Biography
Raised in the traditional music communities of Sacred Harp singing, Old Time music, and Contradancing in the Southeast of the United States, Dr. Andrew Snyder has been interested in diverse music cultures since his childhood. A trumpeter, singer, guitarist, and pianist, he has played in a wide range of styles and ensembles, including brass bands, jazz, Brazilian music, Balkan music, and classical music, and he is co-founder of San Francisco’s Mission Delirium Brass Band.
With a background in Romance languages, Andrew focused on music in Brazil for his doctoral dissertation in Ethnomusicology, completed in 2018 at the University of California-Berkeley. His dissertation is the basis of his book project, Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro (Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming), and it focuses on the vibrant community of carnival brass bands in contemporary Rio that has come to view itself as an activist movement during a period of political crisis. His articles related to this research have been published in Ethnomusicology (2021), Latin American Music Review (2020), Journal of Popular Music Studies (2019), and Luso-Brazilian Review (2019), and an article on gender subversion in contradance was published in the Yearbook for Traditional Music (2019).
During the completion of his PhD and afterwards, Andrew has been involved in collaborative projects as a co-editor of two books: HONK! A Street Music Renaissance of Music and Activism (Routledge 2020), which focuses on the movements and festivals of the global network of alternative brass band and At the Crossroads: Music and Social Justice (Indiana University Press 2021). At INET, he plans to embark on a new research project on Brazilian music in Lisbon.
