The Role of Civil Brass Bands in Chilean Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century
RCH/003, Ron Cooke Hub, Campus East, University of York (Map)
Event details
This lecture presents findings from an ongoing Fondecyt (Fondo Nacional de Desarollo Científico y Tecnológico) research project on brass bands and social movements in Chile, examining how collective sound, performance, and street-based musical practices have articulated forms of political agency during the twenty-first century. After outlining the historical emergence of activist brass bands within Chilean urban cultures, the talk introduces four case studies developed in recent publications. These include the Carnival Mil Tambores in Valparaíso as a landmark of citizen-led artistic activism; the professional trajectories of La Bandalismo and Banda Conmoción, which have redefined brass bands as vehicles of popular resistance; the role of brass ensembles in commemorations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 coup, where sound and performance functioned as spaces of collective memory and repair; and the embodied coalition between Guerrilla Marika and La Banda Exuberante, whose queer-Andean street interventions challenge normative regimes of gender, sexuality, and class.
Together, these cases reveal how brass-based practices transform public space into a site of memory, activism, and creativity.
About the speaker
Dr Ricardo Álvarez
Dr Ricardo Álvarez holds a PhD and an MA in Music from the University of York (UK), where he was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre (2016–2017). He has presented his research at international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. He is currently Senior Lecturer at the Instituto de Música of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile) and is developing a three-year research project funded by the Chilean government on the participation of brass bands from Valparaíso and Santiago in social movements in Chile during the last decade.