Biography
Emilie Amrein is a scholar, artist, educator, and activist whose professional activities resist and unsettle the boundaries of academic disciplines. They locate their work in community practice, drawing on the revolutionary wisdom of abolitionist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist organizers and freedom dreamers from the Global Majority. Current areas of curiosity include disability and voice studies, carceral geography, critical border studies, ecopoetics, and the post-humanism.
Emilie currently serves as Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music at the University of San Diego, where they teach courses on the intersection of music education and social justice movements, community music, and changemaking. As the Director of the USD Choral Scholars, they center embodiment, collective consciousness raising, dialogue, and storytelling in their teaching and artistry.
Emilie is the co-artistic director of Common Ground Voices / La Frontera, a bi-national community music project that aims to build relationships and understanding across political, demographic, and perceptual borders as an exercise of non-violence. They are the founder of The Choral Commons, a media platform that provides a space for singing communities to realize the liberatory potential of the ensemble as a site of radical imagining.
Emilie is coauthor of the book, Empowering Song: Music Education from the Margins, published by Routledge in 2022. They contributed to Wisdom, Wit, and Will: Women Choral Conductors on Their Art, and to Teaching Music Through Performance in Choir (Vol. 2-3). As a speaker, they have presented at the national meetings of the National Collegiate Choral Organization, Chorus America, the American Choral Director’s Association, the College Music Society, and the National Youth Leadership Council.
Empowering Song: Music Education from the Margins
Empowering Song: Music Education from the Margins (2022) weaves together subversive pedagogy and theories of resistance with community music education and choral music, inspiring professionals to revisit and reconsider their pedagogical practices and approaches. The authors’ unique insight into some of the most marginalized and justice-deprived contexts in the world — prisons, refugee shelters, detention facilities, and migrant encampments — breeds evocative and compassionate enquiry, laying the theoretical groundwork for pedagogical practices while detailing the many facets of equity-centered, musical leadership. Presenting an orientation to healing informed by theory, Empowering Song explores the ways in which music education might take on the challenging questions of cultural responsiveness within the context of justice, seeking to change not only how choral music is led but also our conceptions of why it should matter to all.
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