Andrew Snyder

Biography

Andrew Snyder is an Assistant Researcher in Music and Politics at INET-md/NOVA FCSH. He completed his PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkely and initially entered INET-md as a postdoctoral Research Fellow, through the Concurso Estímulo ao Emprego Científico of Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.

He is broadly interested in the politics of festivity in the Lusophone world. His first monograph, Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro (Wesleyan University Press 2022), explores the vibrant community of carnival brass bands in contemporary Rio, which drew on carnival repertoires and discourses to articulate itself as an activist movement during a period of political crisis. His second, Postcolonial Intimacy: Brazilian Music and Carnival in Portugal (University of Chicago Press forthcoming), explores immigrant musical scenes as affective negotiations and contestations of the Luso-Brazilian relationship.

His articles and chapters cover a wide range of theoretical topics, including race, gender, activism, disability, capitalism, cultural diplomacy, migration, affect, and postcolonialism. His articles have been published in leading music journals including Ethnomusicology, Latin American Music Review, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Ethnomusicology Review, and the Yearbook for Traditional Music. He is available to advise theses in Portuguese, English, French and Spanish related to these topics, with focus on popular musics of the Americas and Europe.

Andrew is the co-editor of three 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; At the Crossroads: Music and Social Justice (Indiana University Press 2022), which received the Ellen Koskoff Prize and an honorary mention for the Bruno Nettl Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2023; and Festival Activism, which considers festive settings as privileged sites for activist projects. He is the co-editor of the Journal of Festive Studies, an international and interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of festivities around the world.

Raised in the traditional music communities of Sacred Harp singing, Old Time music, and Contradancing in the Southeast of the United States, Andrew 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.