Kathryn Agnes Huether, PhD
assessing the world through sonic interactions
Kathryn Agnes Huether received her PhD in Ethnomusicology/Musicology from the University of Minnesota in 2021. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. Previously, she was at Bowdoin college and was the 2021-2022 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research and American University’s Postdoctoral Fellow. A classically trained violinist (she studied with Angella Ahn of the Ahn Trio) and vocalist, Huether continues to seek out performance opportunities and enjoys folk, klezmer, and blue grass.
Her primary areas of research consider how music—or more broadly sound—mediates modes of contemporary understanding regarding history, memory, discrimination, and trauma with particular emphasis on Holocaust Memory and African American Slavery. Her book project Sounding Trauma, Mediating Memory: Holocaust Economy and the Politics of Sound, examines sound usage within contemporary Holocaust memory and argues that the sonic, musical, and vocal practices employed within Holocaust museums, film, and testimony can be read as a simulacrum of the Holocaust’s ‘political economy.’
Secondary areas of interest stem from a fusion of her approach to musicology and her background in religious studies/Jewish studies, and are concerned with German Jewish identity politics and European art music (symphony, opera, lieder) from the late 18th-20th centuries and examines the work of composers Felix Bartholdy-Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler, and Leonard Bernstein, to name a few.
“Sound Studies”
— K.A. Huether
In echoes, we unearth tales of trauma's sting,
A cacophony of diaspora, suffering's ring,
The beats and rhythms that pulse with pain,
In sound, scars of displacement eternally remain.
From whispers of ancestors to screams of despair,
Clashes of cultures tearing the air,
In sound, we confront the diasporic plight,
The melodies of survival in the darkest night.
Sound studies lay bare histories shrouded in gloom,
The agony, the resistance, the impending doom,
In sound, we navigate the depths of despair,
The rhythms and cadences of anguish we wear.
From native chants to immigrant cries,
In sound, the world's agony lies,
And in the relentless pursuit of understanding,
We confront trauma's dissonance, commanding.
So let us honor the shadowed realms of trauma's hold,
And explore the depths of its stories untold,
For in sound, we encounter the darkest parts,
And the resilience that beats within shattered hearts.