Professor Ken Ueno delivered the keynote address at Stanford’s Graduate Music Symposium on May 17, 2025. In his talk, Ueno examined the limits of musical representation when tools like notation, genre, and pedagogy are shaped by histories of exclusion. Arguing that representation in music must be understood as an epistemological and corporeal struggle, Ueno draws on his person-specific compositional practice to propose alternative frameworks rooted in bodily knowledge and sonic particularity.
The keynote reflects themes from Ueno’s recent publications, including Reclaiming the Aura: B.B. King and the Limits of Notation and his co-edited volume East Asian Voices of Resistance Against Racism in Music (Ethics Press). As a case study, he discusses his work On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis, which integrates extended vocal techniques and a childhood recording to create a recursive, intertemporal counter-narrative to the abstraction of Western classical forms.
Ueno critiques dominant pedagogies that enforce what he terms “corseting”—a neocolonial disciplining of non-Western artists—and instead calls for practices that center what dominant culture has deemed failed, marginal, or inaudible. His keynote offers a vision of music not just as representation, but as a site of liberation. Click here for more information.