Watch the recording of AIRIE Fellow Kunya Rowley in conversation with associate professor of musicology Dr. Melvin Butler as they reflect on Rowley’s September residency in the Everglades.
A South Florida native, Kunya Rowley is a community, social impact, and artistic leader in Miami, Florida. He is the founder and Artistic Director of Hued Songs, a non-profit collective that celebrates Black culture through artistic experiences, as well as the Music Access, Arts, & Culture Manager at The Miami Foundation, leading the Foundation’s effort focused on making music education & the arts more accessible and equitable in the city. Kunya is a graduate of The University of Florida and is an alumnus of New World School of the Arts’ opera program. In addition to his artistic and directorial credits with Hued Songs, notable performance credits include performances with Magic City Opera, Slow Burn Theatre, Opera Naples, Florida Grand Opera, Orchestra Miami, Klezmer Orchestra, and M Ensemble. Kunya is a 2017 recipient of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge grant, which propelled the founding of Hued Songs.
Melvin L. Butler is an associate professor of music at the University of Miami. An ethnomusicologist with broad interests in musical and religious practices of the African diaspora, he has conducted fieldwork on music in relation to charismatic Christianity in Haitian, Jamaican, and African American communities. In these transnational contexts, he interrogates the cultural politics of musical style and religion while attending to the role of musical performance in constructing collective identities. He has published articles and reviews in several scholarly journals, including Ethnomusicology, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Black Music Research Journal, and Journal of Popular Music Studies. Much of his writing centers on the phenomenology of Pentecostal musical worship, how the transcendent becomes immanent through musical performance, and the intersections of faith, ritual, memory, gender, and power. These interests fuel his concern with ethnographic representation and the ways in which scholars negotiate their identities in relation to various fields of supernatural encounter. He earned his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from New York University and a bachelor’s degree in saxophone performance from Berklee College of Music. His book, Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.