Music and Globalization in 20th-Century Latin America
TR 10:30 to 11:50 / Kelly Hall, Room 114
LACS 26412 & 36412 / HIST 26116 / MUSI 33416
Pablo Palomino – Postdoctoral Lecturer, Center for Latin American Studies and History
Department / [email protected] / Kelly 109B
WINTER 2016
This course introduces students to the history of the globalization of Latin America from
the perspective of the history of the region’s musical practices in the 20th century.
Lectures, group work, readings, and an individual paper will deal with the circulation of
music across national and cultural boundaries. The course focuses on both famous and
obliterated histories of folk, classical, and urban musical traditions, diasporic music
styles, entertainment corporations, music markets and technology, state policies, music
pedagogy, cinema, Latin American musicology, musical nationalism, and musical
diplomacy. Each week we will listen and discuss musical pieces in class to enable an
active dialogue between history and sound. Musical training is welcome but not
necessary to take this class. The emphasis is on the late 19th and the 20th centuries, but
issues of colonial, early post-colonial, and 21st-century music will also be considered.
“Musical practices” are approached here from the intersection of history, sociology and
ethnomusicology, and are intended as material, economic, labor, public policy, aesthetic
discourses, identity, and political forms. The course provides thus a historical framework
to music students, and a consideration of music and musical sources to students in history
and the social sciences.
The grade will consider class participation and a paper (10-15 pages) applying the
readings and concepts discussed in class on a Latin American music-related object—a
recording, music score, book, film, or any other commercial or artwork.
Up to five graduate students can take this course and work under specific guidelines.
Week 1 / Introduction: “Musical Practices,” “Latin America,” “Globalization”
Jan 5 – 7
Readings:
- Howard Becker and Robert Faulkner, “Do You Know...?”: The Jazz Repertoire in
Action (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Chapters 1 and 2: “How Musicians Make
Music Together” and “Repertoire as Activity: The Basic Elements.”
- Peter Sloterdijk, Globes. Spheres II: Macrospherology (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2014), Introduction.
1 Week 2 / Music Categories and Hemispheric Musical Crossings in the 19th-Century
Jan 12 – 14
Paper guidelines
Readings:
- William Acree, “Hemispheric travelers on the Rioplatense stage,” Latin American
Theatre Review 47:2 (2014), p. 5-24.
- John Charles Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin
American Popular Dance (University of New Mexico Press, 2004), p. 1-90.
Optional readings:
- Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging
Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Chapter
8: “Folk and Art Musics in the Modern Western World,” p. 256-77.
- Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Les voyages extraordinaires de L. Moreau
Gottschalk, pianiste et aventurier (Lausanne, Suisse: P.-M. Favre, 1985).
Week 3 / Global and Local Dimensions of Music Business in the Early 20th Century
Jan 19 – 21
Readings:
- John Rosselli, “The opera business and the Italian immigrant community in Latin
America 1820-1930: The Example of Buenos Aires,” Past & Present 127 (1990): 155–
82.
- Marc Hertzman, Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil (Durham;
London: Duke University Press, 2013). Chapter 3: “Musicians outside the circle: race,
wealth, and Property in Fred Figner’s Music Market,” 66-93.
Optional readings:
- Claudio Benzecry, The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), Chapter 1: “An Opera House for the “Paris of
South America.’”
- Hermano Vianna, The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music & National Identity in
Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), Chapter 3:
“Popular Music and the Brazilian Elite.”
Week 4 / Modern Soundscapes and Racial Ideologies
Jan 26 – 28
Early draft paper presentations
Readings:
- Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century
Colombia (Duke University Press, 2014).
Optional readings:
2 - Alejandra Bronfman and Andrew Grant Wood, Media, Sound, & Culture in
Latin America and the Caribbean (Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2012). (Selection).
- Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the
Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
-Pablo Palomino, “Nationalist, Hemispheric, and Global: ‘Latin American Music’
and the Music Division of the Pan American Union, 1939-1947,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, June, 2015.
Week 5 / National Sounds and Global Circulation: Tango
Feb 2: regular class
Feb 4: joint workshop with Prof. Dain Borges on 1930s music as historical source
Readings:
- Jo Baim, Tango: Creation of a Cultural Icon (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2007).
Optional readings:
- Ramón Adolfo Pelinski, El tango nómade: ensayos sobre la diáspora del tango
(Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2000) (French version available as well).
- Eduardo Archetti, “Masculinity, Primitivism, and Power: Gaucho, Tango, and
the Shaping of Argentine National Identity,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Power in
Latin America since Independence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 212–29,
- José Sebastián Tallón, El tango en sus etapas de música prohibida (Buenos
Aires: Instituto Amigos del Libro Argentino, 1959).
- Matthew B Karush, Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a
Divided Argentina, 1920-1946 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
- Florencia Garramuño, Primitive Modernities: Tango, Samba, and Nation,
(Stanford University Press, 2011).
- Didier Francfort, “Le tango, passion allemande et européenne, 1920-1960,” in
Anaïs Fléchet et al., eds., Littératures et musiques dans la mondialisation, XXeXXIe siècles (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015).
Week 6 / Musical Diasporas
Feb 9 – 11
Readings:
- Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘diaspora’ diaspora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2005.
- Zoila S. Mendoza, “Defining Folklore: Mestizo and Indigenous Identities on the Move,”
Bulletin of Latin American Research 17, no. 2 (May 1, 1998): 165–83.
- Pablo Palomino, “The Musical Worlds of Jewish Buenos Aires, 1910-1940,” in Amalia
Ran & Moshe Morad (eds.), Mazel Tov, Amigos! Jews and Popular Music in the
Americas (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
Optional readings:
- Anaïs Fléchet, Si tu vas à Rio: la musique populaire brésilienne en France au
XXe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013).
3 - Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in
the Jazz Age (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Chapter 5:
“Cosmopolitan Music and Race-Conscious Moves in a ‘World a Jazz,’ 19101930s,” 153-95.
- César Miguel Rondón, Frances Aparicio, and Jackie White, The Book of Salsa:
A Chronicle of Urban Music from the Caribbean to New York City (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
Week 7 / The Mexican Musical Globalization
Feb 16 – 18
- Andrew Grant Wood, Agustín Lara: A Cultural Biography, 2014.
Optional readings:
- Mary K Vaughan and Stephen E Lewis, The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and
Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 (Durham: Duke University Press,
2006), Chapter 6: “Mestizaje and Musical Nationalism in Mexico.”
- Carlos Monsiváis, Aires de familia: cultura y sociedad en América Latina
(Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2000).
- Carolina Santamaría Delgado, “Bolero y Radiodifusión: cosmopolitanismo y
diferenciación social en Medellín, 1930 - 1950,” Signo y Pensamiento 27:52
(April 15, 2008): 16–30.
Week 8 / Music and Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s
Feb 23 – 25
Advanced paper presentations
Readings:
- Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil (New York:
Knopf  : Distributed by Random House, 2002).
- Paulina L Alberto, “When Rio Was Black: Soul Music, National Culture, and the
Politics of Racial Comparison in 1970s Brazil,” The Hispanic American Historical
Review. 89:1 (2009): 3.
Optional reading:
- Robin Moore, Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba
(California: California University Press, 2006).
- Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
Week 9 / Musical Circulation at the turn of the 21st Century
Mar 1 – 3
Readings:
- Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving
Modernity (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), Chapters 1 and 2:
4 “From Utopias to the Market” and “Latin American Contradictions: Modernism Without
Modernization.”
- Maria Majno, “From the Model of El Sistema in Venezuela to Current Applications:
Learning and Integration through Collective Music Education,” Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences 1252:1 (April 2012): 56–64.
- Hermano Vianna, “Technobrega, Forró, Lambadão: The Parallel Music of Brazil,” in
Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2011), 240–49.
Optional readings:
- Jocelyne Guilbault, “Interpreting World Music: A Challenge in Theory and
Practice,” Popular Music 16, no. 1 (1997): 31–44.
- Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University
Press, 2002).
- Esteban Buch, “Gotan’s Project Tango Project,” in Tango lessons: movement,
sound, image, and text in contemporary practice (Duke University Press, 2014).
- Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin Moore, Danzón: Circum-Carribean Dialogues
in Music and Dance (OUP USA, 2013).
- Alejandro L Madrid, Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the
U.S.-Mexico Border (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- Dave Laing, “World Music and the Global Music Industry: Flows, Corporations
and Networks,” Collegium 6 (2009): 14–33.
- Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Héctor D Fernández l’Hoeste, and Eric Zolov,
Rockin’ Las Américas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
Week 10 / Conclusion: On Listening
Mar 8
- Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas, “Anthropological Listening as a Genre,” Anthropology News,
2015.
- Claudio Benzecry, The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), Chapters 2 and 5: “It Was Love at First Sight” and
“Heroes, Pilgrims, Addicts, and Nostalgics: Repertories of Engagement in the Quest for
Transcendence.”
Optional reading:
- Richard Peterson and Roger Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to
Omnivore,” American Sociological Review 61:5 (1996): 900–907.
Week 11: No class. Final paper due by Friday 18.
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