Review: Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream, by Carol A. Hess

Abstract

Book Review| December 01 2017 Review: Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream, by Carol A. Hess Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream, by Carol A. Hess. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xix, 303 pp. Stephanie N. Stallings Stephanie N. Stallings STEPHANIE N. STALLINGS is Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University. She teaches a wide range of courses in music history, arts and cultural management, and Latin American studies. She contributed a chapter to the book Carlos Chávez and His World (Princeton University Press, 2015). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2017) 70 (3): 870–873. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.3.870 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stephanie N. Stallings; Review: Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream, by Carol A. Hess. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2017; 70 (3): 870–873. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.3.870 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search Winner of the 2015 Robert M. Stevenson Award of the American Musicological Society, Representing the Good Neighbor vividly recalls a time of optimism and cooperation between the United States and its American neighbors. After examining US reception of works by the “big three” Latin American composers of the mid-twentieth century—Carlos Chávez, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Alberto Ginastera—Carol A. Hess maintains that the most perceptive critics of contemporary music, rather than fetishizing musical or cultural differences, emphasized similarities with the composers’ counterparts in the United States through the universalizing discourse of classicism. In doing so she reveals an arc of pan-American sentiment in the musical and artistic world characterized by empathy, like-mindedness, hope, and mutual understanding, and spanning more than six decades. Ultimately Hess finds that these three Latin American composers shared several key values with their US counterparts: classicism (not neoclassicism, which emanated largely from France, but an “ur-classicism” (p.... You do not currently have access to this content.