Lectures in Music Studies: Chelsea Burns, University of Texas–Austin

Chelsea Burns, associate professor of music theory at the University of Texas–Austin, presents "Neither National Nor Universal: Rethinking Place in Musical Modernisms."

The idea of musical nationalism has often been taken for granted as a celebratory representation of a country’s people and sounds, heard not only on concert stages but also at large-scale events like World’s Fairs and Olympic Games. But this sense of the term does not inhere to all music that has been characterized as nationalist. Particularly for composers from marginalized places, nationalism has often been the only marketable mode of expression. In the 1920s and 1930s, musicians like Heitor Villa-Lobos (Brazil) and Carlos Chávez (Mexico) found that exotic representations of their home country could garner them space on international concert stages, while cosmopolitan works (referred to in both Mexico and Brazil as “universal music”) were neither welcomed nor well received abroad. And this challenge is not limited to the past; to the contrary, many composers face similar expectations today. 

In this talk, the speaker addresses limitations encountered by Mexican and Brazilian composers in the 1920s and 1930s, and the strategies they used to navigate the transcontinental musical scene of the period. As discuss here, these composers and many others have been characterized as essentially and indelibly connected to exotic places, a characterization that not only shapes their compositional output but also has guided scholars’ and critics’ discussions. I argue that nationalist frames have limited the ways that scholars understand and analyze the political and cultural work of this music, and I propose alternative modes for studying these compositions in a rich and nuanced way. 

Chelsea Burns is associate professor of music theory at the Butler School of Music, and affiliate faculty at the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, both at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include Latin American modernist concert music as well as vernacular music genres, especially country and bluegrass. She is particularly interested in the ways that contexts — economic, political, material — affect analytical interpretation. Her research suggests that such contextual understanding shapes analysis in critical ways, at times undermining or reversing prevailing musical interpretations. Her work touches on issues of race, postcoloniality, instrumental technologies, and expressions of privilege and class, among others. 

Professor Burns has presented papers at national conferences of the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the US chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the Latin American Studies Association. In 2023, she received the Society for Music Theory’s Outstanding Publication Award for an article addressing exoticism in Heitor Villa-Lobos’ musical depictions of indigeneity. Her book, The Exotic Self: Mexican and Brazilian Modernists Abroad and at Home, was published in autumn 2025 by Oxford University Press. Additional publications address the pedal steel guitar in 1960s country music, genre and race in 1970s country, the iconic status of Nudie Cohn’s so-called “nudie suits” in country, and Taylor Swift’s re-recorded albums (Taylor’s Versions). She is also an avid bluegrass player and bicycle rider, and serves the Austin community as a board member of the Central Texas Bluegrass Association and Austin’s Bicycle Advisory Council.