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Fernando Rios
Visiting Assistant Professor, Ethnomusicology
Musicology & Ethnomusicology Division
B.A., MacMurray College (Psychology); M.M., Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (Music History and Classical Guitar Pedagogy); Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Ethnomusicology).
Fernando Rios is Visiting Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland. He specializes in Latin American music, with a focus on the Andean region. Dr. Rios's dissertation won the Nicholas Temperley Award for Excellence in a Dissertation in Musicology, a biennial prize for ethnomusicologists and historical musicologists. For this project, he interviewed over 250 individuals during 23 months of fieldwork in Bolivia, Argentina and France, and conducted extensive archival research at La Paz's Congressional Library where he collected data from Bolivian newspaper articles published between 1936 and 1985. The dissertation focuses on urban popular music styles which prominently reference rural Andean indigenous or mestizo musical traditions. A major goal of the dissertation is to elucidate how urban La Paz musical trends and performance practices articulated with Bolivian nation-building projects and international artistic movements (e.g., Chilean Nueva Canción).
Theoretical and topical interests of his include music and political movements (especially nationalism), folkloric representations and resignification processes (e.g., how Andean mestizo traditions have been reinvented as emblems of indigeneity), the relationship between musical folklorization and modernist-capitalist cosmopolitanism, processual commonalities that cut across conventional "popular" and "folkloric" music categories, cultural appropriation discourses as national boundary maintenance practices, musical exoticism and the enactment and perpetuation of racial and ethnic stereotypes, and socially progressive artistic movements and the contradictory values that frequently underpin them.
He has published articles in Ethnomusicology ("Bolero Trios, Mestizo Panpipe Ensembles and Bolivia's 1952 Revolution: Urban La Paz Musicians and the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement") and Latin American Music Review ("La Flûte Indienne: The Early History of Andean Folkloric-Popular Music in France and its Impact on Nueva Canción") and has an article which will appear in Ethnomusicology Forum ("The Andean Conjunto, Bolivian Sikureada and the Folkloric Musical Representation Continuum" [forthcoming 2012]). Currently, he is revising the dissertation into a book manuscript and completing an article titled "Bolivian or Argentine Cultural Patrimony?: Andean Folkloric Music, National Boundaries and the Argentinísima Controversy" (planned submission to a peer-reviewed journal in November 2011).
Dr. Rios previously taught at Vassar College, Miami University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At the University of Maryland, he teaches the undergraduate course "The Impact of Music on Life" (MUET 210), the upper-level undergraduate and graduate course "Music of Mexico and the Andes" (MUET 438m) and the graduate seminars "Field Methods in Ethnomusicology I" (MUET 660), "Field Methods in Ethnomusicology II" (MUET 661) and "The Anthropology of Music" (MUET 650).
