Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 323-334
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lapidus

This chapter draws the main themes of the book together and offers ideas for a clearer and more coherent overview of Latin music in New York, as well as ideas for future scholarship. It outlines Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes' ten points to defend the position that salsa might or might not exist as a genre. Using this as a model, the chapter presents ten themes from the book that show how musicians based in New York City shaped the international sound of Latin music. These include: (1) the physical and metaphysical aspects of clave, (2) the importance of folklore, (3) the emphasis on music education, (4) musical biculturalism and triculturalism, (5) the evolution of the anticipated bass part, (6) instrument making and its impact on performance and recording, (7) the role of dance, (8) lineages of musicians, (9) interethnic collaboration, and (10) the role of jazz. All of these are not treated in each chapter, but they recur throughout and overlap considerably.

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-81
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lapidus

This chapter outlines the important history and role of craftsmen based in New York City who produced and repaired traditional instruments used in the performance of Latin music. It introduces individuals who came from Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Jewish communities, and examines how their instruments physically represented the actual sound of Latin Music to New York and the world on widely disseminated recordings. Many of these instrument makers also sold their instruments beyond New York City and the United States. The chapter also discusses the work of builders and musicians in New York City to create and modify the tools used to forge the sound of Latin music and diffuse both the instruments and their aesthetic throughout the world. Ultimately, the chapter seeks to unify into one coherent narrative, the efforts of folklorists, journalists, and authors who paid attention to the origins of hand percussion instruments in New York, their subsequent mass production, and the people who built the instruments used to play Latin music in New York City.


2020 ◽  
pp. 197-230
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lapidus

This chapter explores how Puerto Rican and Nuyorican (New York-born Puerto Rican) musicians in New York City used jazz harmony, arranging, improvisation, and musical aesthetics to broaden the sound of Latin popular music from the postwar period into the 1990s and beyond. It argues that the Puerto Rican connection to jazz was extensive and encompassed a variety of styles and eras. The chapter challenges the debate over salsa's patrimony and development, by demonstrating how particular Puerto Rican musicians in New York City were fluent in jazz and incorporated it into Latin music. Much discourse has unfortunately centered on pitting Puerto Rican against Cuban musicians or looking only at commercial or sociocultural considerations when considering Latin music in New York. Proficiency in both jazz and Latin music allowed Puerto Rican musicians to innovate in ways that did not happen in Puerto Rico or elsewhere. The chapter also explores other themes discussed in the introduction, such as the importance of clave, the impact and extent of music education among Puerto Rican musicians, family lineages, the importance of folklore, and inter-ethnic collaboration.


2020 ◽  
pp. 3-53
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lapidus

This chapter details the longstanding formal and informal Latin music education settings and networks in New York City, as well as some of the ways in which the musicians benefited from them. It introduces three Puerto Rican women, from the 1920s through 1950s, who taught some of the greatest pianists to emerge from the New York scene. The chapter then presents a Panamanian pianist and a Cuban flautist who imparted musicianship, theory, and piano lessons to countless musicians who were influential performers, composers, and arrangers. The Afro-Latin folkloric music scene in New York was an incubator for musical innovation and preservation; musicians from across ethnic groups have studied, performed, and recorded ritual and folkloric genres. New York City, unlike sites within the Caribbean, offered a wide range of formal and informal study opportunities for musicians from throughout the Caribbean. It explores some of the institutions that served as meeting grounds for musicians, and provided both rehearsal and performance opportunities for aspiring musicians.


Author(s):  
Rachel Straus

In 2000, English-born Christopher Wheeldon became the first artist-in-residence at New York City Ballet (NYCB). The press compared his choreography to George Balanchine’s. This chapter discusses Wheeldon’s critically acclaimed NYCB ballet Polyphonia (2001) in relation to the “thick narrative” of the company’s history. It argues that Wheeldon’s collaborations with NYCB dancers Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto, in Polyphonia and other works, produced a unique aesthetic, one that transcended Balanchine’s neoclassical legacy. The chapter ends by considering how Wheeldon’s controversial decision to direct the Broadway musical about Michael Jackson is not out of character, but emblematic of his propensity to embrace the role of an outsider, who works to understand the unfamiliar and who surpasses what is expected of him.


Author(s):  
Beatriz Kalichman ◽  
Beatriz Rufino

This chapter examines the use of aesthetic and discursive elements in the production of a narrative about República, a district in the central area of São Paulo (Brazil) that has been transformed through a real estate boom in the past ten years. We focus on newly built studio apartments, and on the efforts to differentiate them from the quitinetes, apartments with similar features built in the 1950s and 1960s that have been heavily stigmatized. We situate our analysis of this purposeful urban transformation within a context intertwined with urban marketing, publicity, and image making. Our research shows the strong presence of an industrial aesthetic in the area, which we understand as being a deliberate echo of the gentrification process that took place in SoHo in New York City in the 1970s.


2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (04) ◽  
pp. 753-759
Author(s):  
Brian F. Schaffner

AbstractIn 2010, a debate erupted about plans to construct a mosque (as part of a larger multicultural center) approximately two blocks from Ground Zero in New York City. The main justification given by those who opposed the mosque was that building it so close to Ground Zero would appear to be insensitive. Public opinion appeared to support this notion, as large majorities of Americans registered their opposition to the mosque in surveys conducted at the time. In this article, I examine whether distance was, in fact, an important factor influencing citizens' opposition to the mosque. Using a survey experiment, I asked for opinions on the building of a mosque while randomizing how far the mosque was located from Ground Zero. Results from the experiment indicate that opposition to the mosque was unaffected by how far the mosque would be located from Ground Zero, but strongly influenced by factors such as partisanship, ideology, and tolerance for out groups.


1990 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 370 ◽  
Author(s):  
James O. Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  

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