Elisabeth Le Guin

Le Guin is musicologist and cellist at UCLA whose radical imagination, combining scholarship, performance, video essays, experimental writing forms, and Mexican immigrant activism, has transformed musicology. Her books include Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology and the award-winning The Tonadilla in Performance: Lyric Comedy in Enlightenment Spain (2014). She helped found Philharmonia Baroque and the Artaria String Quartet. Her current Guggenheim-supported work emerges from a transnational grassroots musical activist movement (“movimiento jaranero") in Mexican immigrant communities with whom she is creating an immense digital canconciero that collects their ca.2000 songs and traces their roots to 16th-century Spain.