Jairo Moreno is a Professor of Music, Member of the Graduate Faculty, Department of Anthropology, Faculty Associate in the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLALS), and member of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania, having previously taught at Duke and N.Y.U. His work addresses fundamental questions of listening and sound: How do sound—musical and otherwise—and aurality both make possible and trouble historically- and geographically-specific forms of subjectivity, objectivity, and personhood? How do these forms assemble in the production of listening communities for whom relations to sound constitute a condition of possibility for aesthetic, epistemic, and political practices? He explores these questions in three areas and across the music subdisciplines of history, theory, and ethnomusicology: (i) History of music theory in the Western European tradition (C. 16-19); (ii) Latin American Studies; (iii) Sound Studies. His work reflects an interest in textual and non-textual archives and in synthesizing anthropological, historical, and critical-speculative concerns. Professionally, then, he is a theorist committed to a conjunctural practice of music studies and sound studies. This means that avoiding predetermining the endless articulations of aurality, music, and the sonic, or even what these spheres are. This broad perspective emerges from a double conviction: first, that the spheres he studies—aurality, music, sound—and their multiple entanglements harbor ideas, concepts, and principles inseparable from their practical existence and, second, that no adequate understanding of these spheres is possible without reflection on how their entanglements may congeal as aesthetic, affective, economic, material, political, and social realities throughout time and in space. Working under the rubric of “Theory” at UPenn, his efforts towards reimagining a heterogeneous practice of Music and Sound Studies are articulated in the UPenn Music Department website.
His most recent book, Sounding Latin America, Hearing the Americas (U. of Chicago Press, 2023), is an archival, critical, and ethnographic study of music’s precarious share in political practices during late capitalism. His work in music theory addresses the production of knowledge of music and the sonic in modernity from a historic-speculative perspective. He has written a major study of the history of listening in early modern and modern music theory and analysis, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Indiana University Press, 2004). He also writes at the intersection of aurality, the politics of aesthesis, and Latin-American popular music in the U.S during the long 20th century. His current project, Aurality, Midwifery, and Forms of Life: The Praxis and Poetics of Ontological Singularity in Three South American Communities, studies sonic and listening practices among midwives in three field sites: Indigenous Pankararu (Brejo dos Padres, Pernambuco, Brazil), Cais do Parto, a feminist health care ONG (Olinda, Pernambuco, Brazil) and Afro-Colombian communities (Buenaventura, Valle del Cauca, Colombia). This work is multimodal, comparative, and trained on ontological questions emerging from sonic entanglements in ante-natal sound. Earlier concerns with epistemics and representation have shifted to a current preoccupation with ontology and relationality.
Awards include the Society for American Music 2005 Irving Lowens Article Award for Best Article (“Bauzá-Gillespie-Latin Jazz”), Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities (Yale), ACLS Fellowship (2009-2010), and National Humanities Center Fellowship (2012-2013). He received the David and Janet Brooks Distinguished Teaching Award (Duke University) and the Golden Dozen Teaching Award (New York University). He has advised and currently advises doctoral projects across music and sound studies (musicology, music theory, sound studies, and ethnomusicology). A former professional musician, he was bassist in five Grammy Award nominated recordings with the late Latin and Jazz percussionist Ray Barretto (Blue Note, EMI-France, Concord, Fania labels – 1989-1997), with whom he also performed with musicians such as Stanley Turrentine, David “Fathead” Newman, Arturo Sandoval, and Chick Corea, among many others. He appeared in numerous other recordings and performed chamber music with guitarist David Starobin and the Ciompi String Quartet.