The wide diversity of musical cultures in the Andes means that the most popular genre in the region, the huayno, has a number of localized variants. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the style of huayno associated with the city of Ayacucho, Peru, underwent a transformation that surprisingly placed it alongside international pop music and more cosmopolitan Andean genres on the local radio dial. Joshua Tucker’s Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars is grounded in his ethnographic study of this period, but despite the main title’s suggestion, Tucker goes beyond a focus on the musicians to critically examine the role that producers and DJs played in the rise of the music’s popularity. His excellent balance of musical description, social history, and ethnographic insight make this volume valuable reading not only for those interested in Andean music but also for those attentive to the ways people shape media production, dissemination, and consumption.
Tucker foregrounds musical description in two complementary chapters. Chapter 2, “The Andean Music Scene,” provides a broad overview of the formal characteristics of the huayno across the Andes, including sonic and temporal features, instrumentation, poetic devices, and thematic tropes. Tucker traces how these characteristics changed during the twentieth century in Peru in light of the political ideology of indigenismo, the advent of the recording industry, and the development of pan-Andean music. Ayacucho’s style is the touchstone here, with Tucker first describing how recordings of a guitar-based, literary type of huayno became iconic of the city. During the turbulent 1980s, local musicians used the genre to comment on the political situation, making Ayacucho’s huayno emblematic of socially conscious music. As the violence subsided in the 1990s, political themes became less prevalent, with producers and artists alike choosing to incorporate elements of pan-Andean music into their work, much to the dismay of purists. The result, however, was a wider fan base for the local genre. Throughout this entire period, the trope was that all variations of the city’s huayno were sophisticated, unlike the growing popular forms known as chicha and northern huayno. By briefly touching on the attitudes and aesthetic choices related to these two other musics, Tucker completes a second chapter that serves as an excellent overview of the genre for any intellectual newcomers to the region, particularly undergraduate college students.
Chapter 2’s complement is chapter 4, “The Commercial Huayno Business,” in which Tucker begins by focusing on the musical choices made during the “Golden Age” of huayno recordings in Ayacucho during the 1950s and 60s. Raul García Zárate’s virtuosic guitar interpretations and Trio Ayacucho’s guitar-oriented arrangements of classic huayno repertoire reinforced earlier tropes of the city’s musical sophistication, although Tucker keenly illustrates how these performances reflected “a selective vision of Ayachuchano tradition” (125). While the artists themselves primarily made these musical choices, this situation changed in the 1990s and 2000s as producers and engineers began to take an important role. Following up on the Gaitán Castro brothers’ successful combination of Ayacuchano huayno with pan-Andean instruments, Julián Fernandez, the owner of the record label Dolby JR, hired a regular staff of pan-Andean instrumentalists and arrangers to record upcoming artists in a similar style as he saw fit. Fernandez had made his label important in the dissemination of Ayacuchano huayno in Lima during its socially conscious phase. Fernandez would later develop “contemporary” Ayacuchano huayno along a pan-Andean aesthetic but also incorporate elements of the romantic balada--always cautious not to cross the line and be accused of being too “commercial.” While some would argue that these new combinations were part of creative change, Tucker argues that the stigma placed on commercialism illustrates that values associated with sophistication remained. Tucker’s emphasis on the role of producers here resonates with the work of other scholars (e.g., Meintjes 1999, Greene 2005), who have been attentive to the role of studio work in audiences’ interpretations of recordings.
Tucker makes the historic discourse about Ayacuchano huayno his focus in chapter 3 by examining the publications of the Centro Cultural Ayacuchano (CCA), a social organization formed in the 1930s that planned cultural events with the hope of elevating Ayacucho’s decaying status. The organization’s discourse was rooted in Huamanguinismo, a reference to the city’s Spanish colonial name, and this attitude appealed to this Spanish heritage. In other highland towns, intellectuals and performers vied for national prominence on claims that Andean indigenous culture best represented Peru—the ideology known as indigenismo. Huamanguinismo resonated with these ideas musically in some ways, like promoting compositions based on or about indigenous culture, but these were always in juxtaposition with elite interpretations of huaynos and yaravís that acknowledged mestizo roots but emphasized Spanish refinement. Through well-chosen examples of the CCA’s leaders’ writings and his descriptions of its events, Tucker illustrates that the support of this elitist organization singled out Ayacuchano huayno as separate from other expressions more closely associated with Peru’s indigenous population.
In chapter 5, Tucker complements earlier scholars’ insights by transcending the recording studio and delving into the radio broadcasting booth. He readily admits the difficulties in being able to accurately measure the reach and effect of these broadcasts in Ayacucho, but he calls for researchers to be attentive to the ways DJs and producers frame the recordings they broadcast – both in terms of verbal artistry and scheduling. To this end, Tucker explains how certain DJs in the 1990s adopted the style of discourse typically reserved for pop music to frame Ayacuchano huayno recordings; their speech referenced local culture, nurturing a sense of familiarity and “coolness.” Instead of broadcasting these songs at dawn or late evening, these mediators started inserting huayno into the workday rotation. Arguably, the combined result was to erase some of the stigma previously associated with huayno as a lower class, outdated music in the minds of many younger, cosmopolitan listeners. While this ability of DJs and producers to change social beliefs can certainly be overstated, Tucker makes a strong case that it cannot be ignored.
Tucker acknowledges that the public attention for Ayacuchano huayno has faded, ceding more space to the genres of cumbia and huayno norteño. The discourses surrounding elegance and elitism remain, however, as do efforts to incorporate more cosmopolitan influences into the music and to frame these recordings in the media to appeal to more cosmopolitan audiences. While Tucker’s study has documented these processes in Ayacucho, I would venture that similar dynamics exist in other contexts, pointing to the relevance of his study far beyond the Andes.
--------
[Review length: 1074 words • Review posted on December 17, 2014]