Lightning Lounge: Current Topics in Ibero-American Music Research (Ibero-American Music SG)

In articulating Spanish musical nationalism, musicologists have historically pitted autochthonous genres and Spanish performers against foreign music and musicians. Although numerous studies have revised problematic tropes such as the notion of the "Italian invasion," a late nineteenth-century construction of musical nationalism based on unique musical markers of Spanishness still dominates and colors narratives and discussions of early nineteenth-century musical production in Spain. In this talk, using the Real Conservatorio de Música de María Cristina (1830) and the Liceo Artístico y Literario de Madrid (1837) as case studies, I highlight contemporary attitudes and voices that challenge these historiographic approaches and demonstrate how the promotion of foreign styles and models by both the state and the liberal elite was part of nation-(re)building processes during this decade. By focusing on the language used in related founding documents, I demonstrate a contemporary view that saw music itself as universal in nature yet national in execution. Considering recent studies on nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism, ultimately, I suggest that "cosmopolitan nationalism" may be a fitting term to describe these contemporary attitudes toward musical production during this turbulent decade in Spain's history. 

On November 1910, in Mexico City, recording scouts of the Victor Talking Machine Company recorded a duet of comedians performing "Casamiento de indios", a parody of an indigenous wedding filled with jokes, special effects, and references to popular culture. Three years later, another group of scouts recorded a similar number in Colombia, titled "Viaje de un indio a Bogotá", a phonographic comedy accounting for the adventures of a rural traveler through the urban setting of Bogotá. During the acoustic era, recording companies pursued local musics from all over the world, but their commercial ventures were not limited to music. A diverse assortment of spoken performances, from jokes and recitations to historical reenactments and dramas of various kinds flooded their recording sessions and catalogues. In this brief paper, I will examine some of those recordings made by Victor in the course of its expeditions throughout Latin America. My analysis focuses on their production, considering both the technological challenges posed by the acoustic equipment and the way in which some of these performances functioned as acts of phonographic ventriloquism in relation to indigeneity and popular culture in Latin America.

The exceptional reception of Pietro Metastasio's works during the eighteenth century, all over Europe and in the Iberian Peninsula in particular, is well documented. Due to that unparalleled success, it is now possible to compare large numbers of diverse musical settings of the same aria texts. While the common belief points to shared procedures among composers to express specific emotions, the traditional and computer-assisted analysis of ca. 500 arias of versions of Didone abbandonata and Demofoonte points in a different direction, ie. towards an enhanced variability in composers' musical treatment of particular aria texts. Furthermore, the analysis of the settings especially written for Iberian theatres, in comparison to the average data extracted from the whole corpus, indicates that some particular usages regarding key, metre, rhythmic features and vocal part treatment – especially range and leaps– were significantly conditioned by geographically-determined and gender-associated tastes. Through big-data analysis, this paper will eventually place eighteenth-century Iberian music production and consumption in the context of European opera seria, while setting forth that their unique musical characteristics may have also been related to issues of gender construction. 

The song "Alfonsina y el mar" was first recorded by vocalist Mercedes Sosa in an album called Argentinian Women (1969). Félix Luna's lyrics evoque modernist poet Alfonsina Storni's suicide, occurred in 1938 by drowning, incurring in romanticized and infantilized female representations. Ariel Ramírez musical setting adds Nationalistic and rural connotations by setting the verses to a zamba, an Argentinian folk dance. Thus, the resulting gender and cultural cues contrast strongly with Storni's identitarian self-representation as an independent and urbanite feminist writer. This paper argues that Sosa's nuanced and powerful rendering of the song achieves a feminist performance, coherent with Storni's gendered behaviour. Combining Butler's gender theory, Cusick's reflections on feminist theory and Hall's representation concepts, this paper deconstructs poetic, musical, iconographic and audiovisual materials to reveal underlying cultural preconceptions, while positing the power of musical performance to subvert discursive identity cues embedded in popular songs' constituent materials. 

This presentation describes my involvement in a multidisciplinary historical memory project, "Surviving Memory in Post War El Salvador" and the challenges I confront as a music historian participant. Our team strives for a decolonial, collaborative, and horizontal methodology that recognizes the interconnectedness of historical memory with contemporary social issues and neocolonial challenges, as we work to document the history of campesinos and campesinas' experience of the Salvadoran civil war (1980-92). I work, in the music project, to create an archive of revolutionary songs, and to explore and document, through historical memory workshops, the political, social, and psychological function of music-making in the Honduran refugee camps to which many campesinos and campesinasfled. As I began gathering songs, many of which document brutal massacres and the hardships of the refugee experience, I turned to theories of trauma to better understand their function. I began to realize, however, that trauma scholarship from the global North offers surprisingly little to help us understand music that seeks to bolster psychological resilience and political resistance simultaneously. This talk seeks to encourage conversation about decolonizing one's research practice, both in the field and during analysis, and about the challenges of adapting Participatory Action Research to Musicology.