Event Detail

Mexican American composer Alida Vázquez Ayala (1930–2016) was an essential figure in the narratives of women pioneers in electronic music and a feminist who actively worked towards achieving spaces of equity for women composers. Still, her life story and work are virtually unknown. This conference intends to celebrate Vázquez’s legacy by hosting key figures in her life – friends, mentors, colleagues, and family, many of whom will meet for the first time in this event— and by offering performances of her work for the first time in decades. The concert will feature David Aguila, Kyle Blair, Ryan Beard,  Alvaro G. Díaz Rodriguez, Mariana Flores Bucio, Alexander Ishov, Ellen Hindson, Myra Hinrichs, Batya MacAdam-Somer, David Savage, Grace Talaski, Min-Seok Peter Ko, and Ilana Waniuk. 

This conference will be a space to critically engage with fundamental topics related to women in the arts during the 20th Century, to feminism, in particular Chicana/Latina feminism, and others such as migration and identity, situated in between the context Vázquez grew up in, in Mexico, and the context she spent most of her life in, in New York City. 

Featured events 
Friday, May 5th: 
2:00 p.m.  Round Table Discussion, Experimental Theater
5:00 p.m.  Concert, Conrad Prebys Concert Hall

Saturday, May 6th: 
11:00 a.m.  Ellie Hisama Keynote Address, Experimental Theater
2:00 p.m. Graduate Student Research Workshop, Experimental Theater

ABOUT THE ELLIE M. HISAMA: 

Ellie M. Hisama is Dean of the Faculty of Music and Professor of Music at the University of Toronto. She previously taught at Columbia University as a member of the Theory and Historical Musicology areas. Her research and teaching have addressed issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, the social and political dimensions of music, and public engagement. She is the author of Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon, which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and is co-editor of the volumes Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-century American Music and Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies.

She received a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; a Tsunoda Ryusaku Senior Fellowship, Waseda University (Tokyo); and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship. In 2022, she delivered the American Musicological Society Women and Gender Endowed Lecture, “‘We Have to Reimagine’: Centering Women/Gender/Sexuality in Music Studies.” She has taught at many institutions including Brooklyn College, the City University of New York's Graduate Center, Connecticut College, and Harvard University. She was nominated twice by Columbia College's Academic Awards Committee for the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching, and served as Director of the Institute for Studies in American Music [now the Hitchcock Institute] at Brooklyn College.

As an academic leader, she engages with issues of structural racism and gender and racial justice. At Columbia University, she was a Provost Leadership Fellow and an inaugural recipient of the Provost’s Faculty Mentoring Award. With composer Zosha Di Castri, she directed the symposium Unsung Stories: Women at Columbia’s Computer Music Center and coproduced its podcast series. She is Founding Director of For the Daughters of Harlem: Working in Sound, an initiative that brings students of color from public schools to the university to create, record, and reflect upon their work in sound. She continues this project in Toronto with Future Sound 6ix, which invites gender nonconforming and female-identifying students to work at the University of Toronto’s Electronic Music Studio.