Boletín Latino-Americano de Música (1935-1938, 1941) The Boletín Latino-Americano de Música [BLA] began publication in 1935 as the first scholarly periodical to be devoted to music in Latin America. Gilbert Chase described BLA’s first four volumes as “an enormous boon to all students of Latin American music,”1 and Luis Merino Montero referred to the publication as a milestone in the history of Latin American musicology, not only because of its Americanist perspective, but also because it gives equal consideration to the music of a pre-Hispanic oral tradition, indigenous and folkloric music, and the written colonial music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 In all, within a decade, six volumes were published in various South American capitals: volumes I (1935), III (1937) and V (1941) in Montevideo; volume II (1936) in Lima, volume IV (1938) in Bogotá and volume VI (1946) in Rio de Janeiro. While originally intended as an annual publication, there was a three-year hiatus between volumes IV and V, and another five before the last volume appeared. All volumes were published in Spanish, except volume VI, in Portuguese with few articles in Spanish. The first volume was distributed in forty-six countries and all copies were sold within fifteen days.3 The visionary force behind this monumental publication was Francisco Curt Lange (December 12, 1903- May 3, 1997) a German musicologist who settled in Uruguay in the 1920s, and eventually became an Uruguayan citizen. In 1934 Lange published an article on americanismo musical,4 a movement that aimed to promote American music and musicians through the cooperation of institutions and scholars in North America, Central America, the Caribbean and South America. With this objective in mind Lange founded in Montevideo the Instituto Interamericano de Musicologia in 1938, established public libraries (including extensive recording collections, for example, in Recife, Brazil, 1943), organized international conferences (the VIII International American Conference, Lima, 1938 among them) and participated in the Conference on Inter American Relations in the Field of Music, held in Washington DC in 1939. However Lange’s most important initiative within the context of americanismo musical movement was the creation of the Boletín Latino-Americano de Musica. The ideas underlying the americanismo musical found immediate support in other South American countries and, later in the United States at the time of President Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy.” The scope and size of BLA is substantial. Volume I contains 288 pages; volume II, 480 pages; volume III, 545 pages; volume IV, 861 pages; volume V, 641 pages and volume VI, 608 pages. All volumes, except volume V, are amply illustrated and all volumes, except volume II, include a 1 Gilbert Chase, “Recent books. Americanismo Musical,” Modern Music, XX/3: 214-215. 2 “Francisco Curt Lange (1903-1997): tributo a un americanista de excepción.” Revista Musical Chilena, (1943) LII/189 (1998): 14. 3 According to Lange’s editorial published in BLA, II: 18. 4 Francisco Curt Lange, “Americanismo Musical,” La Sección de Investigaciones Musicales. Su creación y finalidades, Montevideo, 1934. Cited by Hugo Lopez Chirico in “Lange, Francisco Curt”, Diccionario de la Música Española e Hispanoamericana, ed. by Emilio Casares et al. (Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, 1999- 2002), VI: 736. 1 musical supplement containing previously unpublished compositions by North and South America composers. Lange’s goal was to publish a volume of BLA each year in the capital of a different North or South American country. “In this way,” he wrote, “our americanismo will begin” a practical phase gaining the interest of artists from the publishing country which will result in their joining our movement.”5 The journal displays a consistent structure with each volume divided into two parts: the first with a number of sections containing in-depth studies [Estudios] and the second, consisting of a musical supplement (not, however, included in volume II). The first part contains many sections dealing with the musical life of Latin American countries, the United States, Europe and Asia, and music-related subjects such as pedagogy, history, analysis and biographies of composers. Volume I: Montevideo, Uruguay, 1935 The first volume was published in Montevideo in 1935 under the auspices of the music division of Uruguay’s Instituto de Estudios Superiores. The first part of the volume consists of four sections. Section one (125 pages), the largest in this publication, is devoted to Latin American music subjects; section two (thirteen pages), the shortest, treats musical subjects from the United States and Europe; section three (101 pages), deals with music pedagogy and aesthetics; and section four (twenty-two pages), contains notes and commentaries on the contents of the volume. In his volume I editorial, Lange focuses on the goal of the publication namely promoting the music of the Americas along the lines he expressed in americanismo musical, highlighting the participation of many contributors from different parts of North and South America, and calling for the organization of a Latin American Music Congress. The lengthy musicological articles in this section cover a wide range of Latin-American topics ranging from Josue Teófilo Wilkes’ writing on twelve seventeenth-century colonial songs, Doce canciones coloniales del siglo XVII, Luis Heitor Corrêa de Azevedo’s study on the life of Brazilian composer José Mauricio Nunes García (1767-1830), to the joint contribution of Hector L. Gallac and Juan José Castro on the compositional styles of contemporary Argentinean composer Juan Carlos Paz. In addition, the description of the Araucanian instrument trutruka by the Chilean Carlos Isamitt, is the first in a series of BLA articles treating traditional Latin American music and musical instruments. There are also two essays, the first on folk dances from Colombia, by Emirto de Lima, and the second, on music of the Incas by the Peruvian composer and ethnomusicologist Andrés Sas. Of interest is the fact that BLA sets an example of providing equal treatment of traditional, indigenous, folk and art music from the Colonial times to the twentieth century. Of interest in this regard is Mario de Andrade’s article on the performance of Congos, an Afro-Brazilian dance. A brief second section of Part one on music in the United States and Europe follows; it consists of one article dealing with popular North American songs by George Pullen Jackson, and another offering an overview of contemporary composers active in Vienna by composer-musicologist Paul Amadeus Pisk. 5 Francisco Curt Lange, “Americanismo musical,” Reforma Social (Tlaxcala, México), I/2 (1934): 1-13. 2 Section three, entirely devoted to music pedagogy and aesthetics, contains five extensive essays. The first, by Allende,6 treats music education in the elementary and middle schools in Chile. The second, by composer Raul Espoile, deals with the cultural aesthetics among Argentina’s youth. Georg Gartlan contributes the third essay and discusses the efforts of Lowell Mason to establish music education in Boston public schools in the early nineteenth century. Lange contributes the fourth and fifth essays. One offers an account of the pedagogical activities of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos from 1930 through 1934, a period in which he was immersed in his choral educational project (Canto Orfeónico). The other is a long document on the aesthetics of music teaching in Uruguayan schools, in which the subjects of Lange’s 1932 conferences in Uruguay are reported. The fourth section includes biographical notes on the twenty-one BLA contributors representing six nations of the Americas and one in Europe. Volume II: Lima, Peru, 1936 In 1935, Lange lectured in Argentina, Bolivia and Peru where he was invited by the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Latin America’s oldest university, to create the university radio station. Because of Lange’s Peruvian contacts volume II was published in Lima in 1936 and includes among its contributors a large number of prominent Peruvian scholars such as César Arróspide de la Flor, Carlos Raygada and Andrés Sas. In addition to the topics treated in the first volume, namely, Latin America, the United States, and Europe, music pedagogy and aesthetics, the second volume adds Asian studies. There is also a lengthy report on the Sección de Investigaciones Musicales in Montevideo, Uruguay. The largest section of the volume (300 pages) is devoted to Latin American studies. The volume opens with Lange’s editorial, as is customary, and contains eighteen essays. Among the most extensive are the three lectures Lange gave at the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos de Lima on americanismo musical, the use of radio to educate the general public and methods for collection of folk songs and dances and their use in art music. Among other notable contributions are ethno-musicological studies on indigenous instruments such as the Andean erque, Bolivian sicus, and the instruments employed by the indigenous Kollas. The musicological studies range from surveys on Peruvian music to a more specialized analysis of colonial songs (continuation of the analysis published by J. T. Wilkes in volume I). For the publication of volume II, Lange attracted the contributions of outstanding musicologists from Argentina (L. Giacobbe, H. L. Galliac, and J. T. Wilkes), from Bolivia (R. Paredes, González Bravo), Brazil (E. Freitas e Castro, P. Sinzig and B. N. Dos Santos), Chile (C. Isamitt, H. Kock), and Peru (cited above). Despite his efforts, Lange was disappointed by the lack of participation of other Latin American scholars, calling in his editorial notes “once again for the collaboration of the countries still not taking part in the publication: Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, 7 Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Dominican Republic, and Venezuela.” 6 In 1910, 1922, and 1923 the Government of Chile requested composer and pedagogue Pedro Humberto Allende a study on music educational centers in Europe and other South American countries.