Pierre Boulez, Latin America, and the European Avant-Garde After 1950

Recognized as a critic, composer, teacher, conductor and impresario, Pierre Boulez left a huge footprint that defined the trajectory of European concert music during the second half of the twentieth century. With the composition of Le Marteau sans maître (1953–1955) and several subsequent works from the mid-1950s and early 1960s, he established himself as one of the most important composers in his artistic circle. His compositional approach changed radically during the course of this time period. Although many of his pitch organization techniques were only unraveled several decades later, innovations with respect to other parameters of the musical language had a clear and immediate impact. Keeping this in mind, with this intentionally provocative title, I would like to discuss how Latin America played a decisive role in the career of this enormous figure of twentieth-century music. After presenting a brief summary of his professional trajectory, I will discuss the three tours he made of Latin America at the beginning of the 1950s, which, considered within the frame of his interest in ethnomusicology, were crucial to his career. They gave him the space and inspiration for crucial innovations in his development as a composer. By reference to Boulez’s writings, and based on a critical reading of the works that reflect the influence of Latin American music, I will discuss how some of the most important changes in his musical language, like his emphasis on elements of contrast and resonance, were inspired by his experiences on this tour, as much, or more, than by more recognized influences, like Japanese and African music. This has some considerable implications, given that Boulez’s new musical language had tremendous impact on the development of the European avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century. Haciendo referencia a los escritos del compositor y tomando como base una lectura crítica de las obras que reflejan la influencia que recibió de la música latinoamericana, discutiré cómo algunos de los cambios más importantes en su lenguaje musical fueron inspirados por las experiencias de Boulez en sus giras en esta región, tanto o más que por influencias más reconocidas, como la música japonesa y la música africana. Esto tiene implicaciones importantes, dado a que el nuevo lenguaje musical de Boulez tuvo un impacto considerable en el desarrollo de la vanguardia europea después de la segunda guerra mundial.

PENGARUH MUSIK AMERIKA LATIN TERHADAP INDONESIA

Since the beginning of the last century, Latin American music has been succes in the U.S. music industry because its intrinsic musical characteristics and its involvement within the film industry. Through the U.S. and Europe, it has been influencing popular music around the world; including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and India, countries that also contributed to the diffusion of Latin styles in Indonesia. The corpus of original works of Indonesian-Latin music is quite huge and has great quality; particularly audio recordings done in the 1950s and 1960s that mixed Latin, Western, and regional musical elements to create new musical forms know as lagu daerah (regional songs) and pop daerah (regional pop). This article aims to provide some understandings of this complex diffusion process utilising mainly a bibliographical research method (books, journals, digital news, etc.), interviews, and listening-based information from old audio recordings. My hipothesis is that Latin American music has been well accepted in Indonesia, espetially in Java and Sumatra, due to historical crossroads that spread musical and cultural similarities in both regions. In order of its importance in Indonesian-Latin music, these are: the conection of Asia and America during the Spanish, Portugal, and Holand colonial era; the Islamic influence in Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and the Iberic peninsula; the influence of Dutch music in Indonesia and German music in Latin America; the role of African music in Latin America and the probable two side influences between Africa and Indonesia; and the inmigration to Amerika from Nusantara-Oceania sailors in prehistoric times.

The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American Music in the 1950s and 1960s

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.

Caribbean and Latin American Reverberations and the First Birth of Latin Jazz

This chapter documents the strong ties of the Caribbean and Latin America to the formative period of jazz and how that influence reverberated throughout the twentieth century. It argues that the strong foundational influence of Caribbean and Latin American music on pre-jazz styles makes the birth of jazz synchronous with the birth of Latin jazz. By building on the work of a number of scholars who have recently begun to tackle this complexity through historical studies of immigration patterns and the social and political development of New Orleans throughout the 1700s and 1800s and by conducting a “sonic archeology” of jazz styles throughout the twentieth century, reverberations of jazz’s pre-history are uncovered and shown to resound loudly. Along with a discussion of the social history of New Orleans, the focus is on the function of certain rhythmic cells in the jazz repertoire that are most typically associated with Caribbean and Latin American styles.

The “Othering” of Latin Jazz

This chapter discusses various ways the Caribbean and Latin American music styles continued to share a common history with jazz from the 1940s to the 1960s, intersecting, cross-influencing, and at times seeming inseparable, as each has played seminal roles in the other’s development. Three case studies are discussed: the collaboration of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo, the Jazz Samba recording by Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz, and Mongo Santamaría’s “Watermelon Man” recording. In much of the jazz literature, these musicians and their seminal roles have been diminished or downright ignored. This chapter explores the reasons for these omissions and the systematic “othering” of Latin jazz. It examines the forces at play in their continued exclusion; explores how this omission is tied to the economic marginalization of jazz, racism, nationalism, tensions between art and popular music, and canon construction; and identifies what is at stake when Latin jazz is included.

The Second Birth of Latin Jazz

This chapter examines “The Peanut Vendor” as a case study and a lens into the New York City of the 1930s. The role of the popular music industry in promoting “exotica” and “otherness” and how these practices established Cuban music and musicians as the domineering influence in mid-century Latin and jazz mixings are documented. The role of interculturality in 1930s New York jazz is explored, challenging the traditional tropes found in historical narratives that posit jazz as a purely African American or North American music. A closer look at the contextual factors that led to these exchanges calls for a rethinking of jazz as a transnational and global music. This chapter exposes the interracial, interethnic, international, and intercultural complexities and processes that undergird jazz performance practice and that serve as the primary driving forces in the evolution of the music. What becomes clear is that Caribbean and Latin American music and musicians have played significant roles in ways yet to be fully documented and understood.

Latin/Pan-American Music

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.