Latin American Music Center

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LAMúsiCa Vol 2 No. 1 (June 1995)
(1995-06-19) Latin American Music Center, Jacobs School of Music
The Latin American Music Center Newsletter. Carmen Helena Téllez, Editor in Chief; Gerardo Dirié, Editor; Erick Carballo, Managing Editor; Mario Ortiz, Contributor.
LAMúsiCa Vol 2 No. 2 (February 1997)
(1997-02) Latin American Music Center, Jacobs School of Music
The Latin American Music Center Newsletter. Carmen Helena Téllez, Editor in Chief; Gerardo Dirié, Editor; Erick Carballo, Managing Editor; Mario Ortiz, Contributor.
LAMúsiCa Vol 2 No. 3 (February 1998)
(1998-02) Latin American Music Center, Jacobs School of Music
The Latin American Music Center Newsletter. Carmen Helena Téllez, Editor in Chief; Gerardo Dirié, Editor; Erick Carballo, Managing Editor.
LAMúsiCa Vol 2 No. 4 (May 1999)
(1999-05) Latin American Music Center, Jacobs School of Music
The Latin American Music Center Newsletter. Carmen Helena Téllez, Editor in Chief; Gerardo Dirié, Editor; Erick Carballo, Managing Editor
Increasing Cultural Awareness through Choral Music [full paper]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Meisten, Kimberly D.
This paper examines the impact of a unique community engagement program called ¡Cantaré!, which places Mexican composers in Minnesota classrooms to serve as composers-in-residence. Since 2008, the Minnesota-based chorus VocalEssence has connected eight different Mexican composers with more than 20 school, college and community choruses. Urban, suburban and rural communities have participated. The composers work directly with the singers and write new choral works specifically for each group. Through the VocalEssence !Cantaré! program, more than 5000 people have heard 35 new choral works, commissioned and premiered in community concerts throughout the state. The paper will clarify the effects of the program on audiences, composers and performers by reviewing evaluation results and exploring the cross-cultural influences of the compositions. Data has been collected from student, teacher and composer surveys; teacher and student focus groups; classroom observations; Cultural Advisory Committee meeting notes; audience and budget statistics; and related ¡Cantaré! educational resources developed for music teachers and conductors. Key findings reinforce the profound impact of the arts (in this case, contemporary choral music) in the assimilation process of immigrant populations. As the public face of the immigrant group, the arts can enhance understanding and tolerance, easing the incorporation of present and future immigrants. It is our hope that this paper will demonstrate the program’s positive social and musical impact, thus motivating others to replicate the program nationally.
El Dorado in Philly: Latin American Symphonic Music in the Fleisher Collection [abstract only]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Galván, Gary
While la Musica may have fostered the legend, it is la musica that makes the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia the El Dorado of Latin American symphonic music. Believing that no collection of orchestral music could be considered complete without the inclusion of the works of South and Central American composers, Philadelphia music philanthropist Edwin Fleisher began working directly with the United States Government in the 1940s to establish and cement cultural relations and personally commissioned Nicolas Slonimsky to visit Latin America in 1941-1942 in order to secure Pan American orchestral works so that they might be copied for the Fleisher Collection. Fleisher also attracted enthusiastic support from valuable resources such as Walter Burle Marx, Francisco Curt Lange, the Pan American Union, and the Library of Congress to mark the Federal Music Copying Project’s enlarged entrance into the field of producing full performance sets of unpublished contemporary South and Central American orchestral music. Ultimately, Fleisher amassed the largest collection of orchestral performance sets of Latin American orchestral music in the world. Through my research into this collection, I have recently uncovered over 70 uncatalogued Latin American works on microfilm which lack complete materials for performance. This presentation examines the history of the copying project through primary source documents, addresses the collection’s inestimable value to researchers and performers worldwide, and postulates a plan for moving this hidden treasure from the page to the stage.
Music in the Bernardo Mendel Collection [abstract only]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Gordillo, Bernard
In late January of 1969, musicologist Robert M. Stevenson visited the Lilly Library at Indiana University, where he requested permission to study three Latin American manuscripts—Ramírez del Aguila’s Noticias politicas and two others simply labeled “Peru” and “Guatemala.” His visit, the first of several undertaken over a period of many years, was most likely due to an open invitation extended by the library just months before. The manuscripts that Stevenson studied, and from which he would later refer to in his writings, were all part of the Mendel Collection—a unique and extensive archive focused on the Spanish Empire in Latin America and the Philippines—whose foundation was the personal library of Austrian businessman Bernardo Mendel. Now containing approximately 40,000 printed items and 26,000 manuscripts, which embrace the Age of Discovery through the early 20th Century, the collection has been at the library for five decades, in which time its reputation as one of the largest in the United States has not only grown, but attracted much interest from many a scholar. Of particular consideration is the music contained within the collection. And while modest in comparison to other areas, it is nonetheless significant for a handful of items, including the Guatemalan manuscript which attracted Stevenson. In this paper I explore music prints and manuscripts in the collection with a brief survey the contents, acquisition history, and known influence and dissemination. Music-related sources, such as villancico text booklets, are also examined.
Shaping Perceptions: Early Experiments in Musical Diplomacy and Inter-American Relations [abstract only]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Campbell, Jennifer L.
When State Department officials inaugurated a program of cultural diplomacy in the 1930s, their actions stimulated a surge of government-sponsored activity in music. One of the most effective proponents of this initiative was the Music Committee of the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), whose membership included Carleton Sprague Smith and Aaron Copland. This committee focused on furthering musical exchange with Latin America. They decided which U.S. musicians would receive funding for South American tours, as well as encouraged musical reciprocity by commissioning and performing South American music, and, when possible, bringing composers and ensembles north. In this paper, I examine how the decisions and actions of OIAA Music Committee played a role in the way music of the United States was represented in South America and vice versa. In many ways, this committee served as a gatekeeper for cultural exchange with Latin America. Only those U.S. musicians, ensembles, and musical works that met with the committee’s approval were financially supported. In turn, the information gathered by the leaders and participants in these tours influenced which South American musicians and composers the committee advocated to bring to the United States. Two case studies, the 1941 Yale Glee Club tour of South America and the visit of Brazilian composer Francisco Mignone to the U.S. in 1942, serve as examples, offering insight into how the committee members and, more broadly, U.S. government officials evaluated the success of these cultural exchanges and measured the perceived and potentially lasting impact of these new initiatives.
Bordering Spaces and Encounters in Music of Gabriela Ortiz [abstract only]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Kielian-Gilbert, Marianne
The Mexican city of Cuidad Juárez, Chihauhaua, across the river from El Paso, Texas, has become a flashpoint for the complex of values of border relations between the United States and Mexico. Two works of Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz confront ever-present problems of drug trafficking and violent death (the “disappeared women of Cuidad”) in, respectively, her video-opera ¡Únicamente la verdad! (Only the Truth!) (2008-10) and 2009 “requiem” setting Río Bravo for six female voices and crystal cups to text by Mónica Sánchez Escuer. ¡Únicamente la verdad! crosses boundaries of fact and fiction, myth and reality, documentary, opera, and corrido (Mexican ballad). Drawing on specific journalistic reports, it explores border imaginations of Camelia La Tejana, a woman fictionalized in the narcocorrido Contrabando y traición (Smuggling and Betrayal) made popular by the norteño music band Los Tigres del Norte in the 1970s. In multiple musical references (corrido, la música ranchera, cumbia del norte, art/popular music), scene five enacts the journalist César Güemes’s interview of Camelia María, one of the “Camelias” of the opera, and her resistance to his attempt to pin down the “real” Camelia. Ortiz’s 2009 work, Río Bravo takes a different turn in honoring the “lost “disappeared” women (Desaparecidos) of the Juárez maquiladoras (sweatshops). Their voices, “without echo”, multiply through work’s musical “echoing”, articulating the strangeness of their musical displacements of Escuer’s poem. I consider how private spaces—the interview, the requiem—can have public impact in musically enacting and ritualizing the stark realities of individual experience and loss.
Roque Cordero (1917–2008) in the United States [full paper]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Labonville, Marie
Roque Cordero is universally acknowledged as Panama’s finest composer. Like many Latin American musicians of his generation, he was an energetic, visionary man of multiple talents that included composing, writing, conducting, and teaching. During his long career he was honored with numerous national and international commissions, awards, and recognitions. Most of his compositions are based on the twelve-tone technique, which he used with some freedom. He imparted Panamanian flavor to many of these works by his use of folk rhythms and his careful choice of pitch materials. Cordero was largely self-taught as a composer until, in 1943, he began seven years of musical study in the United States. In 1950 he returned to Panama, eager to improve music education in his country and create a truly professional symphony orchestra. During the next sixteen years, however, he faced a series of political and economic obstacles that were mitigated only slightly in 1957 when he gained international recognition as a composer. In 1966, frustrated and disappointed, he left Panama to accept a three-year post at Indiana University as assistant director of the Latin American Music Center and teacher of composition. After that he found other professional opportunities in the United States, where he spent the rest of his life. Nevertheless he remained loyal to his homeland, retaining his Panamanian citizenship and proudly signing his correspondence “Roque Cordero, Panamanian Composer.” This paper explores Cordero’s education, career, and reception, as well as the documentation of his work, in Panama and the United States.
Cuban Art Music in the U.S. before and after the Cuban Revolution [abstract only]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Quevedo, Marysol
The wellspring of U.S. Pan-American sentiment toward Cuba dried up quickly after the 1959 Revolution. Prior to the Revolution exchanges between Cuban and U.S. composers was vigorous, however, the events following the Revolution not only changed economic and political relations between Cuba and the U.S., but also composers’ and musicians’ ability to maintain ties between the two countries. This paper traces the pre-Revolutionary exchanges between Cuba and the U.S. through Henry Cowell’s New Music Society and its related publications (which included Amadeo Roldán’s Rítmicas), the Pan-American Association of Composers, as well as Cuban composers who studied in the U.S. (including Gisela Hernández, and Julian Orbón). The decrease in exchanges between the two countries is most noticeable in festivals and concert series in the U.S., such as the Inter-American Music Festival (IMFA), revealing the embargo’s effect on cultural matters. A quick survey of the programs of the IAMF reveals that after their first festival in 1958 the only Cuban composers included in performances were those who were exiled in the U.S. The lack, and some years complete absence, of Cuban works in the IMFA and the dearth of scholarship about Cuban art music form this period suggests a lack of compositional activity in Cuba. In reality, however, music composition in Cuba flourished, and cultural exchanges with other Latin American countries continued, in fact even increased, with the establishment of institutions to cultivate Pan-American exchanges, most notably the Casa de las Américas. Thus, in spite of the U.S. embargo Cuba actively fostered Pan-Americanism, albeit a different kind of Pan-Americanism from that fostered by the U.S.
The Danzón and Caribbean Musical Influences on Early Jazz [abstract only]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Moore, Robin
Music scholars have long lamented the lack of historical data describing the emergence of early jazz repertoire in New Orleans. Not only do no recordings of the music exist prior to 1917, but few written sources from the turn of the twentieth century make any mention of the emergent musical style. As a result, many studies describe jazz as the invention of a few almost mythical figures in isolation, with little reference to earlier performance practice. This paper uses an analysis of the earliest recordings of the Cuban danzón, dating from 1905, as a window into the formative years of jazz. The danzón is especially significant as the first African-American music ever recorded, and a style known to have been performed in New Orleans beginning in the late 1880s. Analysis suggests (1) that many parallels in form, rhythm, and style exist between the danzón and dixieland repertoire, and (2) that instrumentation associated with the final “hot” (partially improvised) sections of the danzón bear striking similarities to the clarinet-trumpet-trombone frontline of dixieland. The danzón may well have contributed directly to the development of jazz; danzón style ties jazz to broader regional developments, and underscores the fact that the histories of Latin American music and music in the United States are fundamentally intertwined.
Brief overview of the musical dialogue between Bolivia and United States [full paper]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Terceros, Isaac
This paper presents a results overview of the musical relationship between Bolivia and United States in the few last years. In this context, composers like José Velasco Maidana (c. 1899-1989) and Jaime Mendoza Nava (1925-2005) lived in the United States, opening in this way the doors for certain American influence in Bolivia, a country characterized by an appreciation and defense of its original culture. Thus, we show that a meaningful compositional dialogue has been established. One outcome of this dialogue took shape with the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (OEIN), whose innovative aesthetic positioning, has stimulated an intercultural reflection integrating musical traditions of the Aymara and Western musical language. In the performance field, intercultural projects have been developed from the exchange of musicians and conductors – as the renowned violinist Jaime Laredo (b. 1941), the guitarist Piraí Vaca, or conductor Kenneth Sarch – resulting, for example, the foundation of the Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil de Santa Cruz de la Sierra (OSJ). In the academic area, Bolivian composers have benefited from initiatives such as the Centro Latinoamericado de Altos Estudios Musicales del Instituto Torcuado Di Tella in Buenos Aires, where received instruction Alberto Villalpando (b. 1940), responsible for the formation of two generations of composers in Bolivia. Thus, technical and aesthetic aspects of musical composition in works resulting from the interdisciplinary dialogue above, were identified and will be presented in this paper.
Awkward and Uneven Musical Flows: The Politics of Increased U.S.-Cuban Musical Interaction [full paper]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Storhoff, Tim
Since his inauguration, President Obama has relaxed the musical embargo of Cuba following a long period when musical exchanges between the U.S. and Cuba were few and far between. This has made high-profile Cuban performances possible for U.S. musicians like Kool and the Gang, Colombian-American rocker Juanes, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. This period has also seen more Cuban musicians performing in the U.S. because the State Department has resumed issuing cultural exchange visas to Cubans, and the Cuban government is allowing more musicians to travel abroad. While these exchanges can be seen as a part of President Obama’s call for a “new beginning” in the U.S.-Cuban relationship, he also cautioned against overestimating the political impact these exchanges could have. In the same way that contemporary global economic processes create dense interconnections along with areas of exclusion and immobility, recent musical flows between the U.S. and Cuba are also awkward, uneven and discontinuous. While performers distance themselves from any overtly political stance, the disparities between who may participate in these transnational performances, when and where they take place, and the various controversies and reactions they inspire expose a range of attitudes and realities about the U.S.-Cuban relationship and its future. By analyzing the awkward and uneven nature of these performances in both the U.S. and Cuba, this paper explores the potential function of musical exchanges as bellwethers for future engagement between these two nations even when reforms in the U.S.-Cuban relationship appear to be stalling.
Brazilian styles and jazz elements: Hybridization in the music of Hermeto Pascoal [full paper]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Côrtes, Almir
By the late 1960s, the Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal (1936) started producing a musical oeuvre that would become a representative part of the repertory of modern Brazilian instrumental music (known internationally as Brazilian jazz). During his non-formal musical training, Pascoal was exposed to and practiced important Brazilian urban genres such as samba, choro, baião, frevo, and bossa nova. In 1970 he moved to the US, where he lived for around four years. During this time he became intimately involved with jazz music. Among other activities, he collaborated, played, and recorded with the jazz giant Miles Davis (1926-1991). This paper intends to show how Brazilian styles and jazz musical elements are articulated in the music of Pascoal. The discussion is based on a definition of hybridization as a social and cultural process in which structures or discrete practices that developed separately are combined in order to generate new structures, objects, and practices (CANCLINI, 2003). The depth of this cross-cultural process will also be examined, showing the boundaries of Pascoal's blending. Recordings and transcriptions of important pieces by Pascoal will be analyzed in order to illustrate which elements are hybridized and which are not.
Musical Analysis of 16 Poesilúdios for Piano, by Almeida Prado, According to Analytical Techniques Developed by American Theorists [full paper]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Moreira, Adriana Lopes da Cunha
This work presents a musical analysis of structural and pertaining to surface aspects in the 16 Poesilúdios for piano, by the Brazilian composer Almeida Prado (1943-2010). It focuses on aspects of study, analysis and promote of contemporary Brazilian music, as a contribution for its bibliography. The methodology unites a brief biography of the composer; the division of his work into four phases; the presentation of excerpts by a compact disc with the pieces played by the researcher that presents this work, as well as photos of the paintings that have suggested the composition of some Poesilúdios; interviews with some artists to whom some pieces are dedicated, and an interview with the composer with his consideration about his own compositions are also included. It also explores aspects in relation to tempo, dynamics, timbre, texture and structure, with special emphasis on set theory, and proposes an association between musical analysis techniques developed during the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, presented by authors like Felix Salzer (1982) and Joseph Straus (2005). Therefore, it defends the approach of a work conceived by one of the most relevant Brazilian composers after Heitor Villa-Lobos, which work is analyzed according to techniques developed by American theorists and analysts. The conclusion verifies possible interactions between all these aspects, identifying the elements of unity and considerations about the structure of the Poesilúdios.
Radio Dialogues: U.S. Musical Influences on Cuban Alternative Music [abstract only]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Thomas, Susan
U.S. accounts of post-revolutionary Cuban music history tend to focus on the island’s isolation, constructing a narrative that explains more about our own isolation from Cuba than Cuba’s isolation from the rest of the world. This paper works against such narratives by examining contemporary Cuban musicians’ pervasive and tactical engagement with U.S. music in the 1980s and 1990s. The generation that created the eclectic and experimental genre now known as Cuban Alternative Music (Borges-Triana, 2010) was born roughly two decades into Cuba’s socialist experiment. Coming of age during the revolution’s greatest prosperity and optimism, they experienced the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. There may not been an open market for “imperialist” culture in Cuba, but young people actively sought out U.S. and British popular music by listening to Miami radio broadcasts and acquiring recordings via relatives who worked as merchant marines or diplomats, or who traveled abroad for educational or military purposes. Michael Jackson; the Jackson Five; Earth, Wind, & Fire; and Cool and the Gang are routinely cited as major influences along with Argentine rock and Brazilian jazz and bossa nova. This paper examines the role of recordings as well as direct Cuban-U.S. collaborations in shaping contemporary Cuban music. Such musical engagement should not be viewed as another example of U.S. hegemony. Rather, it was willful and selective; Cuban musicians sought out artists and genres that fulfilled certain aesthetic criteria or that offered innovative solutions to issues of rhythm, harmony, arrangement, or production.
George List and Colombian Musicology [abstract only]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Bermúdez, Egberto;
George List started his research interest in Colombia in the mid 1960s concentrating basically in the Afro-Colombian tradition of the northern coast. The materials gathered in his field trips led to several important publications and a sizable amount of field recordings now at the Archives of Traditional Music. His work -although not centered at the School of Music- developed simultaneously with the Latin American Music Center and very close to the music programs and initiatives oriented from the Music Division of the Organization of American States. In Colombia this was a very convulsive period, characterized by workers and student mobilizations and heated discussions on cultural imperialism, foreign military intervention, debates over armed struggle and the role of religion and academia in a polarized political agenda. Colombian musicology was trying to consolidate at the Conservatory of Music within the National University led by Andres Pardo Tovar and by 1964 was already entangled in the political discussion and the polarized intellectual and social climate that led to the emergence of the armed struggle and covered intelligence and indirect military US intervention. In this climate, after Pardo Tovar left the Conservatory, in the late 1960s major changes in the direction he tried to implement become apparent. This paper aims at assessing the impact that List and his work had in Colombian music research within the context described above.
Alcajazz: Afro-Peruvian Forms of Musical Knowledge and the Shaping of Afro-Peruvian Jazz [abstract only]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) León, Javier
This paper is focused on the recent collaboration between local jazz and Afro-Peruvian musicians to develop a new, locally rooted style of jazz that uses Afro-Peruvian musical genres as a departure point. While there have been prior attempts at such musical synthesis can be traced back to the late 1970s, I argue that a shift in perspective among the latest generation of jazz both jazz and Afro-Peruvian musicians has led to more fruitful working relationship. Specifically, I suggest that jazz musicians have increasingly come to acknowledge and value their Afro-Peruvian counterparts for having access to distinct forms of musical and cultural knowledge that are deemed vital to the development of this new jazz idiom. To this end, I will look at the music of Gabriel Alegría and the Afro-Peruvian Sextet, playing particular attention to how stylistic features of Alegría’s music have grown out of an ongoing dialogue among band members with markedly different social, ethnic, and musical backgrounds. I will also explore the broader implications that this new type of collaboration has for rooting Afro-Peruvian jazz among the larger Afro-Peruvian musical community rather than remaining predominantly a middle class and upper middle class activity at the hands of musicians who are not of African descent.
Inter-American Musical Encounters During the Cold War: Festival of Spain and the Americas, Madrid, 1964 [full paper]
(Latin American Music Center, 2011-10) Payne, Alyson
The renewal of the Pact of Madrid in 1963 brought the United States and Spain into a closer rapport as well as strengthened Spain’s connection to the Organization of American States (OAS). No longer politically isolated, Spain began to host inter-American exhibits of music and art to promote more amicable relations with the American republics. One such event, the Festival of Music of the Americas and Spain, held in Madrid in 1964 and sponsored by the OAS and the Institute for Hispanic Culture, showcased the latest avant-garde music of the U.S., Latin America, and Spain. In addition to promoting new music, this display of compositions by Aaron Copland, Juan Orrego Salas, Roque Cordero, Aurelio de la Vega and others aided the political relations among the countries involved. Since the start of the Cold War, the U.S. had tried to strengthen its inter-American relations, while at the same time, deterring Communism in the region. Avant-garde music, in stark contrast to Soviet musical policies, could unite the Americas in a cosmopolitan embrace. Spain, eager to rehabilitate its international reputation, also promoted its own avant-garde compositions in addition to those from the Americas. This demonstration of musical goodwill also helped Spain to secure needed economic assistance from the U.S. and Latin America. This paper examines the cooperation of the U.S. and Latin America with Spain on this festival in order to explore the myriad political uses of music, from promoting democracy to dictatorship.

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