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NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

THE CONCEPT OF IDENTITY: AN APPROACH TO LATIN AMERICAN MUSIC

A RESEARCH DOCUMENT

SUBMITTED TO THE BIENEN SCHOOL OF MUSIC IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS Program of Composition

José Miguel Arellano EVANSTON, ILLINOIS February, 2018

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

ABSTRACT

The Concept of Identity: An Approach to Latin American Music

José Miguel Arellano

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the idea of building a Latin American musical discourse has returned to the artistic discussion, taking into account the peculiarities of cultural syncretism that manifest in the different countries of the region. From the most diverse aesthetics and through different musical media, a great number of composers have begun to rethink the possibility of articulating their artistic language through different mechanisms that could be considered as typical of Latin American culture: rediscovery of Aboriginal music, utilization of vernacular instruments, non-tempered melodic and harmonic systems, rhythmic irregularities, and mixture between art forms among many different other approaches.

This dissertation proposes a historical review of different moments in Latin American history in which composers, artists and intellectuals tried to elaborate a local identity, analyzing the diverse problems that might have arisen from the cultural, social, and political contexts of the different periods studied. A second part of this work will be the articulation of a personal approach to the study of music and processes of identity formation in Latin America, with a special emphasis on the particular case of Chile and its development from the late 19th century to the present day. However, rather than describing a theoretical framework for an analytical approach to the study of classical music in Latin America, this dissertation aims to contribute to the discussion about the need to reflect on the possibility of constructing a genuine local art, considering the specific characteristics of the region, from a historical, social, political and cultural perspective.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my gratitude to Jay Alan Yim, my advisor, for his guidance and for his great knowledge about music and art in general. I also thank the members of my committee,

Hans Thomalla and Ryan Dohoney, for all their help.

I would like to make a special mention to Professor Beltrán Undurraga, for his teachings on sociology and our conversations about Jacques Rancière and Pierre Bourdieu, which have served to delve into relevant aspects of this dissertation

Also, thanks to Professor Gabriel Castillo, for our conversations about art and aesthetics in

Latin America.

Finally, I would like to thank the wonderful people that I had the good fortune to meet in

Chicago: Craig Davis Pinson, Luis Fernando Amaya, Morgan Krauss, Juan Campoverde, Luis

Fred, Eric Singh, Brandon Quarles, and many others.

I dedicate this work to Rocío, Elisa and Sofía.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 The Concept of Identity 1.1 The Case of Latin America 6 1.2 The Building of a Nation: What does music have to do with politics? 9 1.2.1 Institutional Configuration 10 1.2.2 The Political Side of a Musical Work 13

2 Latin America in the 19th Century 2.1 The Construction of an Identity 16 2.2 Western Art Music in Latin America 17 2.3 Music After the Independence Wars 20 2.4 Federico Guzmán: The Quest for a Chilean Identity 21

3 Whose Identity Are We Talking About? 2.1 A Musicological Approach 26 3.2 Latin America’s Fin de Siècle 30 3.3 Identity vs Modernity: The Normative Role of the Arts 34

4 Latin America From the 20th Century to the Present Day 4.1 Brief Historical Overview 39 4.2 Pedro Humberto Allende 39 4.2.1 La Voz de las Calles 41 4.2.2 12 Tonadas de Carácter Popular Chileno 45 4.3 Carlos Isamitt and Eduardo Cáceres: An Approach to Indigenous Músic 48

5 Towards a Sociology of Music in Latin America 5.1 Interdisciplinary Approach 53 5.2 National Customs or Social Identities? 56 5.3 Cultural Capital and the Construction of the Identity 62

6 Preliminary Conclusions 73

7 References 75

A Rocío, Elisa y Sofía

1. The Concept of Identity

1.1 The Case of Latin America Identity is a concept that shies away from any clear and precise definition. Innumerable pages have been written trying to define this idea that seems to manifest itself and come to life in multiple and diverse ways, even among members of the same culture. The issue becomes even more complex when art is used as a platform for the reflection or identity-representation of a particular group of people.

Simon Frith1 has a very interesting approach to the study of the relations between music and possible representations of identity. Focused on the specific case of popular music he says the following:

“The academic study of popular music has been limited by the assumption that the sounds must somehow 'reflect' or 'represent' the people. The analytic problem has been to trace the connections back, from the work, the score, the song, the beat, to the social groups who produce and consume it. What's been at issue is homology, some sort of structural relationship between material and musical forms.”2

Throughout this work I will refer to identity3 as a set of cultural, social and political characteristics that are formed over time due to multiple historical events, and that determine certain modes of behavior of a specific group of people.

1 An English sociologist and musicologist whose main focus of study is related to various aspects of popular music, such as reception, identity and social experiences. Since 2006 he is Tovey Chair of Music at the University of Edinburgh (source: http://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/prof-simon-frith)

2 Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. Questions of Cultural Identity. (London, UK: SAGE Publishers, 2006): 108.

3 For a detailed analysis of the evolution of the concept of identity I recommend a paper by James D. Fearon, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, entitled: What is Identity (As We Now Use the Word)?

It is necessary for me to clarify that there are many other points of view to this concept, and that some of them may be in opposition to the definition that I am using to structure this work. Jorge Larraín,4 for instance, in his book Identidad y Modernidad en América Latina

(Identity and Modernity in Latin America), analyzes some of the many different approaches to the subject, focusing on the specific case of Latin America, and categorizing them depending on their specific situation in the historic evolution of the region.5 For example, he describes the

Indigenist Movement from the late 19th and early 20th century, which locates identity in an oppressed past, in the loss of a set of traditions and ways of conceiving life strongly linked to the indigenous inhabitants of a region. Thereby, for the indigenists, the concept of identity starts from a reconstruction of the past and must go through a rediscovery of the lost roots that were destroyed as a consequence of the European invasion. Thus (as Larraín would say) identity is located and formed—once and for all—in the past.6

For the Chilean sociologist, however, one common element in each of the different manifestations that has occurred in the region is, precisely, this constant search for identity.

Regardless of whether it is understood as a past phenomenon that must be reconstructed, or of a concept that has to be articulated looking towards the future, one of the fundamental

4 Jorge Larraín is a Chilean sociologist whose research focus centers around the concepts of ideology, identity and modernity in Latin America. He received his PhD. from Sussex University in the UK, and currently serves as director of the Social Science Department at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile.

5 Jorge Larraín describes four different types of approximation to identity: 1) Constructivism: discursively constructed character of identity and therefore openness to any change. 2) Essentialism: fixed character, closed to any change of identity. 3) Historic/structural: entrenched practices of a group. It can change in a materially conditioned way. Constructivism focuses its attention in the discourse as a mechanism to create identity. Constructivism focuses its attention in the discourse as a mechanism to create identity, whether political, economic, cultural, etc. (Identidad y Modernidad en América Latina, pag. 47-48)

6 Jorge Larraín Identidad y Modernidad en América Latina. (Mexico D.F., Mexico: Editorial Océano de Mexico, 2004), 57.

characteristics of the Latin American people is this constant quest for shared cultural symbols that could help boost the artistic, political, economic and cultural development of the region.

If we analyze the history since the early days of colonialism, we can see that the discussion about identity has always arisen with greater force during periods of crisis, when shared cultural codes arr threatened by outside influences. During the 19th century, for example, wars for independence meant constant conflict for Latin American societies, in which they had to begin to define (re-define), under sometimes uncertain parameters, the various paths that the nascent nations would follow, in terms of their social and cultural construction. If we think in purely musical terms, we will see that the 19th century is one of the decisive centuries not only for the formation of certain aesthetic and political movements, such as Nationalism, Indigenism and Europeanism, Criollism etc., but also for the impact that those orientations would have in the different social segments of Latin American nations. By this I refer to the way in which these aesthetic and political definitions would shape certain courses of action that had a detrimental effect on the musical development of the region: the marginalization of certain folkloric or popular musical styles, mostly associated with the lower strata; the assimilation of

European aesthetics; and the elimination of indigenous culture within the most institutionalized artistic discourses.

The concept of identity became a desired goal, during the initial years of Latin

American nations, after independence. From seemingly distant places such as politics and the arts, this idea of shaping an individual voice, of articulating the ideas, emotions, pains and histories of a group of people through different means, became a central element within the public discussion. If this notion of identity was understood independently through the discourse

(artistic, political, etc.) as a construction or as a reflection of something previously constituted, the fact is that its presence, towards the middle and end of the 19th century, was strongly noticed.

The Chilean musicologist and philosopher Gabriel Castillo describes in his book Las

Estéticas Nocturnas (Nocturnal Aesthetics) how by the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, through literary means a somewhat fictitious image of the identity of the Chilean people begins to be created. It is possible to appreciate, through a wide range of literary examples, the need to build a collective imaginary not only for the purpose of articulating and shaping this concept of identity, but also with the idea of positioning the country, in some way as a reflection of European society. In his book Castillo describes:

“...the real contempt of the Chileans for the Indian did not change during the Republic; whose virtues were much more celebrated as long as they (Chileans) did not take a Mapuche surname or could be physically assimilated to them. The historical appropriation of the Indian will be much stronger, the longer he remains as 'another'..."7

1.2 The Building of a Nation: What does music have to do with politics? Various musicians, artists, and theorists from the social sciences have referred to the ability of music, and art in general, to articulate ideas and concepts that could surpass a purely technical dimension. That is why politics has been part of numerous musical discourses that, with greater or lesser success, have tried to give life through sound to numerous concepts that could seem as alien to musical and creative activity. If we think on the observation that German composer Helmut Lachenmann makes about the necessity of aesthetically evaluating the consequences of the Second Viennese School, implying that there is a true art form capable of projecting sincere beauty, by revealing the incongruities of current social conditions:

“such evaluation was urgently needed in order to clarify the distinction between humanity's legitimate and profoundly rooted demand for art as the experience of beauty, and its false satisfaction and alienation in the form of art ‘fodder’ manufactured by the bourgeoisie and preserved in a society of repressed contradictions.”8

7 Gabriel Castillo Fadic, Las Estéticas Nocturnas: Ensayos Republicano y Representación Cultural en Chile e Iberoamérica (Santiago, Chile: Frasis Editores, 2003), 23.

8 Helmut Lachenmann, “The ‘Beautiful’ in Music Today” Tempo New Ser., No.135. (Dec, 1980), 20.

From my point of view, the relationship that exists between music and any political dimension can be analyzed from two perspectives that—although closely related to each other—speak about different aspects of the cultural construction of a given society. Both perspectives are intended to reveal the fundamental characteristics with which the cultural structures of the region have been built. Despite the specific peculiarities of each Latin

American nation, these two ways of understanding the relationship between music and politics offer analytical approaches that can help shed light on the study of the construction of musical identity within the region. I will refer to these two perspectives as the 1) Institutional

Configuration and 2) The Political Side of a Musical Work.

1.2.1 Institutional Configuration One of the most common ways through which politics, art, and culture come to life is by institutional configuration. In the specific case of music, and the way in which it is permeated by politics, this institutional configuration operates tacitly: its mechanisms of oppression or freedom are not so clearly evident. In Latin America this cultural domination in music is due to the consequences of European colonialism, which can be understood as a poor critical reflection on the need to elaborate an individual musical and aesthetic discourse taking into consideration the social, political and cultural reality of the region. Even though this gradually began to reverse due to the growth of nationalist movements in different countries across Latin America, gaining even more force when the Mexican Revolution broke out in

1910, transforming the cultural panorama drastically from Mexico to Chile, it is possible to declare that before the decades of the 1940’s and even 1930’s Latin America was culturally subjugated to the ideas and aesthetic notions transplanted from Europe.

If we review the musical history of Latin America towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, we can observe that in different countries similar processes took place in order to establish the cultural and musical foundations of the region, replicating what

had been built in Europe. Thus, most nations established music schools (some of which would later become national conservatories), musical societies, symphony orchestras, concert halls, etc. All of this cultural and institutional architecture had the purpose of contributing to the formation of these nascent Latin American nations according to the ideas of modernity represented by the old continent. For example, in the case of Chile, we see the creation of the

National Conservatory in 1850, the Bach Society in 1924, and the National Symphony

Orchestra in 1940.9

For the Cuban writer and thinker Alejo Carpentier, the process of institutionalization that was structured according to the logic of European culture meant a rejection of national values. That is to say, those musical practices alien to Europe were excluded from the official and academic discourse. Consequently, it could be inferred that what the nationalist movements tried to do was bring these peripheral musical practices back into institutional apparatuses.

However, the translation or reformulation of certain specific aspects of popular and folk music has mostly been carried out under the aesthetic perspective of the West, and in my view what was created were works that due to their hybrid nature were difficult to understand as representations of identity, given that they were not reflections of a social group. In other words, these types of music were constructions of identity without a position within the social space. I will expand this argument in section No.5 of this dissertation, at which point I discuss the relationship between music and sociology.

This institutional framework (which continues to this day) has had a significant impact on constructing an aesthetic and artistic discourse erected with the purpose of artificially installing an alien modernity. This concept of modernity did not occur as an organic and natural process, based on the historical and social reality of Latin American countries. On the contrary,

9 Memoria Chilena, “Conservatorio de Música,” DIBAM Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, accessed January 26, 2018, http://www.memoriachilena.cl/602/w3-article-93313.html

it was understood as a revealed truth. Europe was the paradigm of modernity and consequently nations that had the intention of achieving a similar state of development had to replicate what had been built there. Therefore, a Latin American creation that has the pretense of positioning itself with a local discourse on identity must necessarily consider these political and aesthetic aspects.

For Gerard Behague,10 the long years of European oppression decisively impacted the artistic and musical ethos of Latin American composers, from their way of understanding the role and technical function of music to the relationship that they would establish with the folkloric material of their own culture. In an October 1990 conference given in San Juan, Puerto

Rico, which would be later published in an article titled La Problemática de la posición socio- política del compositor en la música nueva en Latinoamérica (The Problem of the Socio- political Position of the Composer in New Music in Latin America), Behague describes how this footprint of colonialism would affect the aesthetic mindset of some composers at the turn of the 19th century. He says the following:

“The mentality of the colonized was such that composers and historians of music praised those who had the ability to master the techniques of European composition...the skill of perfect technical and aesthetic imitation was valued, without realizing the colonialist imposition.”11 It is important to note that despite the inclusion of material that could be considered as characteristic of or belonging to some Latin American cultures, for Behague this is still conceived through the filter of European aesthetics.

10 Musicologist and Ethnomusicologist (1937-2005) who wrote extensively about different aspects of music and culture in Latin America. Behague completed his PhD at Tulane University, and taught at different institutions in the US, such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Texas at Austin.

11 Gerard Béhague, “La problemática de la Posición Socio-Política del Compositor en la Música Nueva en Latinoamérica,” Latin American Music Review, vol. 27 no. 1 (2006): 47-48.

“Nationalist ideology has often been the target of polemical critics and arguments, supposedly to yield to the pressure of "imperialist logic" by favoring folkloric compositions with a commercial purpose, cultivating an exoticism for tourists, for consumption both of the metropolis and of the local societies themselves.”12

Thus the relationship between music and politics, based on this cultural configuration, is determined by a way of understanding music (and art in general, at least in the Latin

American case) as a search for liberation and rupture with strict European aesthetic ties, in order to enable a construction of one or more musical languages that can account for the social and cultural diversity of Latin American nations.

1.2.2 The Political Side of a Musical Work Music enters a dialectical relationship with politics every time it manifests—through different procedures, whether technical, narrative or structural—the contradictions or mechanisms of oppression of a cultural or institutional configuration, that is, when it becomes a vehicle in the service of revealing the foundations that support the aesthetic, social and cultural logic of a certain social group or given society. The need, and behavioral mechanism of a political dimension of art is eloquently developed by Walter Benjamin in his work “The

Author as a Producer.”13

In this work Benjamin attempts to redefine the figure of the artist within society by attributing to them a central role in shaping a new way of understanding art, the production process, and class struggle. He tries to explain the social need for understanding artistic activity not only from its ideological foundations, but also as a mechanism of social transformation: as

12 Ibíd.: 49.

13 Rodney Livingstone (trans.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 768-781.

a vehicle for revolution. Otherwise (according to Benjamin) any attempt at transformation may result in a counterrevolution.

To explain his ideas regarding the role of art, and the position of the artist within society, he coins the concept of refunctionalization, which can be understood from different perspectives. On one hand, it involves rethinking the social situation of the work of art itself and its purpose within the apparatus of mass production, reflective of the prevailing capitalist society, and therefore another mechanism of oppression. On the other hand, it also aims to redefine and categorize the social function of the artist as an individual who plays an important role in the social struggle. Obviously, author and work are two objects that are directly related; however, it seems important to note the distinction drawn by Benjamin in his refunctionalization of the artistic activity. First of all, we have the artist who entertains and who becomes a binding link within the mass production chain that dominates the cultural scene.

Secondly, there is the artist who, like Bertolt Brecht, is opposed to the state of stagnation of creative procedures, numbed and tainted by the capitalist system, and proposes a breakdown in the way of conceiving an artwork, inviting the public into constant participation in the artistic process.

This is how the relationship between quality and political tendency is erected, as one of the cornerstones of paradigmatic change that Benjamin proposes. And the key question is the role that the artwork has within the production process and its contribution to reconfiguring a new way of thinking about it. For the artist the tension produced between political tendency and quality is solved by the development of technique, that is, through the progress of elements that form the basis of artistic language (literary, musical, etc.). For

Benjamin, as social conditions are deeply determined by current production processes, a break from the status quo is indispensable. The artist must play a key role in building up new technical

and production procedures, which according to Benjamin will have a positive impact upon a social reconfiguration seeking to disengage from the prevailing capitalism.

These ideas about the role of artists and their art within society help us analyze more deeply the situation of Latin America. If we understand its institutional configuration and its political and aesthetic consequences as components of a power structure that does not allow the region's cultural essence to surface, it is then necessary through the arts to unveil those mechanisms. The nationalist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries overlooked this idea of trying to reconstruct local identity by making visible what had been made invisible.

The aesthetic theories and theoretical regulations of Western music impeded a true understanding of the cultural realities of the region: the unstable was stabilized; the irregular regularized; and the un-tempered was tempered.

2. Latin America in the 19th Century

2.1 The Construction of Identity Discussing the identity of a nation, or of a whole region like Latin America, addresses problems that are not easy to circumvent. First of all, given the circumstances of modern societies, it is necessary to consider the differences in the living formations of the members of any studied group. If we talk about Chile, analyzing the cultural structures of the upper class and all the implications that this might entail, and comparing them with those of a more modest class, we are likely to find more differences than similarities. It is, therefore, essential to approach the study and analysis of identity starting from the historical and social processes shared by different members of a given community.

For many years in Latin America an idea has been incubated in the collective imaginary, that the different countries of the region can be encapsulated under the same descriptive parameters, granting them a seal of identity that consequently is limited in only describing its most superficial components. Undoubtedly, their shared history incorporates an enormous multiplicity of common elements that in no case can be left out of the analysis.

This shared history is largely defined by the way in which each nation has, individually or collectively with others, sought their independence, in different spheres of life, and from various external factors that have limited their chances of progress. Different examples of this can be traced throughout history (just to mention a few): the conquest and colonization of

America, the independence movements of the early 19th century, the processes of modernization and institutional configuration during the last years of the 1800s, and the dictatorial regimes in the middle of the last century.14

14 Jorge Larraín Identidad y Modernidad en América Latina. (Mexico D.F., Mexico: Editorial Océano de Mexico, 2004), 57.

Notwithstanding the above, for the Argentine writer Walter Mignolo15 what defines more clearly the cultural structures of Latin American nations is what he calls the ‘herida colonial’ (colonial wound): a vast array of consequences carried out over many years of domination, which can be exemplified in issues such as racism, oppressive treatment of indigenous groups, and an obsessive pursuit of foreign referents (mostly European).16 All this together with political, economic and cultural domination, has resulted in the complex scenario of self-identification shared by the different members of the region.17 As a result of this colonial wound to which Mignolo refers, a split between different layers in Latin American society has occurred, separating each of the cultures that inhabit it, and making the process of integration a very difficult task.

2.2 Western Art Music in Latin America Throughout history the arts in general—but particularly music—have constituted a catalyst for different social and cultural processes. In the mid-20th century, and with the advent of various military regimes across Latin America, one of the region's most characteristic musical movements emerged, the New Latin American Song, which despite many variants in different countries maintained certain principles shared by all: the use of folkloric rhythms, the

15 Walter Mignolo is an Argentine writer who has written extensively about semiotics, literature and modernity in Latin America. Some of his most important works are The Idea of Latin America and The Darker Side of Western Modernity. He received his PhD. from L’Ecole des Haute Études in Paris and since 1993 he has been a professor of literature at Duke University.

16 Walter Mignolo La Idea de América Latina: La Herida Colonial y la Opción Decolonial (Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa S.A., 2007) 37.

17 When I talk about cultural domination, I refer not only to external factors, but also to how these factors have become an important part of the artistic and aesthetic view of many Latin American musicians and artists. It's only necessary to take a look at the nationalistic movements of the region to see that in many cases, they approached the study of their own vernacular music from a purely European perspective, leaving aside all that did not conform to their aesthetic ideas.

rediscovery of autochthonous instruments, a strong leftist ideology, and a social critique aiming for revolutionary change.

Many examples like the one above can be cited with respect to popular music and its role in the configuration of identity in Latin America. Cases such as Latin Rock in Argentina,

Cumbia in Colombia and much of South America, Bossa Nova in Brazil, Milonga in Uruguay and Bolero in Cuba and Mexico are just some examples of how the mixture between different cultures has been possible and can speak about a way to integrate sometimes opposed aesthetic views, such as those of various cultural groups of Latin America.

However, in the case of the classical music of the Western tradition the analysis becomes much more complex, due to the multiplicity of factors at play. One of the most important elements is the fact that European music was used for a long time as a tool for domination and social segregation since the early years of conquest and colonization.

Consequently, the dilemma that arises is how can a musical aesthetic be generated—in light of the constitutive elements of a particular culture—through the construction mechanisms from another18. As always, it is necessary to understand the different historical processes, in order to unravel different ways of approaching the problem.

The cultural heritage of what we know today as Latin America constitutes the clash of three racial groups: Indigenous, African, and European.19 The musical evolution of the region is constructed from different elements coming from these three groups in what is often described as a syncretism: the combination and unification of different cultural elements

(language, music, ways of life, religion, etc.). It is evident, nonetheless, that in a dynamic of

18 The construction mechanisms or elements to which I allude are in reference to harmony, clear melodic shapes, the avoidance of microtonality and rhythmic regularity among some others.

19 It is important to bear in mind that these three larger groups to which I refer can be divided into several subgroups. It is not the same for an indigenous Mapuche, from the south of Chile, as for a Tarahumara from northern Mexico. The same the same thing happens with Africans and Europeans.

domination the most distinctive characteristics of the oppressed group will always be in a detrimental position in relation to those of the dominator. In quantitative terms, this situation of subjugation led to an almost absolute elimination of the musical elements typical of

Indigenous and African cultures from the public discourse, since they were in complete opposition to the basic principles of European modernist thought; in music the latter were expressed through symmetry, consonance and rhythmic homogeneity among many others.

Another problem faced by classical music, in terms of cultural integration, is that it would usually start from a theoretical point of view, and not from within what we could call social processes. In the vast majority of examples where there is a cultural crossing between

Indigenous and European music, most times the approach is from an academic perspective without having previously experienced the Indigenous music or understanding the nature of each of the elements that comprise it.

This way of approaching the conjunction between European and vernacular elements, in the case of the music of written tradition, differs when considering many of the popular rhythms that were born within the region, such as Cumbia, Bolero, Huayno, Zamba, Milonga and Cueca. These evolved over the years and always from unprivileged groups within society:

Indigenous and African people at first, and later peasants, workers and marginalized youth.

Thus, to achieve a correlation between national and musical identity takes much more than simply replicating technical elements of one or another culture. It is absolutely necessary to approach this not only from a theoretical perspective, but also from the experiential, taking into consideration the reality and context of each culture, as well as the historical processes that have shaped them in order to understand more deeply each of their distinctive and fundamental elements.

The need to reflect upon or even to build an identity in Latin America, beyond any superficiality or exoticism, has been an integral aspect of the artistic discourse of much of the

20th century. However, there has been little reflection on the mechanisms needed to carry out this project, and it has always been assumed that by taking elements of the region's folklore it would be possible to create a unique musical discourse and consequently give a distinctive stamp to Latin American aesthetics.

2.3 Music After the Independence Wars The independence movements of Latin American nations, beginning with Haitian emancipation (1790-1804), generated great conflict within the political and cultural configuration of the region, reflected in different ways in the local production of music, and art forms in general. Compared to the colonial period—where there was an immense flourishing of local repertoires, and where we have a vast contemporary array of primary accounts of the musical situation, as Ricardo Miranda and Aurelio Tello would say in their History of Latin

American Music, “the 19th century presents itself to us as a sort of middle age, from which very little music written by local composers has survived.”20

As in any historical situation, the reasons for this scarcity of primary musical sources are multiple and of varied nature. Firstly, independence from Europe led in ensuing years to economic problems and political instability; a large number of hostile conflicts greatly destabilized the region and did not allow for continued development of local artistic culture.

Taking Chile as an example (which fought for independence between the years 1810 and 1818) we will see that its 19th century history is full of internal and external conflicts: against the

Viceroyalty of Peru (1813); against the Peru-Bolivian Confederation (1836-1839); against

20 Ricardo Miranda and Aurelio Tello, Historia de la Música en Latinoamérica (Ciudad de Mexico: Dirección General del Archivo Diplomático, 2001) 27.

Spain (1864-1866); the Pacific War (again); against Peru and Bolivia (1879-1883); and at the end of the century, the Civil War (1890).21

Secondly—and probably one of the most decisive factors—the social reconfiguration of the 19th century spurred the need to rethink the cultural characteristics of nascent Latin

American nations, trying to build a suitable identity that could reflect the specificities of the diverse ethnic groups inhabiting the region. Even if the main objective was the replication of

European modernity within Latin American territory, it was necessary to at least mention certain traits of other ethnic groups. Within the literary discourses of the end of the 19th century, this is why the courage of native peoples is exalted, or the rhythmic agility of African dances is praised. However, its almost exotic value resided precisely in being identified as the ‘other’ with regard to the European.

In the same way that these artificial literary discourses were constructed, in the field of music an attempt was made to unify the musical diversity of the region. Thus, with the idea of shaping the music of the nascent nations, composers from different Latin American countries replicated the European nationalist model by stylizing local music. In the case of Chile, there were few composers of relevance during the 19th century, and although a local aesthetic idea began to emerge, the cultural influence of Europe remained the basis for all musical creation.

2.4 Federico Guzmán: The Quest for a Chilean Identity Federico Guzmán, a Chilean composer born in Santiago in 1827, and one of the most important musical figures in the country around this time, embodied through his work the tension that existed between materials extracted from the vernacular repertoire and the need to filter or reinterpret them through European aesthetics.

21 Mario Góngora, Ensayo Histórico Sobre la Noción de Estado en Chile en los Siglos XIX y XX (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones La Ciudad, 1981), 9.

His catalog of works includes mostly works for piano that reflect the sonority of

European romanticism, using similar techniques as Chopin and Liszt. One of the most representative works of this struggle between the vernacular and the European is his work

Zamacueca, in which both foreign and local heritages coexist. It is essential to note that the title Zamacueca alludes directly to the musical style that originated in the Viceroyalty of Peru and was introduced to Chile by José Zapiola22 in 1824. As detailed by Pablo Garrido in his work Biografía de la Cueca (Biography of the Cueca), published in Chile in 1976, the

Zamacueca would become one of the first purely Latin American styles:

"There were no Zamacuecas (...) neither in Africa nor in Spain, therefore, it did not come from the outside. It is, therefore, the purest symbol of our identity."23

Guzmán, in his Zamacueca No.3, tried to reconcile the European world with certain specific characteristics of the style he alluded to, demonstrating the need that arose in the 19th century in which the search for local identity was always filtered through European aesthetics.

If we analyze this work, we see that several fundamental elements have been left out, stylizing this dance to transform it into salon music, something similar to what happened during this same time with, for example, Chopin and his work with genre dances such as the Mazurka,

Waltz, and Polonaise. It is interesting to note the evident similarities in the compositional and artistic work of both composers, who were foreign to the nucleus of European music of that moment and tried to fuse their cultural heritage with the technical elements of central Western music.

One of the most characteristic elements of the Zamacueca, absent in the work of

Guzmán, is rhythmic irregularity. Although it can be adapted to the time signature of 3/4 (6/8),

22 José Zapiola was one of the most important intellectual figures (musician, politician, writer, etc.) of the Chilean cultural scene during the 19th century. He was also a chapel master of the Cathedral of Santiago, between 1864 and 1874

23 Pablo Garrido, Biografía de la Cueca (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Nascimento, 1976), 103.

its elasticity and the overlapping of different rhythmic figures freed it from any strict and rigid metric binding. Despite this, Guzmán tries to give this piece some mobility and rhythmic complexity by introducing, at different moments of the work (as shown in Figure 1) overlapping 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures (hemiola), something that happens frequently in this dance, as well as in diverse Spanish musical genres that were imported into Latin American territory during the colonial period.

Figure 1: Zamacueca No. 3 I want to clarify that my analysis and commentary on a particular work by Guzmán does not intend to be a judgment about its artistic merit, but rather that it exemplifies a compositional practice and a logic of aesthetic approximation that became more intense towards the end of the 19th century, when the different nationalist movements across Latin

America began to grow stronger.

For Gerard Behague, this attitude which he denotes as unreflective, is a cultural imposition of colonialism, something that will define Latin American music well into the twentieth century:

“Enrique Soro and Alfonso Leng in Chile, Jose Maria Valle Riestra from Peru, Alberto Williams in Argentina, to a certain extent Manuel Ponce in Mexico, and Francisco Braga, Glauco Velasquez and Henrique Oswald in Brazil, among many others, made

very little contribution to truly Latin American artistic creation, due to a total aesthetic uprooting and a disastrous lack of self-criticism and sociocultural identity.”24

This description by an American musicologist sheds light on the ideological problem upon which the nationalist discourse has been constructed. Strong European heritage hindered true understanding not only of Latin American musical forms or styles, but also about the role that the artist and their work should play in pursuit of the cultural construction of the region.

Nevertheless, it is possible to observe that the 19th century was experienced as a period of transition, in different aspects of the construction of collective life.

During the first two or three decades of the century most countries concentrated their efforts on liberating themselves from European domination. Subsequently the need to define the political, cultural, and social structures and some other very sensitive issues (something that from the beginning was established and imposed completely from the outside) arose with great force and the middle and end of the century.25

Despite being a period when little local music was created and preserved, this need for definition added to the growing nationalist spirit and the gradual undoing of colonial structures.

It became an incentive to develop and organize local artistic activity, through the creation of conservatories, concert halls, and opera houses, which were established as hubs for both national and international musicians. However, it was not until the 1930s and 1940s that composers would begin to reevaluate the basic notions of their art. As a result of a social environment in constant tension, clearly marked by the Mexican Revolution, a period of

24 Gerard Béhague, “La problemática de la Posición Socio-Política del Compositor en la Música Nueva en Latinoamérica,” Latin American Music Review, vol. 27 no. 1 (2006): 48.

25 It may be paradoxical that, in an attempt to physically free themselves from European colonialism, as a whole, Latin American countries saw in the old continent the fundamental characteristics to shape their new social and political structures. This, together with an export economy of raw materials mainly to Europe, was decisive in the cultural construction of the different countries of the region. In a way, many of the most distinctive features of the region are a consequence of this relationship established with Europe, covering fields as dissimilar as the arts and the economy.

reflection began in the history of Latin America, affecting as well its social and political organization. Consequently, music began to undergo certain aesthetic changes at the hands of composers in different countries throughout the region. These changes were in crescendo as we approach the 21st century.

3. Whose Identity Are We Talking About?

2.1 A Musicological Approach The nascent concept of identity26 that in music served to build a sonic aesthetic that would break the heavy colonial heritage, encountered various problems along its way. Some of these continue to this day. As Miguel Rojas Mix27 explains, in his book Los 100 nombres de

América: eso que descubrió Colón (The 100 Names of America: That Which Columbus

Discovered), the conquest of America (or Latin America) had as its main objective the destruction of the culture of the different indigenous groups with the sole purpose of installing the culture of Europe:

"In order to subdue the aborigine, the colonization policy had the function of erasing the original culture, which was expressed in the two great themes of the conquering discourse: civilizing and evangelizing, and the ends being declared, they implied obliging the natives to change their form of life, its mode of production and its culture...Christ could not live with the ancient gods or with the Art that embodied them.”28

In the same spirit, in the 19th century, the great German philosopher Georg Wilhelm

Friedrich Hegel described Latin America in a way that clearly portrayed the heavy footprint that Europe had left in the territory, creating an image that was articulated through the historical

26 The idea of identity was always part of the historical construction of Latin America. Even during the colonial period, the European conquerors understood that through a mixture of European and local cultural elements the process of evangelization and subjection would be easier. In music this can be seen, for example, in the famous choral work Hanacpachap Cussicuinin, which fuses the polyphonic style of Europe with the Quechua language. However, this notion of identity as a generator of a nationhood, or as a unifying mechanism, would not emerge until the beginning of the 19th century.

27 A historian and Chilean thinker who has dedicated himself to the study of Latin American culture. He was exiled during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and has spent most of his career teaching at various European universities.

28 Miguel Rojas Mix, Los Cien Nombres de América: Eso Que Descubrió Colón (Costa Rica: Ediciones de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1997), 33-34.

logic of the old continent.29 Hegel described America (Latin America) as "peoples without history, incapable of being counted among the elected to contribute to the universal unfolding of the spirit.”30

This Eurocentric approach to understanding the past and present of Latin America, as well as its cultural construction in the future, continued during the 19th century as a generalized vision in diverse areas of life within the region. Despite a growing sociocultural transformation the European footprint, built for more than two centuries of colonialism, not only did not abandoned the emancipatory discourse but learned to coexist with the reassessment of the cultural legacy of the different Latin American ethnic groups, something that would be intensified after the revolts of independence.

With regard to compositional practices (as we could see in the case of Federico Guzmán from Chile) it is possible to discern a certain interest in using materials from popular music, which articulated under the principles of European classical-romantic aesthetics, gave form to a discourse that did not have as its primary objective the recuperation of vernacular musical practices form the different ethnic and social groups, but rather an eagerness to demonstrate that it was possible to build a musical discourse drawn from Latin America itself. At the same time that this discourse of identity and nationalism was being constructed with the logic of

Western music, different popular musical manifestations developed that gave account of the great cultural heritage coming from the mixture between different ethnic groups, as they were

Indigenous, African and European: rhythms such as the Landó in Peru, the Zamba in Argentina,

Samba in Brazil, and the Cueca in Chile and other parts of the continent. Classical Latin

29 It is possible to appreciate, through the literature on the subject, that Latin America was not built only from within, that is, from its own inhabitants, but also, through the multiple discourses emanating from Europe

30 Alcira Argumedo, Los Silencios y las Voces en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Pensamiento Nacional, 2009), 26.

American composers, during the 19th century, saw in the richness of popular music a great opportunity to shape their own musical discourse. Without the need to delve into the complexities or specificities that a certain style might entail, they began to make use of each genre’s most characteristic elements, molding them to the sonic aesthetic of 18th and 19th century Europe, a practice that occurred in the same way in almost every country within the region.

Ernesto Elorduy (1854-1913) was a Mexican composer who like Guzmán, represented each of the practices typical of Latin American composers during that time. After having started his music education in his native country, Elorduy emigrated to Europe where he received musical instruction from great figures of the time such as Clara Schumann and

Georges Mathias (who was a former pupil of Chopin). This experience would mark his life and musical work in a significant way, since on his return to Mexico he would concentrate his artistic and creative efforts on building bridges between the popular world of his homeland, and the compositional techniques learned in the old continent. An example of this is his piece

Tropicales, which takes elements of different folk dances, and makes extensive use of characteristic elements of 19th century piano music. One of the basic elements of this work is the Habanera, a popular rhythm born in Cuba during the first half of 1800. Elorduy uses its characteristic rhythmic structure to fragment the chords and give the work more harmonic mobility, something that is characteristic of Chopin's piano music, as shown in Figure 2.31

31 In figure number 2 it is possible to see a very similar way of working with harmonic and melodic materials. The left hand is responsible for defining the harmony very clearly, separating the bass from the rest of the chord, while the right hand is responsible for producing a melody.

Figure 2: Elorduy and Chopin Juan Pablo González, a Chilean musicologist, in his study of Latin American popular music defines different processes and modes of behavior of musicians within the region with respect to artistic creation and the various cultural influences that are used to shape musical language. Although his concerns are mainly focused on popular music, it is possible to extrapolate from some of his concepts and apply them to classical music.

González identifies two types of (musical) culture that coexist in Latin America:

Passive and Active Culture. The first describes an approach to musical creation that focuses on what happens on the outside: it articulates its musical language, artistic discourse, and its aesthetic concerns in relation to foreign influences. It:

"...arises due to the economic and social dependence that (Latin America) has maintained from Europe and the United States. This has led to an imitation and adaptation of artistic styles and creative procedures...transplanting them to a different and foreign medium."32

On the other hand, Active Culture results from the integration and assimilation of the different ethnic and social groups that coexist in Latin America since the colonial period and is fundamentally expressed in different styles of popular music. Thus, Active Culture manifests

32 Juan Pablo González, “Hacia el Estudio Musicológico de la Música Popular Latinoamericana,” Revista Musical Chilena, vol. XL no. 165 (1986): 59.

itself as the consequence of syncretism, promoting the mixture between different worlds, and trying to develop its own individual language.

Notwithstanding the above, how is it possible to understand the creative procedures of

19th century Latin American classical music under the analytical logic that González applies to popular music? In my opinion, there are several factors that have to be reassessed in order to analyze the specific situation of classical music, taking into account the duality he presents.

In the first place, written music, as a Western cultural object, in its essence is foreign to

Latin America. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries its use was purely utilitarian33, associated with conversion and subsequent political, economic and cultural domination. In this way, the Western musical tradition is assimilated in the American continent and as a result of this assimilation, it needs a sense of identity, to articulate a musical discourse that was constructed from the cultural reality of the Latin American people. Therefore, we cannot speak of cultural appropriation. Classical music in Latin America was not born with a desire to imitate

European cultural models but was forcefully inserted to the detriment of native musical practices. However, active and passive culture operate in a similar way in the field of classical music, exposing the colonial wound to which Mignolo referred in his book The Idea of Latin

America.

3.2 Latin America’s Fin de Siècle Latin American composers during the late 19th century understood that the music of

European tradition belonged to them as much as to the creators from the old continent, since it had been part of their cultural evolution. Nevertheless, due to political and social circumstances notions of nationalism and identity increased, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, so it was

33 Since the first years of the Colony (and even during the conquest) European music was used, at the hand of the Catholic Church, as a tool for domination. The Missionaries saw the importance that music and sound played within the indigenous cultures, and they used this as a leverage to dominate and evangelize them.

necessary to resort to folk and popular music to give shape to these concepts and ideas34. The assessment in aesthetic and cultural terms of both popular and classical music was done under the European analytical perspective. Not only was a tradition of music notation inserted by the

Catholic Church into Latin American territory, but the ideas it represented or pretended to represent were as well: symmetry, beauty and organization among many others.

This dialectical relationship generated between the foreign and the local shows the analytical precariousness with which composers approached popular culture. We have already seen the cases of Guzmán in Chile and Elorduy in Mexico, and can see that despite the specific differences of each country, both composers articulated their language from the same ground or guiding principle, namely, trying to build an idea of identity, through the arbitrary use of different elements of the stylistic repertoire of popular music, taking as a starting point the aesthetic structure that came from the old continent.

In the following century, especially during the 1930s, the notion of identity reappeared with greater force, this time considering the experiences of musicians such as Zoltán Kodály,

Béla Bartók. Them researches established connections with various other disciplines, such as anthropology, in order to elaborate a mechanism of systematic study that would aid them in understanding in greater depth the complexities of their objects of study. This also allowed for the possibility of diversifying the sound aesthetics of composers in Latin America, since the idea of identity took on a more conceptual aspect, sometimes distancing itself from the evident sonic mimicry of the popular world.

Towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the cultural scenario of Latin America began to be reconfigured from the point of view of disciplines like music,

34 As it happened with those composers who were foreign to central Europe, who had to look back to their own musical and folkloric material, Latin American composers did the same with their cultural heritage. This allowed them to begin to create a more personal musical and artistic discourse, with which they could differentiate themselves, albeit scarcely, from the great European influence.

visual arts, and literature, focusing its attention on different technical and aesthetic elements and with special emphasis on folkloric, indigenous and popular musical practices.

One of the clearest examples of the process of cultural reconfiguration and search for a

Latin American voice can be found in the Literary Modernism that approximately spans from

1880 to 1920. Kelly Washbourne describes this literary movement in An Anthology of Spanish

American Modernism as one of the most important precedents for cultural change in the region, understanding its members as key figures in the gestation of this transformational process:

“In modernismo, the roots of César Vallejo, Gabriela Mistral, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda are to be found, unmistakably, [...] the sign of spiritual unrest, nostalgia for harmony, the search for origins, and cultural and individual identity mark these [modernist] spirits […] modernismo was the first uniquely Spanish American literature, realizing the continent's desire both to join universal literature- aesthetic modernity and to break colonial ties with the then-stagnant Spanish belles lettres.”35

It had already been settled that, in the case of music, the way to reinterpret European heritage, without leaving it completely aside, was through the incorporation of elements alien to it, drawing from the cultural practices of society’s most popular segments. One of the biggest problems in Latin America resulting from the attempt to lay the foundations for institutional, cultural, economic, and political development was that the social structures inherited from colonialism made it very difficult to find elements in common between the upper and lower social strata. As Miguel Rojas Mix formulated so clearly, what gives a group of people a greater identity is “not national customs, but social class. A rich Spaniard is more similar to a rich

Englishman than to a poor Spaniard."36

35 Kelly Washbourne, An Anthology of Spanish American Modernismo (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2007), 50.

36 Miguel Rojas Mix, Los Cien Nombres de América: Eso Que Descubrió Colón (Costa Rica: Ediciones de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1997), 20.

Social stratification, i.e. the isolation of ethnic groups such as Africans, different

Indigenous peoples, etc. created divergent musical, cultural and symbolic elements in each of these strata, leaving European classical music and its evolution on the continent tied to the upper class. In general, the other popular and folkloric practices were distributed within different groups along the social spectrum.

From this perspective, identity or its symbolic representation through music can be understood more as a construction than as an organic consequence of the social structures of the continent. Thus, it is possible, at least during its first stages to understand identity as an alterity,37 that is, as an identity-building consciousness, which focuses its attention on various popular manifestations, rearticulating them under the aesthetic logic of the European canon.

By this I mean that a majority of composers belonged to affluent social groups and had been trained according to the European Conservatory model. They did not come from the dominated groups and therefore a considerable percentage of the musical practices and elements they used, for the purposes of “identity”, did not in fact belong to them.

This need to unify or to give some sense of cohesion to the multiracial and culturally diverse societies of the new Latin American nations, compelled local composers to include exogenous elements to their own tradition, extracted as we have already seen from marginalized groups of society. Moreover, this practice was carried out with the double purpose of trying to build an individual artistic discourse that would help separate Latin America from its European heritage, as well as give this music a sonority that would have been considered fresh, exotic and novel.

37 With alterity I refer to the way in which Latin America always tried to build itself from the denial of itself, at least since the beginning of the 19th century. The indigenous, the African, and the mestizo were each considered an otherness, and it was assumed, from very early on, that destiny was tied to European modernity.

It is interesting to note that this apparent contradiction, produced by the antinomy between the rupture with the colonial matrix and the mechanisms used to achieve this fracture show that music and aesthetic structures within the region were founded under the parameters of the Western canon. It is no surprise then that the institutional configuration of the Arts in

Latin America was articulated as a replica of its European counterpart in which, despite a growing desire to generate cultural cohesion, the non-European elements were left aside. This laid the bedrock of the continent's educational system, wherein the study of European music is understood as the obvious and natural mechanism to proceed. Beyond the use of specific musical elements from peripheral to the academy, little was done from positions of power to give space to purely local38 artistic and cultural manifestations.

3.3 Identity vs Modernity: The Normative Role of the Arts The early years of the 20th century were very significant in the history of Latin America: changes in different aspects of the public sphere produced unexpected consequences in the development of music within the region. New, enlightened ideas from Europe deeply influenced the Latin American populace, who were searching for mechanisms to give meaning, coherence and organization to such a tumultuous period. In fields like painting, music and literature, artists were trying to enhance the feeling of belonging to Latin American culture, through a new appreciation deriving from the concept of Criollo39 (Creole), as Chilean academic and historian Sergio Villalobos recounts in his book Historia de Chile.

Nationalist ideas that had arisen in the second half of the 19th century took on greater force with the arrival of the 20th century, especially towards the end of the Mexican Revolution

38 Purely local is, of course, a comparative term. In relation to classical music, many musical styles evolved independently of what happened in Europe and consequently did not find a European counterpart to their own development. This does not mean, however, that these folk and popular musics have not received, since their birth, external influences, such as the concepts of harmony, melody, etc. 39 Criollo refers to a person who was born in Latin America and who has Spanish ancestry.

in 1920. Expressed in various ways, patriotic sentiment moved through different nations of the region with the same impetus, lasting until the second half of the 20th century.

The social, political and cultural configurations through which Latin America was organized in the years after the wars of independence was not much different than that of the colonial period. The caste system—through which society was stratified in Latin America— continued to operate, although sometimes tacitly, until the beginning of the 20th century. Long- sought freedom to a great extent only benefitted those having more privileged positions within the "pyramid of social stratification". As John Charles Chasteen, professor of Latin American

Cultural History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes: “landowners and urban middle-class prospered after the independence, but the life of Latin America´s rural majority improved little, if at all.”40

Despite having been at least freed from the physical domain of foreign agents, there was a need to lay out the foundations for Latin American progress and development. This process was not carried out without problems; for better or worse, the intervention of different international powers (Great Britain and the United States, among others) in both cultural and economic areas undoubtedly influenced the development of the region. I already described how

Latin American musical institutions operated in the mid-19th century—emulating what was happening in Europe—thus aimed to generate a proper musical scene, sharing aesthetic and philosophical principles with the old continent.

40 John Charles Chasteen. Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (New York: Norton and Company, 2011) 60.

Figure 3: Vista de Santiago desde Peñalolén, Alessandro Ciccarelli (1808- 1879)

A quick look into the history of painting in Chile during the 19th century could be even more illustrative to understand the way in which external influence played a central role in the cultural formation of the region.

Manuel Bulnes Prieto (1799-1866) was the Chilean president from 1841-1851. His need to academically institutionalize Chilean artistic and pictorial practices according to

European models, led him to invite French painter Raymond Auguste Quinsac Monvoisin to create and direct a School of Fine Arts, in connection with the Universidad de San Felipe that had been founded in 1747. Myriad difficulties made the creation of this school impossible for

Monvoisin. However, local authorities’ attempts did not cease, and in 1848 Italian painter

Alessandro Ciccarelli was invited to fulfill the mission that initially had been assigned to

Monvoisin, founding the school one year after his arrival. The influence of Cicarelli demonstrates the Latin American attempt to aesthetically and culturally assimilate the ideas of

Europe. As the first director of the Painting Academy of Chile, Cicarelli developed a language

deeply tied to classical tradition and of great naturalistic character, an attitude that he transmitted to his students at the academy.

Catholic University of Chile professor of aesthetics Ronald Harris Diez observes a total conservatism in artistic and aesthetic terms, contrasting what began to happen in Europe in the late 1800s. Emphasizing architecture, Harris compared the Chilean situation to the European, with the rise of Art Nouveau on the Continent in the last decades of the 1800s. He regarded this separation from European modernism as a mean to construct a Chilean identity that aspired to be associated with European cultural history and everything that that might entail.

"Promoting a New Art would have meant proclaiming a separation that was not wanted and identifying themselves (the Latin Americans) with any of the new emerging arts would have meant taking sides with some of those peripheral identities41, thus abandoning the universalism and the sense of being part of Europe, paradoxically, losing their own identity."42

Gonzalo Leiva Quijada likewise defines 19th century painting as representational, where the landscape and the portrait are elevated as ways of shaping local identity:

“Both aesthetic investigations (portrait and landscape) sought to confirm identities, territories and affiliations. The portrait is evident both in the need for figuration and in the individual genesis of subjects who begin to direct the destinies of nascent republics. Landscape represents [...] the need to set boundaries and borders, interest in knowing

41 Professor Harris refers to the need to remain tied to the classic-romantic models of European heritage with the purpose of building a language of their own. The Art Noveau was erected as a rupture with tradition, conceived as a periphery of the academic institution. For Latin America any association with this new aesthetic meant losing the course in the creation of an identity and dissociating them from Western tradition.

42 Jorge Francisco Liernur, Arquitectura en la Argentina del Siglo XX. (Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 2001), quoted in Ronald Harris Diez, “El Art Noveau en Chile,” Trayectorias Americanas (1810-2010) (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones UC, 2010).

which resources were counted, the need to make plans, territorial atlases to trace routes, ports and cities.”43

In music, characteristics similar to those described by Harris and Leiva can be discerned, especially in the years before 1900. However, unlike the work of José Zapiola (1802-

85) or Federico Guzmán (1827-85)—in which the stylization of folkloric rhythms was understood as the only logic by which to shape identity—some composers in the early years of the 20th century tried to extract other elements from popular traditions, adapting them to different aesthetic contexts. That is the case of Pedro Humberto Allende (1885-1959), who— as we will see in the next chapters—represents one of the most paradigmatic cases in the formation of a Chilean musical school.44

43 Paula Honorato Crespo, comp., Trayectorias Americanas (1810-2010) (Santiago, Chile: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2012), 26.

44 Examples such as Villa-Lobos, Chavez, and Revueltas are similar to that of Pedro Humberto Allende, and responded to a similar concern, which was to create "with their feet in Latin America", taking into account the specificities of the region. Regardless of aesthetic differences between these composers, it is possible to perceive certain common elements, such as the use and reinterpretation of folkloric elements and the search for new sonorities, something that would allow them to articulate an artistic discourse that escaped the empty stylizations that abounded during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.

4. Latin America from the 20th Century to the Present Day

4.1 Brief Historical Overview The history of independent Latin America is one of ups and downs, of numerous political, social and cultural changes that would occur until well into the 20th century. The

Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) is an example of the social whirlwind that was life in those times. From Chile to Mexico, social movements began that had as their purpose a change of the established institutional order. Likewise, by the mid-1900s various totalitarian regimes emerged throughout the region, something that would have dire consequences for artistic development. In Chile many music schools were closed, between 1973 and 1990, and a large number of musicians, singers, composers and artists in general, were exiled from the country, triggering a decline in production and circulation of works created within the country.

Nevertheless, there were many important events within the Latin American music scene that had a salutary effect on cultural activity in these countries. Previously I mentioned the importance of new theaters, orchestras, schools, and concert halls; in the same way new voices emerged in the different countries, which tried to articulate local music aesthetics, recovering both local and European elements.

This happened with Pedro Humberto Allende, one of the most representative composers of the first half of the 20th century. His compositional work and his teaching and research signified a turning point in the country's musical development. Establishing points of contact between local folklore and European heritage, Allende rose as one of the most prolific voices of the continent, establishing friendships with composers and artists of the stature of Claude Debussy and André Breton.

4.2 Pedro Humberto Allende In this section I will analyze two crucial pieces of Pedro Humberto Allende's catalog:

12 Tonadas de Carácter Popular Chileno (12 Tonadas of Chilean Popular Character), a work

for solo piano, published in 1920, and La Voz de las Calles (The Voice of the Streets), a symphonic poem premiered that same year. The goal of my analysis is not to dissect both works to uncover their formal aspects or constitutive elements, but rather to establish connections between theoretical and cultural dimensions, something that will be fundamental to understanding Allende’s language.

Allende was one of the founding fathers of a distinct Chilean musical idiom. Through different musical pursuits such as composition, musicology, and pedagogy, Allende contributed enormously to forming an awareness of artistic work in Chile and Latin America.

Though he had a solid conservatory training, his interest in folklore and indigenous musical forms led him to visit various places in Chile, recording, studying and analyzing musical phenomena he encountered. This interest in the culture of his own land, paralleling that of Béla

Bartók, led Allende to become deeply interested in the music and fieldwork of the Hungarian composer, visiting Hungary in 1927. That same year, Allende was invited to participate in a

Congress of Popular Arts in Paris, presenting different aspects of Chilean indigenous and folk culture, through verious musical manifestations.

Figure 4: Pedro Humberto Allende (1885-1959)

"... he presented indigenous music, Chilean folk songs, and some of his own compositions for piano, including his 12 Tonadas de Carácter Chileno, and was appointed member of the commission to propose the foundation of a scientific bibliography of popular song [...] Allende was also member of the Folkloric Society of Kharkov, USSR, the Pan American Association of Composers, New York and of the International Society of Contemporary Music of London."45

It is important to note that the previous citation reveals a new conception of understanding music and art from Latin America. Unlike what happened to Latin American composers during the 19th century, who travelled to Europe to study only the traditional techniques of Western Art Music, Allende travelled to the Continent to display his own culture, and to establish links with different organizations in order to construct an institutional framework that would foster the preservation and cultivation of Chilean artistic and musical heritage.

4.2.1 La Voz de las Calles Along with 12 Tonadas Chilenas, La voz de las calles is one of Allende’s most famous works and occupies a very prominent place within his oeuvre. A literal translation of the title would be "The Voice of the Street". However, the word street (calle) is used in this context as a symbol of the popular world: the periphery of the European canon. The street is presented to us as the effigy of everything that has been pushed aside by 19th century academic institutionalization. Premiered in Santiago de Chile in 1920, this symphonic poem takes as its starting point different pregones46 of the urban scene of the capital, which become the backbone of the work and from which different sections of the piece develop.

45 Radio Beethoven, “Pedro Humberto Allende” accessed February 09, 2018, http://www.beethovenfm.cl/biografias/allende-pedro-humberto/

46 Pregones are popular chants of the street vendors who advertise their products out loud using different melodies and rhythms. Some of these pregones have been adapted, almost like a cantus firmus, to be the starting point of different local songs.

Seven of these urban songs give life to La voz de las calles; brief interludes are interspersed between appearances of the different pregones. As the composer and musicologist

Rafael Díaz indicates, in his article La Voz de las Calles Entra a la Academia Musical (The

Voice of the Street Enters the Music Academy):

“In general, the melodic designs of the pregones do not suffer major alterations and only the harmonic accompaniment changes, in order to obtain some degree of elaboration without altering the melodic profile[...]despite the appearance of classical form the content[...]makes the work a symphonic poem genuinely inserted in the Chilean academic tradition, and with musical strategies that can be defined as personal solutions by Pedro Humberto Allende.”47

Figure 5: La Voz de las Calles, by Pedro Humberto Allende (manuscript)

47 Rafael Díaz. “La Voz de las Calles Entra a la Academia,” in Anales del Instituto de Chile: Perspectivas sobre la Música en Chile (Santiago, Chile: Andros Impresores, 2013), 128-29.

It is noteworthy that the center of Allende's aesthetic concerns lies in the care with which he treats his chosen material. His concept of identity is not based on the stylization of popular chants, but rather on developing these songs as starting points, and maintaining their character. To avoid the weight of tonality—alien to these folkloric forms—he uses different mechanisms to approach the particular sonority of each pregone, like superimposing or concatenating different musical modes, similar to what Claude Debussy did. These techniques allow the composer to approach more closely the aesthetics of the pregones.

It is important to bear in mind that the evolution of these popular songs is not related to that of Western music. One finds in them intervals smaller than a semitone, as well as irregular rhythmic structures that escape the European tradition. Allende did not go so far, so microtonality is absent in his work. He was absolutely conscious, nonetheless, that the songs used were not constructed within the framework of tonality or the tempered system and consequentially it was necessary to use different techniques, scales and musical elements that allowed him to reconstruct, even in part, the sound of the streets of Santiago and its vendors.

Despite its many differences with the pregones, Allende uses different mechanisms to eliminate any sense of rhythmic regularity, thus approaching more closely to this popular manifestation. There is a constant alternation of time signatures, which at some points in the work occur at a one measure distance, and for long periods of time. Allende tries to eliminate the tension produced between strong and weak beats, linking the ends of certain melodic phrases with the beginning of others. These two ways of playing with rhythm give La voz de las calles a greater degree of freedom and flexibility, bringing it closer to the sound image it purports to represent.

It is important to note that his purpose is not to create an exact symphonic replica of the street vendors and their pregones. His intention is to take these elements as the starting point for constructing a personal music. The sonic landscape of Santiago serves as a context to place

himself as a composer. For that reason, we see that the way he develops his musical discourse responds to a very personal creative impulse. It is possible to detect traits characteristic of the

European tradition: counterpoint, certain procedures of formal development, and a careful and even elegant orchestration, among others. However, all those elements are organized in such a way that they fulfill the function that Allende has proposed: to syncretize the musical heritage of Europe, with the sonorous characteristics of the popular world of Chile.

As it was previously mentioned, La voz de las calles occupies a privileged place within

Allende's catalog. For Felix Armando Núñez, a Venezuelan poet and essayist who lived in

Chile during the first decades of the 20th century, Allende's music, in particular this symphonic poem, represented the spirit of the Chilean people:

“This piece is the work of a wise and refined composer, who guides us through the streets of Santiago, his hometown. Listening to this music we are surprised, like a blind man who suddenly saw the light. Santiago seems picturesque to us, with a soul of its own, sentimental [...] six pregones pass, leading one into the other, presenting us a flow of feelings; the soft, resigned and fatalistic soul of the Chilean people.”48

This emotional foundation on which the work is built made his reception within the

Chilean music scene very successful. Despite having works of greater international circulation, such as his Cello Concerto (which was praised by Debussy (acknowledging in Allende a certain similarity to his own sound and aesthetic experimentations) La Voz de las Calles occupied a place of greater prominence, both in orchestral programming, as well as in the taste of the

Chilean audience.

For Díaz, one of the greatest merits of Allende's symphonic poem is its ability to integrate different elements of Latin America cultural heritage. From selecting the pregones to

48 Félix Armando Núñez, “La Voz de las Calles: La Última Obra de Allende,” Revista Zig-Zag (June 15, 1920)

how he develops them, his music is articulated from the folklore of the region, something that can be appreciated in the melodic construction of the connecting bridges:

“Actually, the modal system of La Voz de las Calles is very unique. It does not come from the Greek modal system (although there are points of confluence), but it derives from the scalar systems of the pregones that Allende uses. That is to say, the melodic lines of the pregones can be harmonized within a modal system of folkloric origin and it does not necessarily come from the Chilean folkloric tradition. In honor of the truth, many of the pregones that were shouted in the streets of Santiago in the 20s of the last century come, stylistically, from the juglaresque song and the folklore of Spain. However, the monodies of the pregones that Allende collected are, for the most part, original, although tributary of the Iberian tradition.”49

These descriptions and narratives built around the work of Pedro Humberto Allende demonstrate its strong Latin American roots. It is not necessary to re-enumerate the many elements belonging to the tradition of Western music; however, it is important to state that their comprehensive articulation including material from the popular culture of the region, enable the musical discourse of Allende to stand as one of the first to synthesize the Western European world with musical and popular practices that until then had remained unrecognized by academia.

4.2.2 12 Tonadas de Carácter Popular Chileno In 12 Tonadas de Carácter Popular Chileno (12 Tonadas of Chilean Popular

Character), premiered the same year as La Voz de las Calles, Allende delves more directly into folkloric music. Here the composer picks up on specific aspects of the tonada,50 one of the most characteristic genres of the popular music of Chile and places them in a sonic context

49 Rafael Díaz. “La Voz de las Calles Entra a la Academia,” in Anales del Instituto de Chile: Perspectivas sobre la Música en Chile (Santiago, Chile: Andros Impresores, 2013), 125. 50 A musical genre related to the zamacueca which was very prevalent in rural areas of Chile. It is structured in 6/8, having as its main element the voice plus a guitar or harp accompaniment.

including reminiscences of post-Romanticism, impressionism, and even of Schoenberg's expressionism. In this work for piano Allende plays with the rhythmic elasticity of the tonada, at times obscuring certain identifying traits of this musical form.

In taking a personal approach to a musical genre so typical of the popular culture,

Allende gives us certain points of reference to understand the way that he relates to the folklore of his land. For him, Chilean music is a vehicle to give form to an individual voice, without needing to fall into the trap of easy stylizations or empty exoticisms, but rather with the purpose of discovering new sound possibilities that start from his own heritage.

Delving into a more exhaustive analysis of the elements that Allende uses in this piece, we notice that something similar to La Voz de las Calles happens. In his Tonada No. 1, instead of starting with a 6/8 measure, he starts with 7/8.51 With this slight alteration, the composer indicates that the rhythmic reality of the genre is more flexible and irregular, and that its transcription from orality to writing has created a distortion of one of its most distinctive qualities. From its rural origins, and far from the academic regularity of Western music, the meter of the tonada expands and contracts, giving the music a certain instability and "rhythmic flaw", wherein much of the artistic value of the genre will reside.

As previously mentioned, the 12 Tonadas by Allende, along with La Voz de las Calles, occupy a central place in the musical production not only of the composer himself, but also within the repertoire of Chilean music of the early 20th century. Its reception by the critics and general audiences exceeded the expectations of Allende, who after the premiere in Paris, by the renowned pianist Ricardo Viñeses, received offers for publication both in Chile and abroad.

51 The popular version of the tonada has rhythmic fluctuations that make its meter somewhat elastic; however, the compass figure (?) of 6/8 is a very close approximation. Allende uses 7/8 in the slow sections of his work, to produce this rhythmic instability. The most agile sections are structured within the framework of 6/8.

Figure 6: 12 Tonadas de Carácter Musical Chileno (No. 1) This syncretism between tradition and experimentation, between the local and the foreign, gives the work a freshness and sonic individuality that had rarely been seen—at least in Chile—during the 19th century and early 1900s. Comparing this work with the Zamacueca

No.1 by Guzmán, we see that Allende's creative process is more complex than that of his predecessor. He does not rely only on the adaptation of folkloric elements under the formal procedures of Western music. On the contrary, his language is constructed from the discovery of new sound possibilities stemming from the mixture between both worlds. His music does not mimic folklore, nor does he mimic European composers. His work reflects the cultural qualities of his homeland: a whirlwind of diverse influences that are expressed at different levels, from the purely technical and concrete layers, to the most symbolic and subjective ones.

Despite being one of the foundational composers in the musical development of Chile, little has been written about the music by Allende. His works have not been programmed regularly, something that stands in contrast with the influence of his music not only in Chile, but also in Europe during the first half of the 20th century.

In 2008 Korean pianist Yong Im Lee Federle (raised in Santiago, Chile) wrote a doctoral dissertation analyzing the 12 Tonadas by Allende; this is one of the most detailed documents about the Chilean composer, developing an analytical and theoretical point of view, as well as discussing certain historical and cultural aspects that help us understand more deeply the relevance of Allende’s work to the construction of a Chilean music.

4.3 Carlos Isamitt and Eduardo Cáceres: An Approach to Indigenous Músic In this section I analyze specific issues pertaining to the

translation of musical elements from one culture to another.

I will address technical aspects as well as the aesthetic and

social implications that this entails. The dilemma52

concerns the replication of a musical object—more or less

concrete—from one culture to the aesthetic canons of Figure 7 Carlos Isamitt another; in this case, from the Mapuche culture to the context of Western classical music. In order to untangle different approaches to the relationship between music and identity, I analyze two Chilean composers who wrote pieces based on elements from the Mapuche culture, from different perspectives and historical contexts.

Cantos Araucanos53 is a piece for soprano and orchestra composed in 1932 by Carlos Isamitt.54

Due to his enormous interest in different folkloric forms, Isamitt spent much of his life studying

52 By dilemma I refer to the problems that arise when trying to establish musical mixtures between cultures that conceive the sonorous in ways that are sometimes antagonistic, as in the case of indigenous cultures and the European tradition.

53 Araucanos is the name that the Spaniards gave to the Mapuches of southern Chile, who lived in the area of Araucanía or Arauco.

54 Carlos Isamitt was one of the first Chilean composers to study indigenous music in a systematic way, including many of its elements in his orchestral and chamber works. He received the National Art Prize of Chile in 1965.

various Mapuche practices, in which the musical content was (is) an essential element.

Throughout his career he transcribed a great number of chants associated with the most diverse practices, such as medicinal use, earth worship, lullabies and other festivities of various kinds.

In this piece, Isamitt incorporates these melodies into a language that, although utilizing elements of the Mapuche culture, is filtered by European aesthetics.

If we examine the melodic line of the voice, and compare it with another chant by a

Machi55, we will see, of course, that there is some direct correspondence between one and the other, especially regarding the contour of the melody and the use of certain rhythmic patterns.

However, other characteristic elements have been modified to conform to the musical logic of

Western culture, such as the microtonal inflections and the constant rhythmic irregularities of the voice and percussion, consequently generating a split between the object and its representation. Elements such as the roughness of the voice, the loose harmonic implications of the melodic lines, and the elasticity of the rhythm have been replaced by their antagonists: a delicate melodic line with a very precise contour, and an extremely clear and defined rhythmic scheme. With this analysis, I am not offering a critique on the artistic value of Isamitt's work but directing attention to the mechanisms used incorporate musical elements of the Mapuche people.

What seems relevant from a sociological perspective, is the attempt to understand the rationale that a composer may have for translating the musical features of one culture through the aesthetic mechanisms of another. There are of course, many different answers to this question, but it would be interesting to review some of the responses that Isamitt gave to this problem, and to assess his position on the use of folkloric material within Latin American classical music composition.

55 Machis are the healers and sorcerers within the Mapuche culture. The Machis are able to cure physical and spiritual diseases through contact with nature.

For him, the use of Latin American indigenous material broadened the sound horizon, giving room to new ways of articulating an artistic discourse. It is not only the idea of vindication that moves him to reposition the elements of a marginalized culture, but also a historical recognition of what composers like Albeniz, Chopin and Rimsky-Korsakov achieved with their own vernacular music. Regarding this issue, Isamitt said the following:

“It is necessary to recognize that, in our country, the use of folkloric material has liberated the musical production of the very subjective intentions and the poverty of the technical means that was drowning it. At the same time, it awakened the most diverse personal purposes, served to extend the field of observation of the artist to their surroundings, and pushed them to be conscious of the stimuli offered by nature…”56

From his words one understands a clearly utilitarian attitude towards the use of folklore that ultimately serves the artist in elaborating a new language but does not necessarily transform their art into a vehicle of representation or vindication of marginalized culture. The use of folkloric material should not be an element of exoticism, but ought to be a mechanism of construction and articulation of a language that reunites the different cultures that have shaped Latin America.

Returning to Cantos Araucanos, we must remember that this is one of the first attempts to reconcile two of the cultures that form the reality of Chile: the indigenous and the European.

Therefore, despite the extreme stylization of certain musical elements, it is still possible to distinguish certain features of the Mapuche culture, especially regarding the use of the wind instruments and their movement by intervals of fifths, as well as in the cadences of the voice, its contour and its harmonic implications.

56 Carlos Isamitt. “El Folkore en la creación artística de los compositores chilenos.” Revista Musical Chilena 11.55 (1957): 12.

The case of Eduardo Cáceres57 and his piece Cantos Ceremoniales para Aprendiz de

Machi58 (Ceremonial Chants for a Machi Apprentice) offers a different solution to the issue of cultural representation. In this work for mixed choir, Cáceres uses different technical solutions to obtain a more accurate representation of the materials extracted from the Mapuche culture.

First of all, the rhythmic structure of the piece has been freed from a fixed pattern of strong and weak beats, replicating the irregular values used by Messiaen, giving it a much more fluid unfolding that closely resembles some of the most important characteristics of Mapuche music.

Secondly, the melodic and harmonic implications have also gone beyond the twelve standard notes of the Western system (in order to imitate the vocal inflections typical of a Machi, but without settling on a specific microtonality) by the use of glissandos, extreme leaps and highly dissonant harmonies. Unlike Isamitt, Cáceres starts from the Mapuche culture to reinsert it within the context of European music and, therefore, the sonic results are closer to ethnographic reality.

An interesting point about the way in which Cáceres rethinks this cultural mixture has to do with a system of musical organization that draws from the logic of Mapuche music.

Unlike Cantos Araucanos, in which indigenous elements are extracted, stylized and adapted to

European aesthetics, in the music of Cáceres the logic that dominates the development of the works is purely Mapuche. For Rafael Díaz, the internal structure of Mapuche music comprises two different types of temporality, the circular and the pendular, something that can be observed in Cantos Para Aprendiz de Machi:

“The circular is externalized in the reiterated cyclic structure of the melody, ritual and profane, and in the circular movements, recurrents of the ceremonial dances. The

57 Eduardo Cáceres is a Chilean composer born in 1955, who has focused on the study of music of the Mapuche culture. He has written more than 90 pieces for various instrumental formats, and received numerous awards, such as the UNESCO Medal of Music and the Prize President of the Republic by the Government of Chile in 2013. He is currently a professor of composition, analysis and orchestration at the Conservatory of Music of the University of Chile.

pendular manifests its presence in the pulsation of the instrumental accompaniments, which persist via the dichotomies of strong/weak, long/short and high/low, in the pendular body movements from left to right, or from back to front of the dancers and instrumental performers of the kultrún and the pifúlka. ”59

All these characteristics are present in Caceres’ work, through different vocal gestures, foot strokes, percussion and movements of the singers.

It is not necessarily my intention to foster a mixture between folklore and classical music, but simply to compare certain artistic and technical processes that composers have used to bring them together, as well as to offer my own perspective on a possible theoretical approach to this matter.

59 Rafael Diaz. “La Excéntrica Identidad Mapuche de la Música Chilena Contemporánea: Del Estilema de Isamitt al Etnotexto de Cáceres. " Revista Catedra de Artes No. 5 (2008): 7172.

5. Towards a Sociology of Music in Latin America

4.1 Interdisciplinary Approach With its most varied forms of expressions and due to its composition and projection of reality, art has always been a platform for constructing identity. Through art, people can create a reality that is not just aesthetic, but also political, social, economic, etc. Art has always been a narrator of history, taking on the role of (re)constructing a civilization, a nation or a society’s own identity.

In Latin America, the question existed for many years: how to give avant-garde music an identity, how to take on European and folkloric traditions without falling into the trap of empty stylization that lacks content and fails to go beyond the superficial.

To do so, it is crucial to understand not just the different range of styles that populate our traditional repertoire, but also the conceptual depth that our identity represents—the reason of certain processes, which often act as reflections of nonmusical practices. Music at times echoes these processes, and acts as a conceptual reflection of certain cultural or religious activities, or aesthetic or political concepts unique to each culture. For this reason, the blending of European and non-European traditions must now go beyond the predictable and take into account the unique characteristics that constitute authentic identity.

If we assume in music a capacity to convey meanings that surpass purely technical aspects, it is necessary to account for the social, political and cultural elements that support it.

Hence it is of utmost importance to elaborate mechanisms with which to approach to those elements that are below the surface, in order to understand, more comprehensively, the specific codes of a particular group of people.

Within the theory of sociology of music, there are some opposing stances on how to deal with this duality that exists between music as a set of technical elements and a more symbolic dimension capable to be a projection of more concrete social.

For Ivo Supicic, for example, the study of the history of music differs from a sociology of music insofar as the latter sees the musical elements not only as representations of the social, but as social elements themselves:

“.... the sociology of music concerns itself not only with the typical relationship between musical artistic facts, and extra-musical social facts, but also with these same musical facts as social facts themselves. The musical and the social must not be opposed, since they mutually interpenetrate; many musical facts imply, in effect, some social aspects.”60

From my point of view the approach of Supicic can lead us to misinterpretations of the social reality that underlies a musical representation.61 If we take the technical elements for granted, we might lose sight of the contradictions that emerge between the social and the artistic object, a blindness which has permeated the nationalist aesthetic, at least during the second half of the 20th century, with unfavorable connotations. This is why a sociology of music must be able to reveal the inconsistencies between the social object of study and the musical elements with which the discourse of representation is elaborated.62

An exemplary case of the aforementioned is the study carried out by Morgan James

Luker in his book The Tango Machine, in which he describes the contemporary Argentine tango based on the contradictions that have arisen during the second half of the 20th century,

60 Ivo Supicic. A Guide to the Sociology of Music. (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press 1987): 46.

61 A good way to explain this dissociation between reality and representation is the approach of Walter Mignolo to the historical evolution of Latin America. He speaks of the differences between the concepts of discovery and invention of America, giving emphasis to the discourse that is constructed by an analysis of the process of conquest and colonialism of the region. The discovery of America speaks of a Europe that triumphs over the unknown, imposing its political, cultural and religious mindset. The idea of America is a critical vision of the structures of power that have been installed throughout the region, imposing a course of action and historical development that does not belong to Latin America’s own unfolding history.

62 A sociology of music should focus on tracking those elements that shape a work, and analyze its connections with cultural and social aspects. Music is not always a mirror of these aspects. Many times it transforms them to its own whim in order to satisfy purely aesthetic desires.

where on the one hand it is still seen as a cultural reference, especially in the collective imagination, but on the other it has lost its real presence within the everyday life of

Argentinians, becoming more of national brand than a purely artistic object. A sociology of music must guide the attempts of reflecting an identity with the purpose of avoiding false representations.

The French writer René Guénon in his book The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times describes very clearly the problems to which a musical study is destined to be prey to if it does not consider each one of the fundamental elements that give form to a certain culture:

“One of the simplest means at the disposal of ‘pseudoinitiatic’ organizations for the fabrication of a false tradition for the use of their adherents is undoubtedly ‘syncretism’, which consists in assembling in a more or less convincing manner elements borrowed from almost anywhere, and in putting them together as it were ‘from the outside’, without any genuine understanding of what they really represent in the various traditions to which they properly belong. As any such more or less shapeless assemblage must be given some appearance of unity so that it can be presented as a ‘doctrine’, its elements must somehow be grouped around one or more ‘directing ideas’, and these last will not be of traditional origin, but, quite the contrary, will usually be wholly profane and modern conceptions.”63

A critical approach to the sociological study has opened new doors to understand the role of the discipline not only in what refers to purely social research, but also in terms of a possible reevaluation of the mechanisms themselves that sociologists utilize to execute their research. One of the strongest critiques of this school has been directed towards the extreme scientism with which sociology has carried out its investigations, without surpassing the merely descriptive to articulate a critical analysis of contemporary social structures. George Ritzer’s

63 René Guénon. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis 1995): 245.

sociological theory proposes to critically break down the power configurations in a given society. Therefore, with its roots in Marxist theory, and its main focus on economic domination, critical theory has turned to the analysis of various forms of social interaction, within which culture stands out as one of the most evident mechanisms for domination. Its sociological approach is presented as a great opportunity to uncover the relations that are established between music, as a set of technical and artistic elements, and a more representational dimension.

In the case of Latin American music of the classic Western tradition, used as a vehicle for identity representation, it would suffice to study the power relations between the different cultures at play to understand these structures of domination. History has shown us that the specific traits which could define the identity of a culture, are generally filtered through the optic of European aesthetics. If we think about the music of composers such as Manuel Ponce or Heitor Villa-Lobos, we see that their use of folkloric and indigenous material has been extremely stylized in order to adapt to the musical standards of the Western tradition. However, it would be unfair not to value their contribution to the development of a Latin American consciousness that has turned its eyes towards groups whose forms of life and culture have been systematically marginalized and, in some cases, definitively eliminated. And it is this desire for vindication that must be filtered by a sociological theory that can help us to shed light on how and why this marginalization occurred and how to proceed forward.

4.1 National Customs or Social Identities? One of the central points in the discussion about identity and its different manifestations through the arts, has to do with the issue of representation. If we talk about identity through the means of sound, this must be a reflection of something previously constituted and shared by members of a certain community. Otherwise, this supposed projection of identity would

become a construction, since what it is meant to be a representation would not find a correlate within the social fabric.

Although it is evident, the aforementioned is fundamental to be able to articulate a discourse that, with a view to an understanding of the music-identity phenomenon, takes into consideration the cultural and social reality within which a certain work is developed, as well as its implications in the realm of the representational, that is, in how these contexts would determine, to a greater or lesser extent, a set of technical elements with which these works will be constructed. Thus, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that each of the different social strata that comprise a society responds to certain cultural codes or symbols that from a historical point of view are an integral part of its development as a social group. As an example from nineteenth-century Chile, we have the peasant world, associated with the development of the tonada and other folkloric musical forms, as well as the economic and political elites of the region with the cultivation of European music and all the institutions created to replicate the cultural model of the old continent, represented through the creation of conservatories, curricula, theaters, concert halls and symphony orchestras, among others.

If we attend in a purely musical dimension to the specificity of each of the groups that shape a particular society, the concept of identity becomes even more complex. Through music it is possible to establish connections with various elements of a symbolic nature, which allow us to build and elaborate upon certain notions of identity. In the same way, the cultural and social ascription to one musical practice over another, defines certain individual and collective features. English musicologist Nicholas Cook says:

“In today's world, deciding what music to listen is a significant part of deciding and announcing to people not only who you want to be but who you are [...] Music is a very small word to encompass something that denotes as many forms as existing cultural or subcultural identities.”64

64 Nicholas Cook, Music: A very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5.

Considering Latin America, attempts to build a local identity in the decades after the wars of independence made visible a multiplicity of problems of a cultural nature, some of them unresolved to this day. The great racial and cultural diversity of the new nations made it very difficult to articulate an artistic or musical discourse that could make sense and also take into consideration with equal depth each of its social layers.

How could it be possible to give social and cultural cohesion to groups as dissimilar as those from Africa with diverse aboriginal groups? Or from a musical point of view, how to achieve an organic coexistence between the rhythmic, melodic and sonorous complexity of indigenous music, as well as its spiritual dimension, with the rationality, formalism, and balance of that from Europe?

In Chile, since the mid-1800s it is possible to detect attempts to combine (with more or less success) musical elements from different social, racial and ethnic groups, with the aim of building a sonically-fused identity that fully considered the cultural particularities of the national territory. However, if we delve into the mechanisms with which these mixtures have been carried out, we realize that in most cases the aesthetic lens of Europe filters and shapes this supposed syncretism, exposing the institutional power imbalance under which the artistic and musical discourse of Chile and Latin America has been articulated. It is the logic of the technical, harmonic, structural and formal development of European music that has reinterpreted and modeled, under its own parameters, different constitutive elements of the peripheral music and cultures from the region, such as Andean musical scales, African rhythmic structures, and indigenous melodic configurations among many others.

The search for national identity was carried out, to a large extent through the appropriation and stylization of cultural objects coming from marginalized social groups and strata, eliminating all sense of functionality as well as suppressing its original symbolic dimension.

From sociology, anthropology, cultural and gender studies, and from various other disciplines and areas of study, it is possible to shed light on this meta-sonorous dimension of music, which seeks to transcend the purely sonic, technical and formal, to give way to a theoretical reflection on its capacity of articulating ideas of aesthetic, political, social and cultural nature.

Among the numerous analyses that have been made of this social dimension of music, the approach of Theodor Adorno is probably the most relevant and familiar of all. For the

German thinker music should not be a mere reflection of the social issues of a certain era but must go beyond and assume a fundamental role of opposition to the capitalist structures that shape the current situation of societies, exemplified, fundamentally, in mass culture and its disengagement with reality and its social processes. However, from the perspective of sociology of culture—without the need to delve into purely musical aspects—it is also possible to extrapolate from certain ideas that will help us understand more deeply the processes of identity construction in Latin America during the last decades of the 1800s.

In relation to music and its social dimension, an interesting analysis is carried out by

Pierre Bourdieu, who tried to establish a connection between the taste for different musical manifestations and the position of the listener within the social spectrum. His study65, in which a large number of people from different social strata were interviewed, aimed to re-evaluate

Kant's aesthetic theory—which suggested a certain independence of aesthetic judgments—in order to enable an analysis that would take into account the social and cultural conditions of any particular group. For Bourdieu a person's particular life history has a direct influence on his ability to aesthetically appreciate certain artistic and musical manifestations, taking into account his own cultural circumstances. For instance, during the 19th century the evolution of the tonada developed outside urban centers, based on the work of peasants and rural singers.

At the same time, the written music of the Western tradition was cultivated with greater force at the hands of the upper classes who saw in this a way to preserve certain ideas and values inherited from Europe. We will return to this later, to see how Bourdieu's works can help us to better understand the possible imbalances of power in the construction of identity.

Taking as a starting point the ideas about capital developed by Marx, Bourdieu coined the term cultural capital ("the collection of symbolic elements such as skills, tastes, posture, clothing, mannerisms, material belongings, credentials, etc. that one acquires through being part of a particular social class"66) to indicate the complex conjugation of elements that plays a fundamental role in the construction of a social imaginary shared by members of the same group. Cultural capital exercises a certain predisposition towards one’s way of approaching diverse cultural experiences such as music, attending to the codes learned through the processes of formation and construction of cultural capital. Furthermore, this cultural capital will be expressed through what Bourdieu calls the habitus, "the physical embodiment of the cultural capital, to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences."67

This analytical approach to the cultural structures of different social strata, and the consequences that they entail in later artistic and aesthetic considerations, helps us to observe, study and understand how the intersection, from a musical point of view, of certain technical and sound elements from one social group to another. In fact, one of the conclusions that the

French sociologist derived from his research, taking into account the specific characteristics the social organization of France, has to do with the force that those in positions of power could exercise over those groups that are most disadvantaged. And, indeed, invoking certain inherent

66 Routledge, “Pierre Bourdieu: Cultural Capital” Social Theory Re-Wired accessed Jan. 29, 2018, http://routledgesoc.com/category/profile-tags/cultural-capital.

67 Ibíd.

aesthetic superiority, it is possible to see how certain composers and musical works are presented as superior artistic values, at the expense of other musical forms, generally associated with more modest or marginal social groups. Consequently, the institutional conformation, as it was in the case of Latin America, is built around these assumptions, elevating certain sound and cultural practices and objects, while suppressing others from official artistic discourse.

The cultural construction of Latin America, and the transplantation of institutional

European artistic canons does not respond to purely aesthetic criteria, but also to political and social considerations. The “European” represented the way forward for a nation that wanted any kind of development. As Miguel Rojas Mix says, "... it is not only admiration for the

European, it is also contempt for the indigenous. The creole founded his social prestige in descending directly from the conqueror, and his greatest title of pride was to be genetically and culturally a white."68

For the Chilean sociologist Jorge Larraín, this social disjunction was articulated around two concepts that turned out to be antagonistic: identity and modernity. The first of them placed its interests in those values and forms of life that had seen their development truncated as a result of the European invasion and its subsequent consequences. Modernity, on the other hand, was an expression of the future: the possibility of shaping a social, political and artistic project taking as reference the Enlightenment. According to Larraín, this misunderstood confrontation supposed in Latin America an erroneous reading of the implications of the concept of modernity. It was understood as a disruptive and exogenous object that had nothing to do with the characteristics and singularities of Latin American history. Thus, as a result of this conceptual opposition between identity and modernity, both were used to socially organize the region, in different situations and historical contexts. In words of Larraín:

68 Miguel Rojas Mix Los Cien Nombres de América: Eso Que Descubrió Colón. (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica, 1991), 158.

"This displacement of modernity with respect to identity could not help but encourage the idea that either modernity is a delayed and ill-received graft of an already constituted identity, or else that identity is an obsolete and traditional obstacle to an indispensable modernization [...] Modernization theories are more widely accepted in times of accelerated development and economic expansion. Instead, identity theories have emerged with greater force in periods of crisis or stagnation.”69

Larraín's reading about the Latin American mentality is clearly expressed through the development of music in the region. The idea of identity was tied to this impulse of revaluing popular and folk music. Regardless of whether it took into consideration the historical and social reality of those elements that it wanted to revalue, nationalism in Latin America, from its beginnings, understood the issue of identity as a process of aesthetic reformulation of musical practices peripheral to the institutional musical discourse, practices that had been developed in the region over the years by some of the most disadvantaged social groups.

5.3 Cultural Capital and the Construction of the Identity In order to graphically describe the political, artistic and cultural behavior of a certain society, Bourdieu creates a conceptual map in which he analyzes the interaction between economic and cultural capital, pointing out how they influence each other in the formation of the structures on which society is sustained. As one can appreciate in Figure 9, corresponding to the social space described by the sociologist, political behaviors, as well as artistic, musical, and even sports preferences, are closely related to the monetary status of each social group.

69 Jorge Larraín Identidad y Modernidad en América Latina. (Mexico D.F., Mexico: Editorial Océano de Mexico, 2004), 57.

Figure 8: Bourdieu's Social Space

The upper left section of the graph, for example, corresponding to the proportional relation between cultural capital + and cultural capital - (variable relationship according to the location within the same quadrant), is composed of secondary and university professors, musicians, writers and intellectuals, among some others, and within their artistic preferences it is possible to appreciate a certain inclination towards classical music, poetry, more complex

literature, etc. Likewise, the members of this group correspond, generally, to those persons who have deepened their academic training with various postgraduate studies.

Below this group we can find the members of the lower left segment, who have, comparatively, a smaller volume of capital than those of the upper left. According to Bourdieu's observations this social segment, made up of primary professors, public officials, and technicians, expresses itself through its predilection for popular and folk music, beer, soccer, etc., and, like the previous group, would have a greater political affinity with the ideas of the left.

Now if we examine purely musical aspects, it is clear that certain preferences are associated more clearly with one social group than another, both with respect to an aesthetic inclination as well as from creative and compositional practices. Folklore, for example, has been a cultural and musical expression, linked mainly to peasants, workers and, in general, to the working class, represented in Bourdieu’s scheme by the lower section of the graph.

Classical music was systematically cultivated, both from creation and from audition, within upper class groups, as a way of perpetuating and reproducing certain codes and symbols inherited from Europe. The case of Guzmán, which we discussed in previous chapters, exemplifies the latter: a musician, composer and pianist trained in Chile and Paris, who replicated certain aesthetic ideas and the technical complexities of piano music of Chopin,

Liszt, and other romantic composers of Europe. The personal history of Guzmán, despite coming from a family of musicians, does not correspond to that of a person who had cultivated folkloric or popular genres. On the contrary, as evidenced by his training and the aesthetics of his work, the music of the Chilean composer clearly responds to the ideas of 19th century

European Romanticism, which is expressed mainly through pianistic virtuosity and harmonic complexity.

In what way then, with the conceptual map of Bourdieu in mind, can we understand this idea of identity that emerged with such force in the 19th century? If we speak of identity, in its musical dimension, as a way to express sonorously certain particular characteristics of social interaction and collective forms of life, what do members of the high social strata have to do with those of the more modest ones?

Perhaps it is illustrative to remember the idea that Rojas Mix has on the concept of identity:

"... there are no national customs, but with class [...] a rich Spaniard is more similar to a rich Englishman than to a poor Spaniard. If there are popular identities, which are glimpsed in everyday life, in certain values, in a language, in gestures of character, in music, in folklore [...] there are also others from the oligarchies and emerging bourgeoisie [ ...] You can study identity in intellectual discourse, or research in day to day [...] you can also say that there are attributed and claimed identities, both associated with image [...] The imposed identities are often assumed by the ruling classes. They found their system of prestige, precisely, in developing an 'exotic identity', in their dépaysement, in being culturally foreign in their own world. "70

Chile, since the mid-nineteenth century, reveals a certain inconsistency between creator and work, since the latter would not find a correlation, following the organizational logic of

Bourdieu, in any of the described social groups. It would be more of an identity construction.

A peasant tune, for example, is not a musical genre that has been actively cultivated by the well-off social classes. Likewise, genres such as opera, symphony, or even chamber music, did not arrive with the same impact in the more modest rural or urban sectors. This is why each of them developed musical practices that made sense according to their own cultural, historical, political and economic situations.

70 Miguel Rojas Mix Los Cien Nombres de América: Eso Que Descubrió Colón. (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica, 1991), 158.

Whose Identity is a symphonic tonada then? If we understand nationalism as a musical practice that consists on re-reading folkloric material of a certain country under European aesthetic canons, can we speak of identity if we deprive these materials of their symbolic value or of the social circumstances that give them life?

In the light of Bourdieu's social theory, there are no cultural symbols that can be extrapolated in the same way to different members of a society. Identity is expressed through inherited customs to be part of a certain social class. Consequently, a musical hybrid, as these mixtures between folklore and European tradition would have to be, could not represent identity, since they have no position in the social space. A person of low social stratum does not consume orchestral music, in the same way that a person from a high stratum does not listen to folk music.

Although it exceeds the purpose of this dissertation, it may be necessary to mention at least the position of the Jacques Rancière on this subject. For him, the true art (the art that becomes political), is that which exceeds what is expected of it, and goes beyond the limits of social conventions. Possibly a symphonic tune could be for Rancière a valuable art object, since disarticulates the established categories, making it necessary to rethink its own implications. It has nothing to do with traditional aesthetic values, but everything to do with the possibility of transforming the aesthetic into political.

This is how Ranciere's aesthetic approach is described by Giuseppina Mecchia, in one of the essays in the book Key Concepts dedicated to the French philosopher:

“It is through the domain of aesthetics, social participation and abstract thought that emancipation is expressed as a fact and that its political potential comes to be realized. It is in these participative and dis-identificatory moments – in terms of economic and

social assignation of status — that the passive victims of power become "a people" as historical subject.”71

Thus, for purposes of reflecting an identity, one should ask how much margin there is to subvert certain canons. Probably a music that seeks to accurately reflect certain musical elements of a certain culture will not have much room to innovate. However, a music that focuses on the incorporation of cultural and not necessarily musical elements, will be able to construct its own aesthetic discourse, without the need to fall into empty stylizations: Gerard

Behague exemplifies this last in the work Beba Coca-Cola, by the Brazilian composer Gilberto

Mendes, in which social criticism is foregrounded, using certain features of Brazilian tribal music, such as rhythmic complexity and microtonal intervals, without the need to refer to any specific genre.

71 Giuseppina Mecchia, “Philosophy and Its Poor: Ranciere’s Critique of Philosophy,” in Jacques Ranciere: Key Concepts, Jean-Philippe Deranty (Durham, UK: Acumen Publishing Limite, 2010), 45.

6. Preliminary Conclusions

Since the independence of Latin American nations, the problem with respect to identity has hovered around different areas of public life. Through literature, the visual arts, music, and other disciplines, an attempt has been made to give shape to a discourse that can help uncover the hidden face of the region from years of domination in diverse areas, from the artistic and aesthetic to the economic and political. A multidisciplinary approach, from the arts, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and history, among others, can allow us to better understand not only the social conditions of Latin America, but also can provide us with tools to produce the necessary changes to achieve greater integration and development in the region.

The purpose of this dissertation has not been to determine or describe the identity of

Latin America, but rather to review certain practical and theoretical approaches that can help us understand the phenomenon in a more integral way. Establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue will undoubtedly open different opportunities to understand the cultural reality of the region from different angles. An art that pretends to constitute itself as an identity projection, must necessarily consider those political and historical aspects that have been an integral part of the cultural evolution of Latin America, especially those impositions of aesthetic and theoretical character.

Likewise, it is important to consider the ideas developed from sociological theory, such as those of Bourdieu, which question the notion of identity as something that could be extrapolated indiscriminately from members of different social classes. As I mentioned in previous chapters, the idea that Latin American nations can be encapsulated under similar descriptive parameters is widespread in the region. However, this idea neglects such basic elements as social and economic situations, which tend to be among the most decisive factors in the shaping of identity.

In his analysis of the cultural and social situation of France, Pierre Bourdieu does not speak directly of the concept of identity, nevertheless the equation between cultural capital and habitus serves as a good analogy to understand the evolution of music in Latin America.

Elements of a symbolic nature, like identity, are the result of certain social and economic dispositions, and in general do not emanate from anything intrinsic to the human being. The taste for certain arts is consequently the result of an accumulation of experiences such as education and social relations. It is for this reason that talking about national identities will always be limited to aspects that for the most part do not surpass the superficial.72

It is very difficult to offer precise results or declarations on how to proceed with the project of creating Latin America. Numerous musicians, composers, performers have tried to contribute to awareness of a musical task that considers the social and cultural reality of the region. However, beyond offering solutions and ways of proceeding, it seems more important to be aware of the need to rediscover the transformational potential of Latin American art. It may be possible through art to unveil the mechanisms of aesthetic, political oppression, etc., in order to promote the resurgence of a truly Latin American culture.

As Eduardo Galeano says:

“Independence is still a task to be completed, as it has been throughout the Americas. All our nations were born deceived. Independence forgot those who risked their lives for her. And women, young people, Indians, and blacks were not invited to the party."73

72 By this I mean that this idea of national customs tends to eliminate the particularities of the different social classes, which have very different cultural experiences between each other. For that reason, for Pierre Bourdieu and Miguel Rojas Mix, there would be no national customs, but customs of classes.

73 Daily Motion, “Entrevista con Eduardo Galeano,” Telesur, 2011, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xhdqo6

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