State Musical Populisms

This chapter shows the emergence of a regional sense of Latin America as part of the musical pedagogy of the nationalist states at the peak of the state-building efforts to organize, through a variety of instruments of cultural activism, what at the time were called “the masses.” It analyzes particularly the cases of Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina—the three largest countries of the time in population and economic development—from the 1910s through the 1950s. It proposes a comparative history of Latin American musical populisms, focusing in particular on policies of music education, broadcasting, censorship, and experiences of state-sponsored collective singing.

A Continental Patchwork

This chapter describes, first, the diverse and scattered musical markets, agents, institutions, and discourses that operated within what today is considered to be Latin America, but back then were considered disparate local, urban, diasporic, and transregional musical circuits. It shows the absence of unifying factors, either economic or ideological, that could sustain any encompassing regional aesthetic discourse or practice. Then the chapter presents the appearance, in disparate geographic spaces, of early intellectual, journalistic, and musicological notions of Latin America as a single regional musical space. It shows how, by the 1930s, a variety of regionalist discourses on Latin and Pan-American music gained legitimacy.

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.

The Transnational Formation of Latin American Musicology

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.

Introduction

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.

Music and Regionalism Since the 1950s

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.

Transnational Networks

This chapter describes four circuits of musical practice in the 1920s and 1930s, in order to locate the emergence of Latin America as a musical space. It analyzes: (1) the entertainment scene’s repertoire of Manila, Philippines, in the early 1920s; (2) the Latin American repertoire in the career of Russian Jewish singer Isa Kremer, who ended up in Argentina in the 1930s; (3) the copyright strategy of Sociedad Argentina de Autores, Intérpretes y Compositores de Música (SADAIC), the Argentine society for composers of tango and other popular styles, in the late 1920s; and (4) the Mexican broadcasting system XEW, the very first commercial attempt to build a Latin American musical platform. In every case, local, national, and transational dimensions of musical practice are approached in terms of music genres, market structures, and musical ideologies.

Epilogue

The epilogue describes the recent history of political and diplomatic regional projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, which was the context in which the research behind this book took place. It reflects, on the one hand, on the links between contemporary regional formation and the consolidation of Latin American music as a cultural category, and on the links between this category and other geocultural categories in world history, on the other. Finally, it argues in favor of considering Latin America as a project, instead of a given framework, a natural reality, or a historical necessity, and situates the study of Latin American music within a broader reflection on the future possibilities for regionalist projects.