“Caged Conservatories” is a long-term passion project (currently in very early stages) that expands upon the peripheral music materials I gathered from my summer research residency at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (where I was primarily working on my dissertation project, “Sensing Death-Worlds”)  and earlier research in 2022 as a graduate student of historical musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In this project, I focus on the musicking cultures within sites of incarceration and ruin during and after the Second World War: Buchenwald (Konzentrationslager, Weimar), Oflag X-B (Nazi-controlled POW camp, Saxony), Santo Tomas internment camp (a Japanese-controlled POW camp), Central internment camp (a British-controlled refugee camp, Isle of Man), and the ruined cities of Berlin, Manila, and Hiroshima.

In simple terms, this project attempts to do three things. First, it investigates the relationship of music, performance, pedagogy, society, culture, and everyday life during wartime. It explores the lives of children, musicians-turned-pedagogues, their victims-turned-audience-turned-students, and material objects of music/sound. Why did these musicians feel the need to teach, perform, and create music? What kinds of music? Why did non-musicians decide to learn music? What were the goals and motivations of these two groups of people? How did they manage to acquire and smuggle sheet music, manuscripts, musical instruments, and other acoustic equipment? What did the relationship between trained musicians, amateur musicians, and ordinary people look like? Second, I also aim to unravel the interdisciplinary networks between performers, composers, impresarios, actors, poets, writers, and other intellectuals. How did these networks develop over time? What were the fruits of these collaborations? Were there any tensions between individuals? What were the limits of these networks? How did they negotiate their creative agencies with the conditions of their incarceration? Finally, I want to ultimately arrive at a theorization of countermusicking, that is, music-making and the production of musical knowledge in counterpoint to systems of power.

In total, this project contemplates on the issues of creativity, autonomy, education, personhood, oppression, resistance, and solidarity.