Bio

Jairo Moreno’s work addresses the production of knowledge of music and the sonic in modernity. He has written a major study of the history of listening in early modern and modern music theory and analysis, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Indiana University Press, 2004). He has also published on jazz performance poetics, the politics of aesthesis, and Latin-American popular music in the U.S during the long 20 th century. His current project is entitled Syncopated Modernities: Musical Latin Americanisms in the U.S., 1978-2008 , an archival, critical, and ethnographic study of music’s precarious share in political practices during late capitalism. Moreno received the Society for American Music 2005 Irving Lowens Article Award for Best Article (“Bauzá-Gillespie-Latin Jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the Black Caribbean,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2004). Other scholarly awards include a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities at Yale, and an ACLS Fellowship (2009-2010). He received the David and Janet Brooks Distinguished Teaching Award (Duke) and the Golden Dozen Teaching Award (NYU). A former professional bassist, he received five Grammy Award nominations for recordings with the late Latin and Jazz percussionist Ray Barretto (Blue Note, EMI-France, Concord, Fania labels – 1989-1997), appeared in numerous other recordings, and performed chamber music with guitarist David Starobin and the Ciompi String Quartet.