Department of Music Honored to Welcome Ana María Ochoa for 2025 Bloch Lectures

Ana María Ochoa

Ana María Ochoa

October 18, 2024

During the spring semester of 2025, the Department of Music will host a series of five public lectures by eminent professor Ana María Ochoa of Tulane University’s Newcomb Department of Music, who will be visiting as the Ernest Bloch Professor of Music in residency at UC Berkeley.  

Ana María Ochoa is a professor in the Newcomb Department of Music, the Department of Communication and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University. Her work is on histories of listening and the decolonial, on sound studies and climate change, and on the relationship between the creative industries, the literary and the sonic in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her current projects explore the bioacoustics of life and death in colonial histories of the Americas.

During her residency, Professor Ochoa will offer a lecture series titled “Sonic Extractivisms: Historiographies of Music and Sound in Times of Climate Change.” The lectures will explore an anthropogenic history of sound during the first half of the twentieth century (up to the 1960s), a period of intense imperial expansion of the United States in Latin America and the Caribbean. Dates and titles for the lectures are listed below. All lectures will take place in Wu Performance Hall (Morrison 125) at 4:30pm.

February 7 – Anthropogenic sounds and ethnomusicological histories
February 21 –The United Fruit Company’s sonic investments
March 14 – Rethinking the genealogies of ambient sound
April 11 – Myth, song and indigenous film in northern Colombia
April 25 – Perspectivism’s auditory history

“Professor Ochoa’s groundbreaking work Aurality signaled a seismic shift in the terms of debate around the coloniality of knowledge production, place of archive, and critique of anthrocene in the field of ethnomusicology,” says Marié Abe, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music. “I am looking forward to not only the robust intellectual engagements her residency will bring to the Department of Music, but also the interdisciplinary conversations her presence will foster across campus.”

Professor Ochoa’s groundbreaking work Aurality signaled a seismic shift in the terms of debate around the coloniality of knowledge production, place of archive, and critique of anthrocene in the field of ethnomusicology...I am looking forward to not only the robust intellectual engagements her residency will bring to the Department of Music, but also the interdisciplinary conversations her presence will foster across campus.
Marié Abe, Associate Professor, Ethnomusicology
Professor Ochoa's writing has proven extremely influential in the field, including her title "Aurality", from Duke University Press.

Professor Ochoa has been a Distinguished Greenleaf Scholar in Residence at Tulane University (2016) and a Guggenheim Fellow (2007-2008). She has served on the advisory boards of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Her book, Aurality, Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded the Alan Merriam Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology. 

She is also the author of Músicas locales en tiempos de globalización (Buenos Aires: Norma 2003) and Entre los Deseos y los Derechos: Un Ensayo Crítico sobre Políticas Culturales (Bogotá: Ministerio de cultura, 2003) and numerous articles in Spanish and English. Her book La Vida de los Sonidos is forthcoming, published by Mimesis Ediciones in Chile. 

Reflecting Professor Ochoa’s wide-reaching impact, her visit is highly anticipated by scholars from multiple departments and programs. 

Associate Professor Beth Piatote, who studies Native American and Indigenous literature and history, arts, and laws, remarks: "the Bloch lecture series is a wonderful opportunity for the Berkeley community to engage the work of this renowned scholar, as she traces the development of sound technology across the 20th century, including the rise of Indigenous film and music." Professor Piatote has organized a talk event with Professor Ochoa as part of the Loft Hour, a monthly event hosted by the Arts Research Center on Thursday February 13, 2025. 

Reflecting on the importance of Ochoa’s work, Roshanak Kheshti, Associate Professor in Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, said "Ana María Ochoa's work is a masterful compendium in the aural as object, as method, and as analytic; it is a recital in which an anthropological musicologist plays an instrument called history." 

The Ernest Bloch Lectures were established at the University of California in 1962 in order to bring distinguished figures in music to the Berkeley campus from time to time. Made possible by the Jacob and Rosa Stern Musical Fund, the lectures were founded in memory of Ernest Bloch (1880–1959), the first beneficiary of the Stern Fund and Professor of Music at Berkeley from 1940 to 1952.

To stay informed about these lectures, be sure to join the mailing list for Berkeley’s Department of Music. These are certain to be popular events, and RSVP links will be made available in the coming months. For any questions on the lectures or media inquiries, please contact Marié Abe at marie.abe@berkeley.edu.