An edited volume like this one is expected to strike at least a minimum of balance in terms of extent, depth, and focus with regard to the contributions of its authors. That did not happen in this volume, edited by William H. Beezley, which seems uneven in aim and scope. The title itself promises to cover all of Latin America as a whole. We understand how difficult this task can be, but a deeper look at the book’s eleven chapters immediately reveals unexplained highlights and absences: three chapters dedicated to Mexico; two to Cuba; and one to Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Argentina, and Bolivia, respectively. Thus, very significant countries in the region—Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Panama, Costa Rica, Paraguay, and most of the Caribbean Islands—are omitted without explanation.
This disproportionate prepresentation is also reflected in the authorship and length of the contributions. The editor, in addition to the introduction, wrote two out of the eleven chapters and is therefore the author of a quarter of the book. Readers would certainly appreciate a little more variety in this regard. The same concern applies to the length of the collaborations: at one extreme, some articles barely cover four pages, while, at the other, some articles extend up to thirty-eight pages. This has an impact, of course, on the style and depth of the chapters, ranging from an opinion essay (without references) to works whose length and depth suggest that they could become independent monographs on their own.
Two short texts are included to address a country as important as Cuba! One of them is the very old and well-known “Cuban Music. Afro-Cubanism” by Alejo Carpentier, which deals with concepts that continental musicology has already left behind; the other is essentially journalistic, “An Accidental Hero [Cuban Singer in the Special Period]” by Jan Fairley. Neither was written for this book, as both authors passed away before its publication—Carpentier died in 1980! Furthermore, these articles seem completely out of context with respect to the rest of the book. Including them is incomprehensible, if you take into account the high-level Latin American specialists in the field who could have written pieces much more in tune with the rest of the book. In that sense, the volume seems more like a collection of randomly chosen varieties than a product conceived as an organic whole to deal with a problem as complex as the title indicates.
Beezley’s introduction suggests that the book, focused on cultural nationalism and ethnic music, will follow the course of particular operas written by local composers in Latin America. This is clearly a risky bet because, among all musical genres, opera has been cultivated the least in this world region due to the immense cost, effort, and infrastructure involved in the composition and mise en scène of a spectacle of that nature. The Latin American repertoire of operas is notably restricted compared to its European counterpart. However, some authors in the book strive to highlight operas that eventually had an impact on Latin American cultural nationalism. Among them is Beezley himself. Additionally, in “Cuzcatlán (El Salvador) and Maria de Baratta’s Nahualismo,” Robin Sacolick discovers the extraordinary work, as a composer and ethnomusicologist, of this exceptional Salvadoran. Ketty Wong's “Cumandá: A Leitmotiv in Ecuadorian Operas? Musical Nationalism and Representation of Indigenous People” touches on the success of Juan León Mera’s novel, Cumandá (1879), and its paradoxical failure as a libretto of homonymic operas by Pedro Pablo Traversari, Sixto María Durán, and Luis Humberto Salgado. An operatic vision of the carnival, as well as the strong rivalries between different regions in Brazil, is brought to light by Jerry D. Metz, Jr., in “Carnival as Brazil’s ‘Tropical Opera’: Resistance to Rio’s Samba in the Carnivals of Recife and Salvador, 1960s–1970s.” The tensions between indigenous people from the highlands and mestizos from the lower parts of Bolivia are described by Gabrielle Kuenzli in an opera by Alberto Villalpando (based on a novel by Nestor Taboada Terán), in her chapter “The Opera Manchay Puytu. A Cautionary Tale Regarding Mestizos in Twentieth-Century Highland Bolivia.” These chapters delve into topics that have not been much studied, and hence constitute very valuable contributions to Latin American musicology.
In addition to this focus on opera, the book includes articles on a number of other topics, among them: “La Hora Industrial vs. La Hora Íntima. Mexican Music and Broadcast Media Before 1934” by Sonia Robles; “Dueling Bandoneones. Tango and Folk Music in Argentina’s Musical Nationalism” by Carolyne Ryan Larson; and “Sounding Modern identity in Mexican Film” by Janet Sturman and Jennifer Jenkins, which emphasizes the role the media (radio or cinema) played in shaping the idea of nation. Beezley’s works, “Music and National Identity in Mexico, 1919–1940” and “Guatemalan National Identity and Popular Music” also follow this direction.
Although it offers several excellent contributions, this book is unbalanced and its components are not connected coherently enough to draw the big picture of Latin American music that the editor intends to paint.
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[Review length: 829 words • Review posted on May 7, 2020]