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ABSTRACT avant-garde. international languagesthe musicalofducingPeruinto the intro for responsible were others, among Bolaños, César and Garrido-Lecca Celso Pinilla, Valcárcel, Enrique Edgar best years of the Peruvian musical vanguard. Composers applied to the newly created Conservatory. This markedthe Peru (Lima), in 1946, a remarkable number of young people as and objects of parts landscape the 1). (Fig. animal or spiritual agents (interspecific interactions), as well involvethatperformances the are so but [2] studyof object an beings human among place takes that performance the is only not case, this In position. central a occupies beings gies, the interaction between human beings and non–human regard to “sound and knowledge”: Within indigenous ontolo mance, perfor in this case Peruvian, musical directs a us to of a broader vision interpretation in and construction The Time Peru, aswellonPeruvianethnomusicology. andmusicin andoriginalityofexperimentalart new lightonthehistory fromacross-culturalperspective,sheds The analysisofthisrepertoire, through elementsoffolkandtraditionalmusicusedinthesepractices. therefore exploreslocalexpressionsandnationalregionalidentities sources ofinfluenceonmusicandnewtechnologiesthattime.It electroacoustic musicinthe1960s,toinvestigatemethodsand reviewsthecompositionalpracticeofPeruvian This article TA ©2017 ISAST with thisissue. See
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o like - - - influenced contemporary Peruvian art, inMendívil[9].(©JulioMendívil) Peruvianart, influenced contemporary Fig. 1. ing issue, this Valcárcel wrote: “backwardness” of the Latin American region [3]. - Concern intention was to level and transform the considerableinstitute’s The 2). musical (Fig. (CLAEM) Musicales Estudios Altos eration of student fellows of the Centro Latinoamericano de gen- first the scholarships to twelve offering grant a for ply Ginastera, invited Edgar Valcárcel and Bolaños César to ap- America? Latin in music of diversity the of then, speak, we do Howenjoy? groups social of range broad a that music American Latin of variety wide the for canon single a establish to possible it Is questions: big the with irreconcilable be to day, seems this to still nationalistandstance, which, artistic social bya In 1961, the Torcuato di Tella Institute, through Alberto Alberto through TellaInstitute, Torcuato di the 1961, In Peru, and most of Latin America, have been characterized soil andsoil that with all he owns as aPeruvian . .[4]. intimate unionand the of spirit blood the the of musician, the with his of born rhapsodists, of free nationalism a a nationalism perceived in more than one young composer; atonality within free conceptions. Finally, marked a the future i.e. factor, present, our is which that be would factor under the influence of a westernisingthe tendency; typical ing: the burden factor would the echo be of our musicians The essential features ofthis new generation arethe follow Diagram ofdifferentmusicbasedonthebooksArguedas,which LEONARDO MUSICJOURNAL, Vol. 27, pp. 93–97,2017 - 93 Fig. 2. César Bolaños, in the Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Fig. 3. The 1960s generation (from back to front): César Bolaños, Francisco 1966. (© Arch. Luis Alvarado) Pulgar Vidal, Leopoldo La Rosa and Edgar Valcárcel. (© Arch. Luis Alvarado)
Edgar Valcárcel called this process of contact with the in- toire [8]. Far from the destructiveness traditionalists attach ternational academic world “a stage of updating” [5] a crucial to them, these distances from a current tradition also con- moment in the context of Peruvian music. This new genera- tribute to its own conservation, perpetuating conventional tion of composers (see Fig. 3) was not only the accession to forms by giving them renewed strength. The conception of a musical cultural model but also the beginning of musi- a new series of musical transformations was, of course, in cal searching and experimentation. These artists wanted to close connection with a new way of understanding Peruvian distinguish themselves from the articulate expression that identity, of how to play and present it [9]. identified the previous musical generation, known as the in- In 1964, Bolaños composed his first piece on tape at the digenist movement, which used pentatonic scales. The claim CLAEM, Intensidad y Altura, based on a poem of the same to represent a national genre of music could not be reduced name by Peruvian poet César Vallejo. This was the first elec- to the mere quote of a folk melody attached to a classical troacoustic piece created at the center, while its laboratory piece. Instead, such pretensions also required an awareness was still in its initial stages of development, and it was the first of the new modes of being that urban life had established. In electronic piece produced by a Peruvian. Although the use of 1956, a commentator wrote the following about the premiere folklore was not vital to Bolaños, his work could be read as of the work Ensayo by César Bolaños: a sign of the social transformations that Peru experienced in the 1950s and 1960s. This is what the pieceHomenaje al Cerro For César Bolaños, musical nationalism, regarded from the San Cosme (1957) suggests. Bolaños recalled of that time: point of view of indigenous people, is ineffective. He thinks that for the coastal musician, born as he was in Lima, a My father had a business in the town of El Porvenir; that’s city with enough cars and noises to drive anybody crazy, where I established contact with the world of Cerro San it is incoherent to believe in a vulgar autochthony, when, Cosme. I was struck by the recent invasion of the Andean as in his case, “he does not even directly know a tinya or world, they were coming to Lima. There were a few stands a quena” [6]. along Aviación Avenue. In the central part, there where the gardens should be, wooden stalls with speakers were sell- This way of thinking, diametrically opposed to that of ing music that you could hear throughout the Avenue [10]. other Peruvian composers, makes Bolaños’s music regarded as highly dissonant and modern within our field [7]. During the following years, Bolaños used electroacoustic media, and, even later, computers in his musical works. He CLAEM and the Birth of Peruvian created works for tape only and mixed pieces, including live Electroacoustic Music electronics and multimedia resources, in some of them. One The conformation of the CLAEM and its openness to the of Bolaños’s most representative works during his stay at the world was based on the facilities that the U.S. government CLAEM was Interpolaciones, a four-channel work for electric offered through the Alliance for Progress, a program es- guitar and magnetic band (Fig. 4). tablished by John F. Kennedy. Its purpose was to promote The guitar used in Interpolaciones did not have the con- Latin American art and culture, in an attempt to counter the ventional speaker of an electric guitar; instead it had a device emergence of guerrillas inspired by the Cuban revolution, composed of micro-switches, controlled by the guitarist’s which had influenced many intellectuals and artists in Latin foot, that could place the amplified guitar sound in any of America, including Bolaños. the six speakers in the room. The speakers could also ro- We can contend that periods of distancing from tradition tate by rotating the guitarist’s foot. The work was structured are followed by clear reinstatements of that tradition, which from a set of values and a geometric ratio. The instrumental- recover traditional elements that had become marginal. It ist translated these approximate values and heights that fell could not have been otherwise, since, as Steven Feld notes, within a certain area [11]. it is only through the history of hearing that a listener can Interpolaciones was made for playback systems incorpo- recognize whether a song can be considered within a reper- rated in the audiovisual room of the di Tella Institute. It was
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_01026 by guest on 02 October 2021 Valcárcel was studying electronic music at the Computer Music Center (CMC) at Columbia University (Fig. 5), thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a student of Vladimir Ussachevsky and the Argentinian Alcides Lanza. Beyond the light effects by Mario Acha, the piece stood out because of its use of visual poems slide-projected and composed by Romualdo himself. Among the 117 projections that night, there were images of Túpac Amaru’s face in color, which gave the presentation a pop flair that was in perfect tune with the posters designed by Jesús Ruiz Durand for the revolutionary government of Juan Velasco Alvarado. A note, published in Oiga magazine, was titled Canto Fig. 4. Interpolaciones for electric guitar and magnetic tape, 1966. Coral: Arte de Vanguardia, Arte Revolucionario (Choral (© Arch. Cesar Bolaños) Chant: Vanguard Art, Revolutionary Art) [14]. It seemed as though the piece embodied the nationalist spirit of Velasco’s firstperformed in its original version in 1966, during the third government, and it became exemplary of the age. However, concert of the Fifth Festival of Contemporary Music of the Valcárcel had already written the first version of the Canto Institute. Years later, he presented his work Ñacahuasu (1970), Coral in 1965, three years before the military junta led by a work that included recited excerpts from the diary of Che Velasco dismissed president Fernando Belaúnde Terry from Guevara in Bolivia. During a meeting of Latin American Music office and the image of commander José Gabriel Condorcan- held in Cuba in September 1972, Bolaños said: “The fundamen- qui became symbolic of this deed. tal problem of Latin American music is not in the assimilation In an interview from 1975, regarding the premiere of his of techniques, but [in] finding a way to express the convulsive Choral Chant to Túpac Amaru, Valcárcel was asked: “Is this political and social reality of this continent” [12]. revolutionary music? Has it been composed as a contribu- Latin America and the assertion of its cultural indepen- tion to the Peruvian Revolution?” to which the composer dence was a constant concern for Bolaños throughout his responded: career as a composer and researcher. As early as 1964, in an interview with Enrique Pinilla, he said: One might ask the same question about the song for Túpac Amaru. This piece was written 10 years ago, when there I do believe that there is a Latin American style that is al- were no signs of the revolutionary changes. It was merely a ready displayed in folklore, like in any other work, that the personal approach, of myself to the character, an intuition author freely uses atonality, polytonalism, dodecaphony, of what might lie ahead [15]. etc. Admittedly, European culture weighs significantly on our own, because we are in a process of assimilation, but Later Valcárcel declared: “I am against all the revolutionary nonetheless the Latin American personality exists primar- posing that I encounter daily in folks who sit at a desk and ily in the rhythmic vitality that is not present in the already worn-out European avant-garde [13].
Choral Chant to Túpac Amaru In October 1968, the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces was installed in Peru under the command of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, with a nationalistic and anti-imperialist political profile. As a result, a series of re- forms that had been historically pending were carried out under the title of the Agricultural Reform, which sought to eliminate forms of landlordism that had been the basis of the formation of elites. More than 11 million hectares in Peru were expropriated and given to cooperatives and rural com- munities. The cultural field was not to be exempted from the reforms. As a result of the Education Reform in 1970, the Composition workshop at the National Conservatory of Music was created. In October 1970, the National Symphonic Orchestra pre- miered Canto Coral a Túpac Amaru II (Choral Chant to Túpac Amaru II) by Edgar Valcárcel, a piece for choir, percussion, electronic sounds, projections and lights, that incorporated a sound sample of Alejandro Romualdo reciting a poem he had Fig. 5. Edgar Valcárcel in the electronic music laboratory in Columbia, 1966. written in 1959. The piece had been composed in 1968 while (© Arch. Luis Alvarado)
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_01026 by guest on 02 October 2021 are ‘revolutionary’ but who are anything but revolutionary on mulation of the Andean national identity, and his influence the inside. This is why, compared to them, I am not revolu- on Peruvian vanguard artists during the 1960s greatly influ- tionary” [16]. Ironically, the creator of Choral Chant to Túpac enced the formation of a particular national identity [21]. Amaru would have to bear the slogan of the agrarian reform, The aesthetic of Peruvian electroacoustic music is reflected which was a quote of Gabriel Condorcanqui: “Farmer, the in the quantity and character of works from the 1960s and landlord will no longer feed from your poverty.” 1970s. The ability to realize work according to an indigenous character was of utmost importance to the composers of The Transculturized Feeling the time. This is reflected in an interview with Valcárcel:
The foreigner who listens to it [the song] considers it a little While visiting McGill University, where Alcides Lanza wild; the artist, no matter how foreign he is, perceives the taught, I composed Flor Sancayo, for piano and electronic deep power of the singing; and he who has always lived in sounds. The title means “Little Flower Growing in the these towns, even if he is civilized, he feels the world as il- Mountains.” I was born in the mountains, by the shores of luminated, animated and shaken by a human emotion [17]. Lake Titicaca, in an area where you can find little flowers [22]. The perspective of the ethnographic or historical auditory subject, deepened by Seeger via the “ethnographic ear” con- In reviewing a series of works by composers of this genera- cept [18], is important to bear in mind because it opens paths tion, we can say that they were conquered and seduced by that allow us to suspend the belief in our own ontologies and the sound and visual landscape of a geography unknown at to draw new ones, often suggesting or configuring surpris- the time, one capable of transmitting throughout their bod- ing ones. This contributes to the current discourse of these ies of work the starting point for pieces of a hybrid charac- theories in the framework of the so-called ontological turn of ter, which was unusual in a technology-dependent type of anthropology, especially within the sound space—the social music. Until then, these composers had essentially thrown interaction between humans and their environment and the themselves over to working in a traditionally Western style various beings and entities that populate it. and composition method of producing music, an act that After analyzing popular culture’s strategies to integrate resulted in an early attempt to categorize them as compos- with modernity, anthropologist García Canclini concluded ers in a “hegemonic discipline” [23]. In short, what I intend that there is no dichotomy between modern and traditional to analyze is not the veracity of the discourses of this or that cultures. He proposes that traditional cultures are constantly interpretation or composer. Rather, I propose an inspec- entering and leaving modernity, and that modern cultures tion of how and why these types of discourses are laid out, require tradition in order to be validated [19]. The educa- for example, discourses of continuity and recovery such as tion at the di Tella Institute was not exempt from this broad technoshamanism, of a return to the source or roots, and an framework. Although the center’s aesthetic policy presented invention of practices that are intended to revive ancestral itself as one of open universality, which assumed the image of practices by the use of new languages. It is important to note a credential that enabled access to that illusory development, that technologies did not require these strategies, because one should not forget that the fellows of the di Tella Institute machine time cannot be questioned (at least not according to came from Latin American societies. These societies had Ernst). They have very different discourses and thus depend recently begun to reclaim their national identities through on different practices [24]. music, as stated by Aurelio Tello: The medium of electroacoustic music has seen relative The idea of creating a “national” art was not exclusive of liberty in the choice of sound, and thus a composer faces one Latin American country in particular. “Nationalism,” “an acoustic palette as broad as the environment itself” [25]. that position that attempted to establish identity principles Due to the nature of the electroacoustic genre—especially for our peoples, dressed in tonalities, in chromaticism, in in South America and, in this particular case, Peru—it is impressionism, in polytonality, in neo-modalism and even now common among composers to choose or borrow sounds in atonality, was not a trend that developed in Argentina, from the ethnic environment. But it is also an implicative Brazil, Cuba and Mexico, but one which responded to the option, determined by the decisions of abstraction and the undeferrable need to consolidate the artistic mark of our imposition of the narratives associated with the piece. As people as the result of a process of search for identity that Michael Bull states in Sounding Out the City: “The use of dates back to the 19th century [20]. sound technologies can be understood as part of the West- ern project of appropriation/control of space, place and the Peruvian art history has shown that the artistic medium ‘other’ ” [26]. of a given time is strongly influenced by the artists’ cultural The case laid out here is an attempt to delve into history environment; influences originating from environmental or to evaluate the extent to which it was—and is—possible to musical sources that, in time, have become representative sidestep aesthetic mandates to make space for an experience of the culture. The most relevant examples are José Carlos resulting from an aesthetic de- and re-sensitization in the Mariátegui, from the 1920s, and José María Arguedas, from wake of sound stimuli (soundscapes) that, according to these the 1940s through the 1960s. Arguedas’s introduction to the mandates and moments, belong to the order of things that Andean worldview, his knowledge of the language and refor- are tangible and intangible.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_01026 by guest on 02 October 2021 References and Notes 16 See Ref. [15].
The title of this article is taken from the sounds made by the Sicu, 17 José María Arguedas, “Canto kechwa: Con un ensayo sobre la capa- an Andean wind instrument, through a click of the tongue while it cidad de creación artística del pueblo indio y mestizo” (Lima: Club is being blown (as in the repetition of the phoneme “ta” or “chá”). del Libro Peruano, 1976) p. 88.
1 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Repro- 18 Anthony Seeger, “Sudamérica y sus mundos audibles, Cosmologías duction (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2003). y prácticas sonoras de los pueblos indígenas,” Estudios INDIANA 2 Richard Grusin, The Non-Human Turn (Minneapolis: University of 8 (Berlin: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Minnesota Press, 2015). 2015) pp. 27–36. 3 Conrado Silva de Marco, “Música electroacústica na América La- 19 Néstor Canclini García, “Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar tina,” Art 13 (1985) pp. 105–115. Available on
8 Steven Feld, “Communication, music, and speech about music,” 22 Robert Gluck, “Touching Sound, Like a Sculpture: Conversation in Music Grooves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) with Peruvian Composer Edgar Valcárcel,” eContact! 15, No. 4 pp. 77–95. (2006):
9 Julio Mendívil, “De calandrias, ríos y pinkuyllus. La música en la 23 Robert Gluck, “Between, Within and Across Cultures,” Organised obra de José María Arguedas,” In Die Subversive Kraft der Menschen- Sound 13, No. 2, 141–152 (2008). rechte: Rainer Thule zum radikalen Jubiläum, Niko Huhle and Teresa Huhle, eds., (Oldenburg: Paulo Freire Verlag, 2015). 24 Wolfgang Ernst, “Media Archaeography: Method and Machine ver- 10 Luis Alvarado et al., “Tiempo y Obra de César Bolaños,” Edición sus the History and Narrative of Media,” in Digital Memory and the Centro Cultural de España en Lima (2009). Archive (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2013) pp. 55–74:
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