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Diccionario bibliográfico de la música argentina y de la música en la Argentina (review)
The book takes a broad view of its topic, providing bibliographic information on \"indigenous, folkloric, popular, and academic music from the colonial period to our days\" including names of composers, interpreters, investigators, journalists, producers, musical genres, geographic sites, institutions, musical instruments, and specific musical pieces, including music for film and the theater. Because of this, the book is, on the one hand, necessarily relegated to functioning as little more than an entry point into these other works, or, at the very least, working only in tandem with them. (To be fair, you can tell who the individuals are by their dates of birth and death, and some entries indicate if a place is a café or a cabaret, for instance, though the vast majority of entries are presented without these kinds of indications.) Though I can imagine reasons for why Donzo may not have wanted to provide this kind of information in the book - not wanting to pigeonhole artists within given genres comes to mind, though Donzo does not provide any real explanation - it seems to me that providing almost no contextual information whatsoever works against the purpose of a book such as this, which, I assume, is to make more information about Argentine music more easily available to anyone looking for it.
Journal Article
Tango Renovación: On the Uses of Music History in Post-Crisis Argentina
Long celebrated as a \"national\" genre in Argentina, tango has not been massively popular there since the late 1950s. Beginning in the late 1990s, however, a renewed interest in the genre began to develop among many Argentines, and tango has since risen to again occupy a prominent position within the wider domain of the country's cultural life. The reemergence of tango was punctuated by the devastating Argentine economic crisis of December 2001, which generated severe economic hardship and raised fundamental questions about self and society in Argentina. In this context, the collective work of a growing milieu of contemporary Argentine tango artists, audiences, and critics has amounted to what has been called a \"renovación\" (\"renovation\" or \"renewal\") of tango. As a musical practice, renovation consists of drawing upon genre conventions, stylistic details, and musical repertoires from previous periods of tango history and incorporating that material into current practices. It is a complex domain of music making in which the past is sonically brought to bear on the present, which, in turn, is heard as a commentary on the past. The paper is arranged in a series of three case studies, each of which is focused on a particular strategy of renovation corresponding to the work of several contemporary tango artists and groups. By contextualizing these cases, I show how similar musical strategies and aesthetic concerns underlie what might sound like radically divergent musical styles and artistic projects. The ultimate goal is to develop a sense of how, in this particular context, musical style and history are used as a means of negotiating political-economic ruptures and demonstrate how these musical practices are connected to larger transformations in the cultural and political topography of contemporary Latin America.
Journal Article
The Managers, the Managed, and the Unmanageable: Negotiating Values at the Buenos Aires International Music Fair
Diversity has become a key discourse of international cultural policy-making following the neoliberal turn. This article traces how diversity discourses were put into practice by the city government of Buenos Aires, Argentina, following the devastating 2001 Argentine economic crisis, taking the first Buenos Aires International Music Fair (BAFIM) as a case study. A key event within broader policies aimed at developing the local music industry as both an economic and a cultural resource, BAFIM was designed to use diversity as a means of reconfiguring the economic, social, and cultural domains of the city. While the fair opened fields of action in which subjects could make newly productive moves, a critical examination of the fair also demonstrates that diversity, in and of itself, is not a democratising paradigm.
Journal Article
Tango Renovación: On the Uses of Music History in Post-Crisis Argentina1
Because knowledge of these templates is mutually but unevenly shared by musicians and their diverse audiences, the social power of these practices lies not in the variously celebratory and/or anxious positions taken by artists in relation to canonized tango history, but in the creative (mis) understandings of that history that are sounded and enacted through the practice of renovation itself. Members of these ensembles would compose original music, and the orquestas also drew upon a canon of common repertoire that represented a more generalized tango tradition. Because different orquestas played many of the same basic compositions, an ensemble was sonically defined less by what pieces of music they played than by how they played them, their style. Music does not \"signify something outside of itself, a reality, the truth,\" but rather functions as \"an interactive social context, a conduit for other forms of interaction\" (Erlmann 1999, 6). [...]music is somewhat unique in that it can communicate through affect, \"feelingfully and intuitively,\" allowing the same musical object to communicate multiple messages on multiple levels to multiple interpretive subjects simultaneously (Meintjes 1990, 38). Within such a context, those renovating tango in Buenos Aires today cannot comfortably subscribe to a teleology of musical progress. Because of their position within the larger trajectories of Argentine musical and social history-after the golden age, after the crisis-a model of musical history in which their work builds upon that which came before them in a linear, progressive fashion is simply inoperable.14 For these artists, rather, musical history constitutes a field of competing aesthetic sensibilities and historical trajectories that must be actively engaged and negotiated from the distinct perspective of the present if they are to be made meaningful as a past.
Journal Article
The tango machine: Musical practice and cultural policy in the post -crisis Buenos Aires
This dissertation examines new ways in which tango, Argentina's “national” genre of popular music, has been drawn upon and used as a cultural and/or economic resource following the devastating Argentine economic crisis of late 2001, focusing on how the transformation of musical politics has affected the conceptualization and practice of musical form. Based on data gathered over more than 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Buenos Aires, the dissertation is divided into five chapters. Following a general introduction on the historical, musical, and political context of the study, the second chapter investigates how the cultural industries, especially the local music industry, emerged as a priority for the city government of Buenos Aires in the wake of the economic crisis, tracing the formation of such policies through the city's engagement with international debates on “cultural diversity.” Chapter three studies how cultural policies based on these diversity discourses have been put into practice, taking the government-produced Buenos Aires International Music Fair—a spectacular event designed to increase both the cultural significance and economic value of local music production, including tango—as an ethnographic case. Chapter four explores the cultural politics of contemporary tango music against core debates regarding the status of “the popular” in Latin America, analyzing how specific musical features and stylistic details of some contemporary tango maps onto broader patterns of musical, cultural, and social inclusion and exclusion in Argentina today. Chapter five considers the work of TangoVia Buenos Aires, a non-profit arts organization that has taken advantage of the city's newfound interest in forming public-private partnerships following the economic crisis, arguing that the viability of such partnerships, from the perspective of both the private entrepreneurs and their public partners, has required a substantial revision of historically entrenched aesthetic ideologies regarding tango in Argentina. By locating tango music and culture within the broader managerial regimes that frame the genre as it is practiced in Buenos Aires today, I bridge disciplinary modes of thinking about the power of aesthetic values, cultural practices, and the workings of cultural policy and the cultural industries within the contexts of economic neoliberalism and cultural globalization.
Dissertation
Tracing Tangueros: Argentine Tango Instrumental Music
Luker reviews Tracing Tangueros: Argentine Tango Instrumental Music by Kacey Link and Kristin Wendland.
Book Review
Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay
The book addresses the conundrum of the black minority experience in what was and is, at least on paper, a strikingly egalitarian, meritocratic society, with some legal provisions for the equal protection and opportunity of all citizens regardless of race going back to the mid-19th century. [...]the cumulative evidence Reid presents here shows how the \"universalist\" ideology that underlies Uruguay's legal protections of individual rights has in fact made it only that much more difficult to address the lived reality of prejudice and exclusion faced by the minority Afro-Uruguayan community, in part because it provides no institutional space in which their claims to group rights can even be recognized. Examples include: official tolerance (as of 1816) of the original candombes, ritual events featuring song, dance, and drumming that were sponsored by mutual aid societies formed by enslaved Africans and their descendants; the development of blackface and racially integrated comparsas during boom in European immigration to the Southern Cone in the late 19th century (which Andrews convincingly frames as a way for newly arrived immigrants \"to be, or to become, Uruguayan\" (p. 62) despite the shock of blackface and the clearly racist content of candombe in this and other time periods); and the municipal government's longstanding, deliberate cultivation of carnival comparsas and candombe music as a means of promoting Montevideo as a destination for cultural tourism.
Book Review