Copyright by Michael Seamus O'brien 2010
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Copyright by Michael Seamus O’Brien 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Michael Seamus O’Brien certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Disciplining the Popular: New Institutions for Argentine Music Education as Cultural Systems Committee: _______________________________ Robin Moore, Supervisor _______________________________ Veit Erlmann _______________________________ Stephen Slawek _______________________________ Ward Keeler _______________________________ Eugenia Costa-Giomi Disciplining the Popular: New Institutions for Argentine Music Education as Cultural Systems by Michael Seamus O’Brien, B.A. B.M. M.M. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2010 For Julia Acknowledgements This dissertation is based on field research that was supported by a William S. Livingston Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin, and also informed by previous fieldwork supported by a Tinker Foundation Grant. I am additionally grateful to the ethnomusicology department at the University of Texas for providing me with the assistant instructor position that funded part of my writing period. My dissertation committee, Professors Veit Erlmann, Stephen Slawek, Ward Keeler, Eugenia Costa-Giomi, and particularly my advisor Robin Moore have all provided steadfast support and guidance through this process. I also remain grateful to have had the opportunity to study with the late Gerard Béhague. I regret that he did not live to see my graduate career to completion. His steadfast devotion to scholarship and to his students, and his indomitable spirit remain models for me. In Argentina, Dr. Ana Lucía Frega and Gabriel Gil of the Academia Nacional de Educación provided early support and orientation. Dr. Frega’s critical assessment of my project was also an insightful and helpful perspective. I am heavily indebted to all of the administrators, teachers, and students of the Escuela de Música Popular de Avellaneda and the Tango/Folklore department of the Conservatorio Superior de Música “Manuel de Falla.” Javier Cohen, Ariel Goldemberg, Ricardo Cantore, “Toro” Stafforini and Fernando Diéguez, Marta Sima, Patricio Villarejo, Nicolás Ledesma and Lilián Saba all deserve particular mention for their patience, warmth, friendship and generosity of spirit. So do many students who for reasons of confidentiality I regret I cannot list under their real names here. The members of the three bands featured in Chapter 5 – Zamacuco, la Biyuya, and Orquesta Criolla Pura Muña – have been especially helpful. I’ve been fortunate to develop long and lasting friendships with a handful of musicians who over the course of the last decade have helped me to understand more about the music and culture of Argentina than I could begin to quantify. I am profoundly grateful to know them: Hernán Ríos and Silvana “Quichi” Reina, Mariela Nieto, Pablo “El Colo” Dichiera and Marina Baigorria, and Gustavo Trillini. I am also indebted to my fellow graduate students at UT; the sense of camaraderie and lively discussions have enriched me intellectually and kept me (mostly) sane: Alfredo v Colman, Emily Pinkerton, Mark Lomanno, Ryan McCormack, Sonia Gaind, Huáscar García, Dan Sharp, Kathryn Metz, Ryan Kangas, and April Prince. Dan Sharp and Kathryn Metz deserve a second mention for countless hours of shop talk and critical reading of my work, to say nothing of unfailing friendship. No less important to my development have been the times playing music with many of the above students, and also Cory Gavito and the long list of musicians who made their way through Bailengua; Genevieve Frisch, Karla Hamelin, Robert Honstein, Melissa Becker and K.C. Scharnberg; and the members of my tango quintet, Doug Brown, Amber Dolphin, Jamie Davis and August Jirovec. I’ve run more than a thousand miles while writing this dissertation and often found that the shortest path to the end of a vexing paragraph was five miles through the snow. Thank you to Mike Dougherty, Madeleine Fairbairn, Tom Deits and the Movin’ Shoes gang for accompanying me in this journey. I couldn’t ask for a more loving and supportive family. My sisters Erin and Caitlin, my stepfather Brent have all been a great source of support. My mother, Cathy Kooistra, deserves special mention: for her unfailing love and steadfast faith in me and my work, and for her instilling in me by example an interest in and respect for teaching as a profession and as an art worthy of taking seriously as a scholar. I’ve been fortunate to gain a second family by marriage during this dissertation process, too: Martin McReynolds and Norma Pérez McReynolds are as fine a pair of suegros as a guy could ask for. I owe them two principal debts of gratitude here: for the use of their lovely Buenos Aires apartment during my fieldwork, and for raising the daughter who deserves the pride of place of last mention: my wife, confidante, editor, photographer, and unfailing compañera de ruta in this and all adventures, Julia McReynolds. vi Disciplining the Popular: New Institutions for Argentine Music Education as Cultural Systems Michael Seamus O’Brien, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: Robin Moore This dissertation focuses on a recent but growing movement in Argentina, state-sponsored formal institutions of popular music education. The musics taught in these schools – tango, jazz, and Argentine folk idioms – have historically been excluded from the country’s formal music education systems. Recent moves to standardize and legitimize these musics in this new institutional context raise questions of canon formation, pedagogical praxis, aesthetics and musical meaning that have implications far beyond the classrooms where they are implemented. I examine two of these schools based in and around the capital city of Buenos Aires: the Escuela de Música Popular de Avellaneda, and the Tango and Folklore department of the Conservatorio Superior de Música “Manuel de Falla.” I adopt an ethnographic approach that considers broad structural and policy issues of power distribution, state intervention, and cultural nationalism. I also examine how these structures play out in discourse and practice within and beyond the classroom, shaped by and in turn vii shaping students’ and teachers’ aesthetics, politics, and subject positions. I then analyze the output of several musical groups composed of current students and recent graduates of these programs, exploring the notion of an emerging institutional aesthetic and the extent to which these institutions act as homogenizing influences or engender creative divergence. Finally, applying Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a field of cultural production, I question the extent to which this new “música popular” is truly popular, ultimately arguing that it occupies a sort of third space between mass culture and high culture, replicating some avant-garde assumptions about the role of art as anti-commercial, yet simultaneously embracing a symbolic economy that valorizes populist and subaltern identities and ideologies. viii Table of Contents Introduction..........................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: The music school as culture..........................................................................................29 Chapter 2: Sociohistorical context...................................................................................................51 Chapter 3: Structures of Power, Authority and Hegemony.........................................................75 Chapter 4: Aesthetics and ideology in classroom discourse and practice................................140 Chapter 5: Putting it into practice: Three música popular bands after the academy........................................................193 Chapter 6: Música popular in the field of cultural production .....................................................243 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................265 Appendix – Curricular Plans ..........................................................................................................274 Bibliography......................................................................................................................................276 Vita .....................................................................................................................................................286 ix List of Figures Figure 3.1: Doorway art at the EMPA…………………………………………………….93 Figure 3.2: Plaques memorializing victims of dictatorship outside EMPA…………...…….93 Figure 3.3: “School in conflict” painted on EMPA entrance………………………………94 Figure 3.4: Profesor “Toro” Stafforini accompanies a student in an ad hoc charango workshop during the period of suspended classes at EMPA………………………………..…………………………………....121 Figure 3.5: The main corridor in the Falla building…………………………………….....131 Figure 5.1: Front and back covers to la Biyuya’s album Buenosairece…………………….....197 Figure 5.2: La Biyuya in performance…………………………………………………….201 Figure 5.3: Singer Marina Baigorria………………………………………………………201 Figure 5.4: Bordoneo pattern as played on electric bass………………………………….…204 Figure 5.5: Introduction to la Biyuya’s “Buenosairece”…………………………………...207