About

Music as relationship.

Greetings! My name is J.A. Strub. Originally from New York, I now live in Austin, where I study, teach, and do research at the University Of Texas’ Butler School of Music. My work considers the intersection of music-making, community, equity, and social technology in the United States and Latin America. Through collaborations with musicians, graphic artists, multimedia producers, and cultural promoters from throughout the hemisphere, I seek to highlight the value of music as a conduit for building relationships of shared creativity, mutual support, and cross-cultural understanding. At the same time, my research grapples with how music can be highly contested, and how expressive culture and the arts serve as stages for the articulation of power, ideology, and control.

While I have always been surrounded by music, my educational and professional background is rooted principally in social services and community organizing. As an undergraduate, I studied economics and statistics under Dr. Howard Chernick at Hunter College at the City University of New York. While at CUNY, I was also part of a collective of students who spearheaded an initiative to implement participatory budgeting, a direct-democratic process in which a community gets to collectively decide how to spend public funds, at various campuses in the city’s public university system. Before moving to Texas, I worked as a housing advocate on an eviction prevention team based in Jamaica, Queens.

In my current work as a music scholar and cultural consultant, I apply my advocate sensibilities to the task of facilitating equitable collaborations between performers, promoters, researchers, and institutions. In addition to research and teaching, I am involved in various initiatives of cultural diffusion and arts education. I am involved in the coordination of several music festivals and have been part of multiple initiatives to bring visiting musicians from Latin America to universities and cultural centers in the United States for educational programming that emphasizes cross-cultural understanding.