Title: “Music, Representation, and the Politics of the Singular”

Abstract: What are the limits of musical representation when the tools of transmission—notation, pedagogy, genre—are bound to histories of exclusion? In this keynote, I argue that the politics of representation in music must be reframed not as symbolic substitution, but as epistemological and corporeal struggle. Drawing from my practice of person-specific composition, I propose that representation can be reimagined through the material and embodied realities of specific performers, rather than idealized types.

My 2008 work On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis serves as a case study. In it, I analyze my own extended vocalizations—overtone singing, throat singing, and other subjugated techniques—extracting harmonic and structural data as the scaffolding for the piece. The work opens with a childhood recording of my voice played on a boombox, enacting a recursive self-portrait and an intertemporal counter-narrative to the abstraction of Western classical forms.

Alongside compositional insights, I draw from my critical writing, including Reclaiming the Aura: B.B. King and the Limits of Notation and Towards the Un-Corseting of Non-Western Bodies, to examine how dominant pedagogies enforce what I term “corseting”: a neocolonial disciplining of non-Western artists into the rigid aesthetics of Western music. Such systems operate through what George Lewis calls “exnomination”—the invisibilization of whiteness as a positionality—and are sustained by what Boaventura de Sousa Santos critiques as the Epistemology of the North.

By engaging alternate frames from Halberstam’s Low Theory and the Epistemologies of the South, I call for practices that resist corseting and instead valorize what dominant culture deems failed, marginal, or inaudible. This is not simply a critique—it is a composition of new pathways, rooted in bodily knowledge, personal history, and sonic particularity.

In this way, I offer a vision of musical representation as a site not just of depiction, but of liberation.
 

Ken Ueno is a composer, performer, sound artist, and scholar. Leading performers and ensembles around the world have championed his music. Ken’s piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, Shiroi Ishi, was featured in their repertoire for over ten years, with performances at such venues as Queen Elizabeth Hall in England, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and was aired on Italian national radio, RAI 3. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by Eighth Blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. A portrait concert of Ken’s was featured on MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011. As a vocalist, Ueno is known for his bespoke extended techniques and has performed his vocal concerto with major orchestras such as the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Warsaw Philharmonic, and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra. He has collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Du Yun, and Tyshawn Sorey, among others, and maintains ongoing projects with artists like Kung Chi Shing, Viola Yip, Matt Ingalls, and Karen Yu. Ueno’s sound art installations have been exhibited worldwide, including at Art Basel, the Taipei Modern Art Museum, and the New Vision Arts Festival. His large-scale installation, Daedalus Drones, a fence-labyrinth with a nest of flying drones, was installed and premiered at the Asia Society Hong Kong in 2021. Last summer, he was a featured artist on the Noise Fest, curated by the West Kowloon Cultural Center in Hong Kong. Last September, he was the featured guest composers at the Takefu International Music Festival, where the Arditti String Quartet premiered his latest string quartet. On that occasion, Toshiya Suzuki, premiered Ueno’s concerto for bass recorder. Most recently, in April 2025, Ueno was a featured performer at A Bunch of Noise, Shanghai’s leading noise music festival. He is currently a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His writings have appeared in the Oxford Handbook, The New York Times, Palgrave Macmillan, The Drama Review (TDR), Ethic Press, and Wiley & Sons. His biography is included in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.

Admission Information

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