- customized Spotify playlist
- online listening guides
- audio sound links to reinforce musical concepts
- stimulating activities for individual and group work
- customized Spotify playlist
- online listening guides
- audio sound links to reinforce musical concepts
- stimulating activities for individual and group work
Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
- customized Spotify playlist
- online listening guides
- audio sound links to reinforce musical concepts
- stimulating activities for individual and group work
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520285583 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 08/21/2018 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 444 |
| Sales rank: | 657,070 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Experiencing Latin American Music: An Introduction
Few human beings are indifferent to music. Indeed, responsiveness to music is intrinsic to the human condition (Sacks 2007). When Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot by an assailant in early 2011, wounds to the left side of her brain prevented her from speaking. Yet during her long rehabilitation, she was able to sing before she regained her ability to speak. Alzheimer's patients immersed in the gray fog of forgetfulness will suddenly "look alive" when they hear music that is special to them, such as a popular song from their youth.
How do most of us relate to the phenomenon of music, which weaves itself into so many aspects of our lives? Many people consider music an accompaniment to another activity, such as dancing or studying. Others attend concerts of what is usually labeled "classical" music, at which listening is the sole activity. Others listen to music for emotional satisfaction or relief from stress. Listening to music can be a solitary activity or a shared one.
Clearly each of us experiences music in a personal way. As you will discover in Activity 1.1 (below), it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is about a particular musical creation that moves us. Indeed, many people who listen to music propose that if language could describe the musical experience then music itself would be unnecessary. For this reason, music has sometimes been relegated to the realm of the emotions, earning second-class status in Western philosophy, which has long privileged the mind above the emotions and the body (Claxton 2015). As a result, it has only been relatively recently that music has been considered worthy of serious study, despite its compelling qualities.
This book will broaden your understanding of music by focusing on Latin America, a region rich in musical practices and traditions. Besides learning musical concepts, you'll reflect on musical meaning, the ways in which music interacts with societies, environments, and cultural values throughout Latin America. To that end, we'll consider Latin American history, the events and the stories told about them that have informed the lives of Latin Americans over time. All these factors, in combination with musical sound, create a web of associations and meanings for listeners both in Latin America and worldwide.
MUSIC IN LATIN AMERICA: A GENERAL VIEW
One premise of this book is that we cannot know the culture of a region or country without knowing its music. Unfortunately, many people in the industrialized world do just that. They wrongly suppose that if they can't read music, they are automatically disqualified, unaware, perhaps, that most of the world's music is neither written down nor made by people who read music. Consequently, college students learning Spanish or Portuguese or majoring in Latin American studies may know Latin American literature, painting, and film quite well but not music. In this book, you will enrich your understanding of Latin America by studying a variety of Latin America musics. (Note the plural form of "music," which suggests something other than a monolithic category.) Because music is connected to human experience, it offers us a lens through which to understand Latin America while also affecting us powerfully in and of itself. It is one thing to learn about historical developments or social practices in Latin America from textbooks, lectures, and discussion, all valuable, time-tested approaches. By also letting the soundtrack to these phenomena speak to us, we discover that experiencing Latin American music — reacting to it and reflecting on its multiple meanings — is one more way of understanding Latin America.
Like most large agglomerations of countries, regions, and peoples, Latin America abounds in contrasts. Especially noteworthy is the region's geographical variety, which encompasses the rain forest of the Amazon, the peaks of the Andes, the beaches of the Caribbean, and the vast, fertile plains of Argentina known as the pampas. Besides these natural phenomena, we find world-class museums and theaters alongside areas of extreme poverty, urban and rural. The human landscape is equally varied, stemming from indigenous, African, and European populations and considerable mixing among them (mestizaje in Spanish; mestiçagem in Portuguese). Mestizaje has been common since the sixteenth century, the era of colonial expansion when Spain and Portugal ruled much of the world, subjugating indigenous populations and imposing slavery in their dominions by forcibly importing thousands of Africans. People from the Middle East, East Asia, and Central Europe have also made Latin America their home, all contributing to this diverse panorama.
Another element of contrast is language. Spanish and Portuguese are spoken today, as are indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Quechua, Aymara, and hundreds more. Although Spanish is the most widely spoken language in Latin America, it is by no means uniform. An Argentine does not pronounce Spanish the way a Colombian does, for example, and a simple word such as the equivalent of "blanket" will differ from one country to another.
Although numerous ethnic and language groups can coexist within the borders of a given Latin American country, some individuals identify more strongly with their region than with a nation-state. For the rural people of the plains (llanos) of the Orinoco River basin, "home" is a territory that encompasses both Colombia and Venezuela, such that llanero identity may be more meaningful than citizenship of either country. Does this mean that the political borders found on the map are artificial? Does Latin America as a concept even exist? These are questions on which music can comment.
As we'll also see, Latin American music has something to say about the region's powerful neighbor to the north, the United States. At various points in history, the United States and Latin America have been at odds, whether due to territory grabs during the US-Mexican War in the mid-nineteenth century, US business's exploitation of cheap Latin American labor and abundant natural resources, or military interventions by the United States in Latin America, especially during the last century. Some Latin Americans also complain that US citizens remain ignorant of Latin American history and culture; indeed, a famous journalist once wisecracked that people in the United States will "do anything for Latin America except read about it" (Hamilton 2009: 126). In addition, racism has reared its ugly head: just as anti-Latino sentiment has a long history in the United States, the Indian, African, and mixed-race populations of Latin America have been stigmatized north and south.
To be sure, at various points in history, prominent Latin Americans have admired the United States, and Latin Americans have cultivated bonds with it, feeling a sense of belonging to the American continent. A prime example of this spirit was the 1930s and 1940s, the so-called Good Neighbor period, when the administration of US president Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) crafted a series of policies to unite the hemisphere against European fascism and Nazism, effectively seeing the Americas as one. This period, however, was short lived, and nowadays, especially in the ongoing political turmoil over immigration in the United States, it is all too easy to overlook the historical concepts of "Greater America" and the "American continent" (i.e., all of the Americas).
These structures of thought have also affected education. Until nearly the end of the last century in the United States, for example, primary- and secondary-school teachers would begin their study of American history with the New England colonies. In doing so, they bypassed the fact that within the territory now known as the United States, the Spanish predated the Pilgrims and Puritans by roughly a century. Since the Latino population in the United States is projected to reach 29 percent by 2050, many people are reconsidering their conception of America (Pew Research Center, cited in "The Hispanicisation of America" 2010: 35). As the Latino journalist Ray Suarez declares, "You won't be able to understand the America that's just over the horizon if you don't know Latino history. Latino history is your history. Latino history is our history" (Suarez 2013: xi).
Consequently, the term "America" can be problematic. When, in everyday English, we refer to "American interests," "American character," or "American music," we generally mean "of the United States." Yet Panamanians or Colombians may well object that they too are Americans since they reside in the Americas. One challenge is that whereas in Spanish and Portuguese it is possible to denote "of the United States" (estadounidense, estadunidense), English lacks an adjective that differentiates a US citizen from other inhabitants of the Americas. For the sake of clarity, in this book we'll use the term "US" as an adjective when referring to something or someone from the United States.
A first step is learning current borders. Central America, with Mexico to the northwest and Colombia to the south, consists of seven countries (Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama) and South America consists of twelve (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela). (French Guiana is an overseas territory.) Several areas of the Caribbean are also considered part of Latin America, such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Note that in this book we will not address the music of the French, English, or Dutch Caribbean.
LATIN AMERICA IN THE WORLD
The United States, Canada, Western Europe, and parts of Asia constitute what scholars call the Global North, that is, those "developed" countries that are part of the industrialized world and that have similar economic systems. (Although not geographically in the north, Australia and New Zealand are also considered part of the Global North for their economies.) The Global South encompasses Africa, parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America and is, in general, a poorer region in that food, shelter, and other basics are far less abundant than in the Global North. Over history, the Global South has been subject to several labels conceived by the Global North. These include "the orient, the primitive world, the third world, the underdeveloped world, the developing world, ... a place of parochial wisdom, of antiquarian traditions, of exotic ways and means" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2014: 1). It pays to ask, as we will do throughout this book, how helpful these either-or denominations really are, especially in an increasingly globalized world. As you study global inequality, you may also see two additional either-or terms to distinguish these regions: center and periphery. The technological innovation, economic structures, and political and cultural clout of the center (the Global North) are generally presented to stand in contrast to the hardships of life in the periphery (the Global South). These terms apply to Latin American music insofar as Latin American musicians see themselves in relation to the center, often wearing their peripheral status proudly to defy the hegemony (dominance) of the center and performing music of resistance.
One contradiction: Latin America is not "Latin." The term arose in France in the nineteenth century to designate those regions of the Americas in which a Latin-based (Romance) language such as Spanish or Portuguese was spoken, a locution that would presumably distinguish "Latin" peoples from Anglo-Saxons. It falls short in several ways. It does not, for example, include the indigenous languages just mentioned. Nor is "Latin America" normally understood to encompass French-speaking Québec. (Indeed, despite the fact that Canada is part of North America, it has seldom figured in the debates among politicians and historians over what sort of relationships should exist among the Americas.) The imperialist overtones of the term "Latin America" are summed up by one scholar, who has declared that "the idea of Latin America was an invention forged in the process of European colonial history and the consolidation and expansion of the Western world view and institutions" (Mignolo 2005: 2, emphasis original).
Still, despite geographical contrasts, ethnic and racial diversity, regional affiliations, and the plethora of languages, many Latin Americans see themselves as unified. Over history, they not only have recognized their relationships to their own countries but have professed allegiance to, an idea tested by the Venezuelan "liberator" Simón Bolívar in the early nineteenth century. Pan–Latin Americanism implies an essential bond among the Latin American republics.
MUSIC IN LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE: SELF AND OTHER
Music is a cultural phenomenon, one that we can "use" to learn a great deal about other cultures, just as we do when we read historical documents, analyze sociological data, or study the literature, painting, or monuments that a given community has produced. Often (and perhaps instinctively) we compare these cultural productions to our own values and patterns of existence, which we may wrongly consider culturally normative.
Of course, culture has meant different things over time. In the sixteenth century, it referred to the development of the mind, body, and spirit in human beings. (What we nowadays call "exercise" was once known as "physical culture.") In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when people referred to a "cultured" individual, they meant that the person in question was broadly educated and conversant with art, literature, and classical music. Nowadays we are likelier to adopt the usage common among sociologists, anthropologists, and other scholars who research the workings of societies worldwide. One dictionary defines culture in this sense, calling it "the sum of attitudes, customs, and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people from another," and adding that "culture is transmitted, through language, material objects, ritual, institutions, and art, from one generation to the next" (American Heritage Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 3rd ed., 2005). Included here are everyday behaviors. As one scholar puts it, "culture is [knowing] ... when to smile, what it means to cheat on the subway fare, and whether one talks about politics at dinner" (Griffin 2009: 266). A sociologist explains that culture is "the order of life in which human beings construct meaning through symbolic representation" (Tomlinson 1999: 18). Clearly this definition relates to music, which awakens so many visceral responses and often arises in specific communities but whose actual meaning is often open to debate.
When we use the term "culture" in this book, we'll do so from a sociological-anthropological standpoint, in each instance bearing in mind the often complicated relationship between self and other mentioned above. Our selves are shaped by the culture we know. Even if we resist the temptation to consider our own culture as normative, as we study unfamiliar music, we may nonetheless experience a vague feeling of tension between self and other. One day in class my students were discussing a musical example in this book, one from a culture distant from theirs and that contained sounds completely unfamiliar to them. When a young man confessed, "it creeps me out," some members of the class laughed, a bit nervously, I thought. But in the end, all seemed to recognize that this individual had simply acknowledged the tensions that challenging the self may provoke. Certainly he could have chosen his words more carefully. But his reaction was perhaps the first step in a process of constant monitoring and reflection. Scrutinizing the relationship between self and other is no either-or proposition but, rather, a path that leads inevitably to a thought-provoking paradox: recognizing the self is the first step in decentering it and subsequently opening our selves to the unfamiliar other.
How is it possible to "read" a culture through music? Music's meanings both mirror and create societal relations and are thus inscribed in patterns of social interactions. Consider the ways in which you have just reflected on your own experience as a listener (activity 1.1). Multiply that experience by an entire region, people, or nation. Listeners, composers, agents, critics, sound engineers, publicists, performers, and everyday people who make music spontaneously may be involved. When we study musical activity within a group or a society — a culture — we discover a great deal about the values of that culture. In this sense, music becomes a way of knowing.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Experiencing Latin American Music"
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