Faculty Profile for Dr. Ludim R Pedroza

Biography Section

Biography and Education

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—musics long excluded by the idealisms of the music academy. 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 (genre aficionados) reformulate these acoustic scenes as irreducible auditory scenes—as composite tone color mosaics, in the words of Olly Wilson (1937-2018). Ludim’s work goes on to critique the scientific discourses we project onto percussiveness and timbral heterogeneity, to identify how musicians and music scientists bolster dualities that are ripe for scrutiny (e.g. music vs. noise, human vs. nature), and to propose ethical pathways at the junctions between the arts and the sciences.

Ludim teaches sections of the post-classic-era undergraduate music history courses, as well as graduate courses in the music and aesthetics of the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States.

Research Interests

History of music institutions in the Americas; history of scientific discourse in music; philosophy of science; sound studies and ecomusicology.