Gregory Melchor-Barz
Sound heals, provokes, seduces, and saves. My work lives where music meets medicine, where drag meets data, where queerness disrupts the archive. As ethnomusicologists, we study how rhythm becomes resistance—and how the margins have always been making noise.
Sounding out the margins—queer, global, vital
My Website “Bits”
here’s who I am ...
As a professor of ethnomusicology at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts School of Music, I study the dynamic relationships among music, culture, politics, and health. My research focuses on music and medicine in sub-Saharan Africa, queer theory, drag cultures, and the ways marginalized communities use music to express identity, build solidarity, and resist oppression.
My book, Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda, examines how Ugandan communities have mobilized music, dance, and drama in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These art forms are more than cultural expressions: they serve as vital forms of education, care, healing, and survival. I also produced the Smithsonian Folkways album Singing for Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/AIDS in Uganda, which received a GRAMMY nomination for Best Traditional World Music Album—an affirmation of music’s power to cross cultural boundaries and become an instrument of change.
My current research explores socially conscious popular music through the lens of global queer identities, asking how sound and performance create possibilities for self-expression, resistance, and belonging. I also co-edited Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, published by Oxford University Press, a volume that brings queer theory into critical conversation with the study and practice of ethnomusicology.
Across these projects, I seek to broaden the boundaries of the field and amplify voices too often pushed to its margins. My work approaches music not only as an art form, but also as a force for healing, social commentary, activism, and transformation.