To engage with (de)coloniality through music is to confront the colonial narratives that have shaped our sonic world, often invisibly. These narratives have naturalised the supremacy of Eurocentric aesthetics, elevating “art music” as a proxy for whiteness, rationality, and centrality – while relegating the vocal traditions of formerly colonised peoples to the margins, as derivative, exotic, or folkloric. What has been called “peripheral” is not marginal by essence but by systematic exclusion.

My work with Latin American art song reveals how deeply these narratives are embedded in training, performance, and reception. Classical singers, even in Latin America, are often trained to reproduce Central European vocal ideals and languages, ignoring the timbres, bodies, and histories of their own cultures. In doing so, they replicate the very hierarchies that silence them. This internalised coloniality affects not only institutional structures, but also the performer’s voice, body, and identity.

To decolonise music is not merely to add repertoire – it is to transform consciousness. It is an invitation to listen otherwise, to rethink who and what defines “art,” and to revalue the expressive traditions of bodies long silenced. We must develop new ears and freer minds.

This work also requires a radical rethinking of language. Colonial paradigms live in the very words we use. We must challenge inherited categories and question the hierarchies they impose. Terms like art, folk, or popular are not neutral – they carry embedded assumptions about legitimacy and value. I insist: they are all songs. Period. Songs that move through flexible, fluid spaces where meanings are negotiated, exchanged, and transformed. Refusing to fragment them into artificial tiers allows us to honor their full expressive power.

Song, understood in its totality, is not only a mirror of identity – it is also a tool of transformation. It is in song that we reclaim our histories, our languages, our emotions, our bodies. It is in song that we resist.