At the University of New Mexico I had the fortune of being an archival assistant for the John Donald Robb Archive of Southwestern Music housed with the Center for Southwest Research. I listened to and digitized many of the over 3,000 field recordings of vernacular musics that former dean of the College of Fine Arts and Professor Emeritus John Donald Robb collected throughout his life during his travels in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. They are now available on the Center’s online archive. The materials in this collection that most captured my interest pertained to audio recordings from the American Southwest, and particularly my home state of New Mexico.

At the time, for me as a musician and aspiring Mexican-American music scholar, the collection afforded a historical glimpse into the aural landscape and material culture in which the lives of people in New Mexico were immersed from the 1940s through the 1970s. Listening to many voices captured on tape, song after song I often wondered what it was like for the people that Robb recorded. Here was this six-foot-tall retired Harvard-educated lawyer who moved from New York to New Mexico following a nearly twenty-year career in law. With the move and change of environment he would dedicate the second half of his life to study music to become a significant composer and music educator internationally. In conjunction with these roles he excelled in compiling one of the largest audio archives of folk music in the Southwest. His daughter Priscilla Robb McDonnell recalls accompanying her father on various trips into communities in New Mexico and southern Colorado to collect or as she says “hunt” for folk music. She writes, “During the early 1940s, many of my most enduring and happy memories are of accompanying my father, John Donald Robb, on his hunting trips into the northern New Mexico mountain villages. Dad was armed with a German wire recorder and a bottle of wine to corral some old men to sing Hispanic folk songs.”

Hispanic Folksongs of New Mexico was originally published in 1954 and most recently revised and republished in 2008. It can be best described as a songbook collection of twenty-three popular melodies and texts arranged by Robb for pianoforte. The songs included in this collection are taken directly from the “hunting trips” the author conducted in the 1940s up until the collection’s first publication. Included are examples of corridos, canciones, inditas, relaciones, and a cycle of pastorela songs. Robb’s motive for recording the thousands of songs and hundreds of performers is most explicitly stated in the foreword of the text as he informs the reader:

“The Hispanic folk song of New Mexico is a veritable Spanish treasure. Like the contents of the treasure chest buried around the shores of the Spanish Main, its contents are often corroded and mangled with various sorts of dross. The real gems, the fine metal have to be selected with discrimination and sometimes polished and placed in an appropriate setting before their beauty and character become fully apparent. Often the songs are mutilated or incomplete, like a fine stone from which a part has been chipped. Sometimes the separate pieces can be found and reassembled. Scholars and musicians attempt to restore these beautiful things to the cognizance of the world and to integrate them into the wonderful and unprecedented civilization of our America of which they are a part.”

As the preceding excerpt shows, Robb’s mission in collecting folk music served as a means of providing thematic material for his art music in a similar manner to others who followed the lead of Hungarian composer Bela Bartók. The intended audience for Hispanic Folksongs of New Mexico would most likely be vocal soloists or ensembles that could undoubtedly use the collection as a useful cycle of Spanish-language folksongs as recital material. However, as a work of cultural recovery in ballad or song scholarship the collection falls short, since the author throughout the text indiscriminately manipulates, mixes, and adds textual materials from songs he deems “obviously incomplete or mutilated.” This poetic cannibalization obscures how variants of texts create new contexts with each new performance. What we are left with are variants created by Robb himself that erase the performative cues of Robb’s interlocutors from whom he collected his songs. Only three years later in 1958 with the publication of With a Pistol in His Hand, Texas scholar Américo Paredes would focus on the often-erased performative aspects of folksong in greater Mexico. Through his methodology of comparing the differences of variant texts he was able to approximate the interventions that the performers were communicating to their audience.

As evident in Robb’s particular work, the imbedded cultural and contextual meanings of these songs are unfortunately often seen as secondary behind the composers’ focus on the melodic and lyrical aspects. Robb states in his preface: “The songs I have used were selected chiefly for their beauty or interest, or both.” Though he does provide brief descriptions of various songs in this collection in the introduction and in a following section called “Discussion of Selected Folk Songs,” he tends toward genre-based scholarship. In these two sections he discusses characteristics of song types such as the romance, corrido, and the canción. This is followed by a short, confusing discussion of musical characteristics in which Robb draws upon evolutionary assumptions that the existence of modal melodies point to a “survival of ancient methods of musical thinking” from Europe (5). It is unfair to judge in hindsight the methodologies that are employed in the text, but an adequate new introductory essay would have helped singers who use these materials become sensitive to the performance politics of these borrowed cultural materials.

In the last thirty years of ethnomusicology a critique has emerged of how musical exhibition of traditional musics can erase voices of native musicians when their music is appropriated by more powerful social classes. The process of collecting folksongs from Hispanic villages and putting a songbook in print proves to be more of an artistic venture than an academic one. Today’s scholars have an opportunity to critically position Robb himself as a subject of study of his art music in relation to the materials he incorporated into his musical arrangements and compositions. It is unfortunate that the current revision and edition is unsuccessful in situating Robb’s own intervention into the folk music world of the 1940s and 50s. It would have easy and appropriate to provide a critical dimension to the prologue to locate Robb among his intellectual and artistic peers.

Two such scholars of many that Robb recognizes in his acknowledgements and whose work is fundamental to Robb’s own conclusions and analysis of the folksongs are Vicente T. Mendoza and his life partner, the anthropologist Virginia R.R. de Mendoza. V. T. Mendoza was at the time one of Mexico’s preeminent scholars of traditional musics. In 1945 the already accomplished couple was invited to New Mexico by the University of New Mexico to conduct an eight-months residency. The manuscript which was the result of this research remained in Robb’s archive for more than forty years until it was published in 1986. The text Estudio y Clasificación de la Música de Nuevo México finally gives us this text with which Robb was certainly in conversation. We can locate Robb’s academic position squarely in the Mendozian formalist tradition of Latin American scholarship based on genre definition and melodic analysis. Robb’s most comprehensive text, Hispanic Folk Music of New Mexico and the Southwest, published also in the 1980s, remains faithful to these 1940s methodologies which by 1980s were far out of date.

As for the re-publication and “revision” of the text in our discussion, the only new material added is found in the piano arrangements which are now computer-rendered and to which guitar chords above the staff have been added. Also the lyrical texts have been edited by a Spanish professor. Interestingly, here there is no mention of the standardization of the texts that has almost completely obscured the regional varieties of Spanish in the songs. These dialectical differences are evident in many of the field recordings. In addition, all the texts are not translated but rather poetically rendered as to provide an English text which could be sung alternatively in place of the Spanish texts or to serve as “subtitles” (xi). The piano settings of the texts, however pleasing, are also decontextualizing. Robb’s harmonic treatment of the melodies goes far beyond the chordal palette employed by the typical vernacular guitar practices of the region, which focus on tonic, subdominant, and dominant chords. Also the music arrangement standardizes and simplifies the rhythmic properties which were performed by many of the singers in Robb’s field recordings. Robb’s practice of only transcribing the first verse and chorus is useful in making art settings of folk music; however, it fails to give an idea of their performance in actuality. The native musician’s intervention is obscured and labeled “dross” which Robb laments and aims to correct. However, in rendering them artistically, he removes himself from a scholarly discussion, since his musical arrangements like his literary texts have been compromised.

Overall, as is stated in the preface, the work has not changed. All that was added were guitar chords above the staffs and computer-generated charts rather than the hand-drawn ones of the previous edition. For singers the new edition may be welcome, despite the failure of the introductory material to adequately inform the rich context from which these songs emerged. Students of historical ethnomusicology and popular culture would do best to read Mendoza’s corpus or consult the archive online personally as a way to contextualize the important metadiscourses which situate Robb’s substantial work both as a composer and folksong collector.

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[Review length: 1620 words • Review posted on August 18, 2010]