This book problematizes the notion of experimentalism as defined in conventional narratives about experimental musical practices. Contributors take a broad approach to a wide variety of Latin@ and Latin American music traditions conceived and/or perceived as experimental. The adoption of a plural “experimentalisms” points at a purposeful decentering of its usual US and Eurocentric interpretative frameworks. The case studies in this book contribute to this by challenging discourses about Latin@s and Latin Americans that have historically marginalized them. As such, the notion of “experimentalisms” works as a grouping, as a performative operation of sound, soundings, music, and musicking that gives social and historical meaning to the networks it temporarily conforms and situates. This book responds to recent efforts to reframe and reconceptualize the study of experimental music in terms of epistemological perspective and geographic scope, but also engages traditional scholarship about musical experimentalisms. Contributors provide important challenges in relation to the types of music that have been traditionally considered experimental and the reasons why scholars have adopted these perspectives. Included in this book are case studies localized in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, México, Peru, and the United States, but with frequent regional, transnational, and postnational implications. This book contributes to the current conversations about music experimentalism while providing new points of entry to further reevaluate the field.
Dorothea Gail, Weird American Music: Case Studies of Underground Resistance, BarlowGirl, Jackalope, Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music (Heidelberg: Winter, 2018), 413 pp.
