolster and challenge seemingly self-evident dualities (e.g. music vs. noise, human vs. nature).

Ludim teaches graduate courses in the music and aesthetics of the Caribbean and Mexico; in historical and contemporary disciplinary frameworks in musicology; and the post-classic-era installment of the music history undergraduate sequence.