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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Alonso-Minutti, Ana R., 1976– | Herrera, Eduardo, 1977– | Madrid, Alejandro L.
Title: Experimentalisms in practice : music perspectives from Latin America / ed. by Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, Alejandro L. Madrid.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017034408 | ISBN 9780190842741 (cloth) | ISBN 9780190842758 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780190842789 (oxford scholarly online) | ISBN 9780190864699 (companion website)
Classification: LCC ML199.5 .E96 2018 | DDC 780.98—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034408
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Contents
List of Figures vii
List of Music Examples ix
List of Tables xi
Acknowledgments xiii
List of Contributors xv
About the Companion Website xxi
1. The Practices of Experimentalism in Latin@ and Latin American Music: An Introduction 1 Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid
Part I | Centers and Institutions 19
2. “That’s Not Something to Show in a Concert”: Experimentation and Legitimacy at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales 21 Eduardo Herrera
3. Experimental Alternatives: Institutionalism, Avant-gardism, and Popular Music at the Margins of the Cuban Revolution 49 Susan Thomas
Part II | Beyond the Limits of Hybridity 67
4. “I Go Against the Grain of Your Memory”: Iconoclastic Experiments with Traditional Sounds in Northeast Brazil 69 Daniel B. Sharp
5. Peruvian Cumbia at the Theoretical Limits of Techno-Utopian Hybridity 85 Joshua Tucker
6. Experimentalism as Estrangement: Café Tacvba’s Revés/Yosoy 107 Alejandro L. Madrid and Pepe Rojo
Part III | Anticolonial Practices 129
7. Gatas y Vatas: Female Empowerment and Community-Oriented Experimentalism 131 Ana R. Alonso-Minutti
8. Noise, Sonic Experimentation, and Interior Coloniality in Costa Rica 161
Susan Campos Fonseca
Part IV | Performance, Movements, and Scenes 187
9. “We Began from Silence”: Toward a Genealogy of Free Improvisation in Mexico City: Atrás del Cosmos at Teatro El Galeón, 1975–1977 189
Tamar Barzel
10. Experimentation and Improvisation in Bogotá at the End of the Twentieth Century 227
Rodolfo Acosta
11. Experimental Music and the Avant-garde in Post-1959 Cuba: Revolutionary Music for the Revolution 251
Marysol Quevedo
12. Performance, Resistance, and the Sounding of Public Space: Movimiento Música Más in Buenos Aires, 1969–1973 279 Andrew Raffo Dewar
13. Afterword: Locating Hemispheric Experimentalisms 305 Benjamin Piekut
Bibliography 315
Index 333
List of Figures
2.1. Panel de interconexión centralizado (automatic patch bay). 27
2.2. Miguel Ángel Rondano (second from left) together with pop artists from the Di Tella Institute featured in the popular magazine Primera Plana, cover page, August 23–29, 1966. 28
2.3. Gerardo Gandini, composer and recognized pianist, playing the double bass, c. 1969. Used by courtesy of Mary von Reichenbach. 42
6.1. Café Tacvba, Revés/Yosoy (1999). Front and back of the CD package. 116
7.1. Festival logo designed by Nani Chacon for Gatas y Vatas 2011. Used by courtesy of Nani Chacon. 135
7.2. Festival logo designed by Tahnee Udero for Gatas y Vatas 2012. Used by courtesy of Tahnee Udero. 136
7.3. Monica Demarco, image to be projected during the performance of the first movement of Las Hijas de la Chingada. Used by courtesy of Monica Demarco. 145
7.4. Monica Demarco, image to be projected during the performance of the second movement of Hijas de la Chingada, “Easy to Hold.” Used by courtesy of Monica Demarco. 146
7.5. Monica Demarco, image to be projected during the performance of the third movement of Hijas de la Chingada, “No One Counted.” Used by courtesy of Monica Demarco. 148
7.6. Cover of album Xila (2013) showing Tahnee Udero’s rendition of Iturbide’s “Mujer ángel.” Photograph by Szu-Han Ho. Used by courtesy of Tahnee Udero. 151
7.7. Tahnee Udero’s Xila (2013), released on cassette tape inserted into a handmade costalito, along with a matchbox with a milagro inside, and a small chapbook with images of the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico. Photograph by Szu-Han Ho. Used by courtesy of Tahnee Udero. 152
8.1. Ronald Bustamante’s lab equipment. Used by courtesy of Pablo Murillo. 167
8.2. Alejandro Sánchez’s lab equipment. Used by courtesy of A. Sánchez. 167
8.3. Otto Castro, Roberto Fournier, and Ganassi Group. Used by courtesy of Adela Marín. 169
List of Figures
8.4. Alejandro Sánchez, Monumentum, spectral design of “Hombre” No. 4. Used by courtesy of A. Sánchez. 175
8.5. Sánchez, Monumentum, graphic score of spectral design of “Hombre” No. 4. Used by courtesy of A. Sánchez. 176
8.6. Pablo Murillo, “This is Not Central American Art.” Used by courtesy of Pablo Murillo. 179
9.1. Atrás del Cosmos, c. 1976. Used by courtesy of Ana Ruiz. 192
9.2. Atrás del Cosmos, c. 1980. Used by courtesy of Ana Ruiz. 195
9.3. La Banda Atrás del Cosmos performing at the inauguration of the outdoor amphitheater Espacio Escultórico, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, April 1979. Used by courtesy of Ana Ruiz. 196
9.4. Don Cherry at El Galeón: Organic Music Workshop, 1977. Used by courtesy of Xavier and Carolyna Meade. 207
9.5. Atrás del Cosmos and Don Cherry residency at El Galeón, 1977. Used by courtesy of Xavier and Carolyna Meade. 209
9.6. Program for Las Damas Chinas, Universidad Autónoma de Hidalgo, Pachuca, June 22, 1970. Used by courtesy of Luis Urías. 220
9.7. Free Jazz Women and Some Men (Jazzorca Records, 2015). Used by courtesy of Ana Ruiz, Germán Bringas, and Jazzorca records. 225
11.1. Stage layout for Relieves as provided in the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional October 1969 concert program. 269
12.1. “Noche de los bastones largos,” Buenos Aires, July 29, 1966. Photo in public domain. 280
12.2. Hot Dogs Band, c. 1958. Used by courtesy of Guillermo Gregorio. 285
12.3. Photo of Theo van Doesburg’s studio, which was inspirational to Gregorio. Used by courtesy of Guillermo Gregorio. 285
12.4. Movimiento Música Más in Café Tortoni, c. 1970. Used by courtesy of Guillermo Gregorio. 289
12.5. Movimiento Música Más performing in a cage during Chavarri’s Plaza para una siesta de domingo, 1970. Used by courtesy of Guillermo Gregorio. 296
12.6. Movimiento Música Más performing in a cage during Plaza para una siesta de domingo, 1970. Used by courtesy of Guillermo Gregorio. 297
12.7. Program handed to “audience members” by bus driver during performance of Chavarri’s Música para colectivo línea 7. Used by courtesy of Guillermo Gregorio. 298
2.4. Enrique Rivera, Piano Sonata no. 2 (1965). 36
7.1. Monica Demarco, Hijas de la Chingada (2007), movement 1, staves 1–2. Used by courtesy of Monica Demarco. 144
7.2. Demarco, Hijas de la Chingada, movement 2, staves 7–8. Used by courtesy of Monica Demarco. 147
7.3. Tahnee Udero, Born in Space (2014), transcription of “Artifact 2,” motive A. 155
7.4. Udero, Born in Space, transcription of “Artifact 2,” motive B. 156
7.5. Udero, Born in Space, transcription of “Artifact 2,” motive C. 156
11.1. Juan Blanco, score of Contrapunto espacial III (1969). 272
List of Tables
11.1. Compositional process for the film music for Lucía. 267
Acknowledgments
this book would have not been possible without the help and support of many friends, colleagues, students, and family. We are grateful to all the colleagues who responded to our request of trying to problematize mainstream ideas about musical experimentalism from a Latin@/Latin American perspective; their enthusiasm, commitment, and passion made this endeavor possible. The project began at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, where we, the editors, shared a panel with Benjamin Piekut and talked about the possibility of putting together a volume about experimental music practices in Latin America. Two years later, in 2015, Eduardo Herrera organized a workshop titled Experimental Music in Practice: Perspectives from Latin America, at Rutgers University. Most of the collaborators in this volume were able to get together for a meaningful scholarly exchange. The collective conversations and feedback that started during the workshop and continued well afterward were determinant in shaping the intellectual dialogues that concern this volume as well as in strengthening each of its essays. At Rutgers University we are indebted to the Mason Grass School of the Arts, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Centers for Global Advancement and International Affairs, the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, the School of Arts and Sciences, the Office of the Dean of Douglass Residential College, the Center for Latino Arts and Culture, Critical Caribbean Studies, the Department of Art History, the Department of American Studies, and the Department of Music for their generous support. We especially wish to express our deep gratitude to Robert Livingston Aldridge, Ulla Dalum Berg, George D. Stauffer, and Camilla Stevens for believing in this project, securing funds, and working hard
xiv Acknowledgments
in the numerous details that made the workshop at Rutgers University possible. We would also like to thank Britney Alcine, a student at Rutgers University who served as research assistant during the initial phase of this project.
Numerous individuals, colleagues, and students contributed in a wide variety of ways to the success of this project. To all of them we owe a great debt. We are especially grateful to Felicia Miyakawa for her editorial hand as the book’s final manuscript was taking shape. Finally, we extend our thanks to Suzanne Ryan, Jamie Kim, and others at Oxford University Press for their interest in our project and their work in seeing it through to publication. Thanks to our anonymous reviewers for all their suggestions at various stages. Thanks to Martha Ramsey for her careful copyediting, and thanks to Norm Hirschy for help in designing and supporting the OUP website accompanying the publication of our book. We hope that the sound files, images, links, and other materials posted there will prove a useful complement to the text that follows.
Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, University of New Mexico
Eduardo Herrera, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Alejandro L. Madrid, Cornell University
List of Contributors
Rodolfo Acosta is a Colombian composer, performer, improviser, and teacher trained in Colombia, Uruguay, France, the United States, Mexico, and the Netherlands. He studied with Coriún Aharonián, Graciela Paraskevaídis, Klaus Huber, Roger Cochini, and Brian Ferneyhough, among others. His music has received awards and prizes and has been performed, published, and recorded in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He is the founder of Ensamble CG and EMCA, mixed ensembles devoted to the performance of contemporary music. Since the 1990s, Acosta has been an active improviser in Bogotá, collaborating with local and international musicians. He has directed the improvisation collective Tangram and is one of the organizers of Bogotá Orquesta de Improvisadores. He has been guest professor and lecturer at universities and conservatories throughout the Americas and Europe, teaching composition, music history, music theory, analysis, and interpretation. Currently he teaches at the Facultad de Artes- ASAB of the Francisco José de Caldas District University and at the Central University (both in Bogotá), as well as in the Master’s in Literary and Musical Studies of the Mexican/North American Institute of Cultural Relations in Monterrey, Mexico.
Ana R. Alonso-Minutti is associate professor of music and faculty affiliate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico. She holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of California, Davis. Her teaching and research endeavors blend musicological and ethnomusicological inquiry into the study of contemporary musical practices across the Americas. Her scholarship focuses on experimental and avant-garde expressions, music traditions from Mexico and the US-Mexico border, and music history pedagogy. She has published in Latin American Music Review, Revista
List of Contributors
Argentina de Musicología, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Pauta, and elsewhere and her book Mario Lavista and Musical Cosmopolitanism in Late Twentieth- Century Mexico is under contract with Oxford University Press. As an extension of her written scholarship she directed and produced the video documentary Cubos y permutaciones: Plástica, música y poesía de vanguardia en México. Prior to joining the University of New Mexico, she was assistant professor of music at the University of North Texas.
Tamar Barzel is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on twentieth/twentyfirst- century musical avant-gardes and undergrounds, particularly those that span jazz, rock, and free improvisation. With attention to sonic engagements with heritage, memory, and national identity, she delves into the recent history of improvised music and the communities it has fostered. Her book New York Noise: Radical Jewish Music and the Downtown Scene (2015) addresses the heterodox Jewish music that emerged from Manhattan’s downtown scene in the 1990s, and her articles have appeared in Journal of the Society for American Music, Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, and People Get Ready! The Future of Jazz Is Now. She is currently curating the Downtown Oral History Project for the Fales Library-Downtown Collection at New York University. Her article in this book is part of a larger project investigating the intersections among experimental music, theater, and performance in Mexico City in the 1960s and 1970s.
Andrew Raffo Dewar is a composer, soprano saxophonist, and ethnomusicologist who holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University. He is associate professor of interdisciplinary arts in New College and the School of Music at the University of Alabama. His research interests include experimentalism in the arts from a global perspective, intercultural music, jazz and improvisation, music and technology, and 1960s intermedia arts. His writing has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Leonardo Music Journal, Jazz Perspectives, Jazz Research Journal, the New Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd ed.), and elsewhere. In addition to his work as a scholar, he is an acclaimed composer and performer whose work appears on more than a dozen commercially released recordings.
Susan Campos Fonseca holds a Ph.D. in music from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. She is a musicologist whose research focuses on the philosophy of culture and music. She has received the 2002 University Council Award from Universidad de Costa Rica, the 2004 WASBE conductor scholarship (UK), the 2005 Carolina Foundation Scholarship (Spain), the 2007 “100 Latinos” Award (Spain), the Corda Foundation Award 2009 (New York), the 2012 Casa de las Américas Musicology Award (Cuba), and the “Distinguished Scholar Award” 2013 and 2014 from Universidad de Costa Rica. She has served as coordinator of the Feminist Musicology Research Group (MUS-FEM) of the Iberian Society for Ethnomusicology, as fellow at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music of the University of California, Riverside, and as visiting scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. She serves on the advisory boards of Boletín de Música (Cuba) and IASPM@Journal and has been a guest editor for Trans: Revista Transcultural de Música and Ideas Sónicas (México). Her books include
List of Contributors xvii
Herencias cervantinas en la música vocal iberoamericana. Poiésis de un imaginario cultural (for which she received the 2012 Casa de las Américas Musicology Award), and the coedited volume Estudos de género, corpo e música: Abordagens metodológica. She currently coordinates a project on sound art, culture, and technology at Universidad de Costa Rica, where she is professor of history and music research.
Eduardo Herrera is assistant professor in ethnomusicology and music history at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He received a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and specializes in contemporary musical practices from Spanish- and Portuguese- speaking Latin America. His book, Elite Art Worlds: Philanthropy, Latin Americanism, and Avant-garde Music (under contract with Oxford University Press), considers the history of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (1962–1971) as a meeting point of US and Argentine philanthropy, framings of pan-regional discourses of musical Latin Americanism, and local experiences in transnational currents of artistic experimentation and innovation. His second book project explores participatory music making in Argentine soccer stadiums and is titled Sounding-in- Synchrony: Masculinity, Violence, and Soccer Chants. He has delivered papers and guest lectures in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina. He is a board member of the Society for American Music and council member of the American Musicological Society.
Alejandro L. Madrid is author or editor of more than half a dozen books and edited volumes about the intersection of modernity, tradition, globalization, and ethnic identity in popular and art music, dance, and expressive culture of Mexico, the US-Mexico border, and the circum- Caribbean. His work has received the Mexico Humanities Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association, the Robert M. Stevenson and Ruth A. Solie awards from the American Musicological Society, the Béla Bartók Award from the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards, the Woody Guthrie Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-U.S. Branch, the Casa de las Américas Award for Latin American musicology, and the Samuel Claro Valdés Award for Latin American musicology. He is also the recipient of the 2017 Dent Medal, given by the Royal Musical Association and the International Musicological Society. Madrid is frequently invited as an expert commentator on national and international media outlets and most recently acted as advisor on the use of Mexican music to filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose latest film, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, is set in 1930s Mexico. He is professor of musicology and ethnomusicology at Cornell University.
An associate professor of music at Cornell University, Benjamin Piekut is the author of Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (University of California Press, 2011), editor of Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (University of Michigan Press, 2014), and coeditor (with George E. Lewis) of The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2 vols., Oxford University Press, 2016). His article “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane,” coauthored
xviii List of Contributors
with Jason Stanyek, won the 2011 Outstanding Article award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. He has published his research in American Quarterly, Cultural Critique, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Twentieth- Century Music, and a range of other journals in music and performance.
Marysol Quevedo, a native of San Juan, Puerto Rico, received her Ph.D. in musicology with a minor in ethnomusicology from Indiana University and is currently assistant professor of music at the University of Miami. Her research focuses on art music in Cuba after the 1959 revolution and examining the relationship between music composition, national identity, and the Cuban socialist regime. Quevedo was program specialist for the Society for Ethnomusicology and visiting lecturer at the Musicology Department of Indiana University. She has contributed numerous entries to the second edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music and presented her work at the national meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology, and her article “Classical Music in Cuba” was published by Oxford Annotated Bibliographies.
Pepe Rojo is a writer and interventionist living in the California border zone. He has published five books and more than two hundred texts dealing with fiction, media, and contemporary culture, in Spanish and English. He directed You Can See The Future From Here, a series of science fiction–based interventions at the Tijuana- San Ysidro border crossing, as well as the project Tú No Existes in Mexico City. His English writing can be found in Birds in Shorts City, Flurb!, Three Messages and a Warning, Entropy, and Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. He was most recently spotted raising Tierra y Libertad flags. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of California, San Diego, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in communication at the same institution.
Daniel B. Sharp is associate professor at Tulane University, hired jointly in music and Latin American studies. His book Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse: Popular Music and the Staging of Brazil was published in 2014 by Wesleyan University Press as part of the Music/Culture series. His articles have appeared in Latin American Music Review, Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship, and Critical Studies in Improvisation. He is currently working on a book about Naná Vasconcelos and his 1979 recording Saudades
Susan Thomas is professor of music and women’s studies at the University of Georgia. Her research interests include Cuban and Latin American music; music and gender; transnationalism, migration, and diaspora; embodiment and performativity; and media studies. Her book Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana’s Lyric Stage (University of Illinois Press, 2009) was awarded the Robert M. Stevenson Prize of the American Musicological Society and the Pauline Alderman Book Award of the International Association of Women in Music. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including residential fellowships as the Santander Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University and Greenleaf Visiting Scholar at the Stone Center for Latin American
List of Contributors
Studies at Tulane University. She is currently completing her second book, The Musical Mangrove: The Transnationalization of Cuban Alternative Music.
Joshua Tucker is David Josephson assistant professor of music at Brown University and the author of Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars: Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru. His work, which has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, focuses largely on the social politics of popular music in Latin America. His current research centers on the intersection between indigenous activism, acoustic ecology, and instrument making among Quechua- speaking musicians in the southern Andes.
About the Companion Website
www.oup.com/us/experimentalismsinpractice
Oxford has created a password-protected website to accompany this book. The reader is encouraged to take full advantage of it. The companion website includes pictures, documents, music and video links, and relevant Internet sites that enhance the discussions in the book. The authors hope these materials will prove a useful complement to the text that follows. These website materials are signaled throughout the text with Oxford’s symbol . You may access the companion website by typing in username Music3 and password Book3234.
Experimentalisms in Practice
THE PRACTICES OF EXPERIMENTALISM IN LATIN@ AND LATIN
AMERICAN MUSIC
An Introduction
Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid
From Julián Carrillo’s microtonal revolution in Mexico City and Carmen Barradas’s futurist piano music in Montevideo in the 1920s to the noise rock and avant-pop performances at Plano B in Rio de Janeiro or the psychedelic sounds of Bogotá’s Meridian Brothers in the 2010s, the last one hundred years have been rich with experimental music practices and conversations about experimentalism among musicians and music fans in the Americas. The eclectic styles and heterodox character of most of these practices, however, make it difficult to trace common musical trends, genealogies, or aesthetic goals. Even defining or agreeing upon a common definition of experimentalism among practitioners, fans, and critics is a complicated task. Many of these practices, although frequently in dialogue with broader transnational currents of experimentation, remain circumscribed to specific local scenes and historical moments and thus are unknown beyond reduced circles of loyal followers, with only few important exceptions. Even more, they continue to be neglected by mainstream scholars engaged with theorizing and conceptualizing musical experimentalism(s).
Since the very concept of experimentalism in music narratives has not carried a homogenous meaning, recent scholarship has stayed away from providing any confined definition. For James Saunders, for instance, “it becomes meaningless to define experimentalism in a closed way: rather a series of indicators might suggest where much of this work is located.”1 It would seem that, as Benjamin Piekut has noted in
1 James Saunders, introduction to The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music, ed. James Saunders (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 2.
