Representing the Good Neighbor

Abstract

What do we in the United States know about Latin American art music, and how do we know it? Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream is the first study to explore this question in relation to Pan Americanism, or the idea that the American nations are bound by common aspirations. As Pan Americanism has risen and fallen over the decades, so too have attitudes in the United States toward Latin American art music. Under the Good Neighbor Policy, crafted to cement hemispheric solidarity amid fears of Nazism, Latin American art music flourished and U.S. critics applauded it as “universal.” During the cold war, however, this repertory assumed a very different status. While the United States supported anticommunist Latin American military dictators, many works were increasingly objectified through essentializing adjectives such as exotic, distinctive, and national—that is, through the filter of difference. Representing the Good Neighbor tracks the reception in the United States of the so-called musical Big Three—Carlos Chávez (Mexico), Heitor Villa-Lobos (Brazil), and Alberto Ginastera (Argentina)—and offers a new interpretation of a work about Latin America by the U.S. composer Frederic Rzewski, 36 Variations on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” Covering works performed in modern music concerts of the 1920s, at the 1939 World’s Fair, for the inauguration of the New York State Theater in 1966, and for the U.S. Bicentennial, this study illuminates ways north-south relations continue to inform our understanding of Latin American art music today.