Music and Regionalism Since the 1950s

Author(s):  
Pablo Palomino

This chapter traces the consolidation of Latin American music as a category and of Latin America as a musical space since the 1950s, as part of a larger web of commercial, political, diplomatic, and musicological practices and discourses that consolidated the region as such. It shows how the discourses and markets discussed in previous chapters ended up shaping the current musical understanding of the region. It describes the decades of inter-American and radical musical Latin Americanism in the region from the 1950s to the 1970s, the expansion of the “Latin music” market in the United States and Latin America since the turn of the twenty-first century, and the naturalized meanings of Latin American music in contemporary culture.

Author(s):  
Pablo Palomino

This chapter explains the pan-American absorption of Latin Americanism during World War II and the inception of the “world music” discourse that led to the creation of UNESCO. It focuses on the work of Charles Seeger as director of the Pan American Union’s Music Division from the years leading to the United States entry into the war to the immediate postwar years. The chapter analyzes a host of actors and initiatives, by the Pan American Union and other music-related associations, that influenced the consolidation of Latin American music and inter-Americanism as fields of musicological and educational practice. It illuminates the place of Latin American music in the convergence of nationalist traditions, hemispheric rhetoric, and global horizons among musicological and diplomatic actors as World War II came to an end.


Author(s):  
Pablo Palomino

This chapter tells the history of the German-born Uruguayan musicologist Francisco Curt Lange and the Latin-American Music Bulletin he created, a musicological project intended as a forum for musicians and music-related figures from all over Latin America, and the United States, interested in creating a regional field of musicological studies and musical promotion. It examines policies about disc collection, score printing and distribution, musical ethnographies, folklore, musical analysis, conferences, concerts, and regional institutions promoted by the Bulletin, and traces relevant aspects of Lange’s professional journey between Germany, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, among other places. The chapter also highlights the changing place of the United States, both as a subject of musicological study and as a site of music-related hemispheric initiatives, in the history of this Latin Americanist project.


Author(s):  
Pablo Palomino

This book reconstructs the transnational history of the category of Latin American music during the first half of the twentieth century, from a longer perspective that begins in the nineteenth century and extends the narrative until the present. It analyzes intellectual, commercial, state, musicological, and diplomatic actors that created and elaborated this category. It shows music as a key field for the dissemination of a cultural idea of Latin America in the 1930s. It studies multiple music-related actors such as intellectuals, musicologists, policymakers, popular artists, radio operators, and diplomats in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, the United States, and different parts of Europe. It proposes a regionalist approach to Latin American and global history, by showing individual nations as both agents and result of transnational forces—imperial, economic, and ideological. It argues that Latin America is the sedimentation of over two centuries of regionalist projects, and studies the place of music regionalism in that history.


Tempo ◽  
1958 ◽  
pp. 28-34
Author(s):  
Gilbert Chase

Any survey of music in the area that we are accustomed to call Latin America should begin with certain basic distinctions intended to dissipate the superficial notion of cultural homogeneity. Let us agree at the outset to regard the term “Latin America” as a loose geographical designation for those portions of the Western Hemisphere that lie outside of Canada and the United States. It is better to resort to such circumlocution than to risk the misleading assumption of a fundamental similarity in the twenty countries with which we are concerned.


2020 ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Eduardo Herrera

This chapter focuses on the dynamics and overlaps between the history of CLAEM and U.S. philanthropy, cultural diplomacy, and foreign policy during the 1950s and 1960s, decades shaped by the Cold War and the Cuban Revolution. By tracing the constitutive networks that led to the initial CLAEM grant, this chapter seeks to destabilize the concept of philanthropy as a preexisting third force between the public and private sectors. Instead, it argues for its examination as an emerging domain that results from complex entanglements, webs of relations and ideas, all being mediated and enacted as the result of human, institutional, discursive, and material actors. The chapter argues that CLAEM was one of the most successful projects in the arts supported by the Rockefeller Foundation during the 20th century and that few if any had such broad repercussions in the musical scene of a whole region.


Notes ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 899
Author(s):  
Susan T. Sommer ◽  
John Storm Roberts

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.


Author(s):  
Pablo Palomino

This introductory chapter describes the contribution of the book to key historiographic and intellectual approaches to music and Latin American history. It locates historically and conceptually the emergence of the category of Latin American music within the history of the idea of Latin America since the nineteenth century. It focuses on the emergence of a cultural definition of Latin America as a region and argues about the centrality of music in it. It is a conversation with many intellectual, political, and aesthetic histories of the region. It describes the main concepts utilized in the book—musical practices, transnationalism, modernity—and the overall content of each chapter.


Tempo ◽  
1959 ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Gilbert Chase

Leaving the continent of South America we come to Panamá and the five Central American Republics. In Panamá we find a composer whose star is rapidly rising, Roque Cordero (b. 1917), previously mentioned as one of the prize-winners of the Caracas Festival. Cordero studied with Ernst Křenek in the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship and became addicted to twelve-note writing, which, however, he employs freely rather than dogmatically. Like so many others, he began along the path of folkloristic nationalism with a Capricho Interiorano (1939) for orchestra, based on the mejorana, a typical Panamanian dance; continuing with the Panamanian Overture No. II, and the ballet Setetule, on themes of the Cuna Indians of Panamá. But his main trend has been towards subjective expression in symphonic form, initiated with his Symphony I (1945) and reaching its culmination to date in his Symphony II (in one movement), composed for the Caracas Festival in 1957. This is an intensely dramatic and emotional utterance, saved from mere rhetoric not only by its communicative sincerity (which called forth an ovation from a public rather recalcitrant to musical modernism) but also by its solid musical structure.


1981 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 535
Author(s):  
Gerard Behague ◽  
John Storm Roberts

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