The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History

by Pablo Palomino

Overview

The ethnically and geographically heterogeneous countries that comprise Latin America have each produced music in unique styles and genres - but how and why have these disparate musical streams come to fall under the single category of "Latin American music"? Reconstructing how this category came to be, author Pablo Palomino tells the dynamic history of the modernization of musical practices in Latin America. He focuses on the intellectual, commercial, musicological, and diplomatic actors that spurred these changes in the region between the 1920s and the 1960s, offering a transnational story based on primary sources from countries in and outside of Latin America. The Invention of Latin American Music portrays music as the field where, for the first time, the cultural idea of Latin America disseminated through and beyond the region, connecting the culture and music of the region to the wider, global culture, promoting the now-established notion of Latin America as a single musical market. Palomino explores multiple interconnected narratives throughout, pairing popular and specialist traveling musicians, commercial investments and repertoires, unionization and musicology, and music pedagogy and Pan American diplomacy. Uncovering remarkable transnational networks far from a Western cultural center, The Invention of Latin American Music firmly asserts that the democratic legitimacy and massive reach of Latin American identity and modernization explain the spread and success of Latin American music.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190687434
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/29/2020
Series:	Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	13 MB
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About the Author

Pablo Palomino is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Mellon Faculty Fellow at Oxford College of Emory University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Music is Latin American history Chapter 1: A continental patchwork Chapter 2: Transnational networks Chapter 3: State musical populisms Chapter 4: The transnational formation of Latin American musicology Chapter 5: Latin/Pan American music Chapter 6: Music and regionalism since the 1950s Epilogue: A century of Latin American Music Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"The Invention of Latin American Music covers a great deal of ground and offers a number of important insights for readers interested in the historiography of music research in Latin America. Based on meticulous archival research in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, and the United States, the various case studies included in this book are engrossing in their own right, many of them providing tantalizing leads for future research. The book is also important because of its emphasis on social actors, institutions, and perspectives within the regional context of Latin America, a much-needed complement to other recent research that has tended to privilege the role of US-based individuals and institutions." — Javier F. Leon, Hispanic American Historical Review

"Palomino's study shows how music factored importantly into defining Latin America as a region in the twentieth century ... Moving between these different scalar vantage points, Palomino zooms in and out to write a history featuring three-dimensional protagonists engaged in a geographically expansive intellectual and cultural project." — Elizabeth Schwall, Latin American Research Review

"Latin America', Palomino shows, was never a distinctive and coherent song or symphony; it has been a contentious key to play sundry very local and very global cultural trends. Palomino provides the first and best more-than-national account of the lasting background music of the 20th century, whose Latin Americanness was neither in the non-Westernness nor in the uniqueness of its musical scores or lyrics, but in the very struggle to play notes, to sing feelings, this way today, that other way tomorrow, producing thus collective memories which, albeit never wholly Latin American, gradually fulfilled Joaquim Nabuco's old sense of being: 'We are but a drop of water in the ocean. Let us be cognizant that we are water droplets, but let us also be aware that we are ocean." — Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Samuel N. Harper Professor of History, The University of Chicago

From the Publisher