The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History

Abstract

Pablo Palomino's book The Invention of Latin American Music aims to trace the development and embrace of the notion of Latin American music as it is commonly used today, whether in academic circles, among listening audiences, in the realm of cultural policy and diplomacy, or with artists and performers themselves. The author argues that the concept, which began to take shape and exert its influence in the 1930s, did not emerge out of a cohesive and concerted regionalist project. Instead, it is the result of a process of layering of competing ideas regarding Latin America as a geographical entity, which intersect with modernist and nationalist desires for cultural distinctiveness and with more pragmatic concerns regarding the creation, protection, and expansion of networks and markets centered on different forms of musical production (live performances, radio broadcasts, recorded sound, music education programs, academic research, etc.). As a result, Palomino defines Latin American music as an aesthetic category, one that provides a convenient handle to those who engage with it, despite lacking a single discernible core or clear external boundary.Palomino further suggests that understanding this process of invention and naturalization also sheds light on the often-overlooked transnational dynamics that informed the various articulations of musical nationalism in Latin America. With this he adds a much-needed regional-level historiographical analysis of how musical nationalism and cosmopolitanism are interrelated and mutually constitutive rather than mutually exclusive. The book begins by considering how a heterogeneous collection of music performance circuits—local, national, regional, and intercontinental—led not to a unifying notion of Latin American music but instead to the emergence of multiple incarnations that partly overlapped and partly competed with one another. Additional conceptualizations of Latin American music grew out of a nascent commercial music industry, in which music critics, royalty collection organizations, and broadcasting stations used a variety of genre labeling practices to negotiate their positionality vis-à-vis national and transnational discourses of authenticity regarding the musics with which they were involved. Nationalist and populist state musical polices, for their part, relied on transnational notions of civilizing the citizenry and elevating the vernacular to help create a regional Latin American framework. That framework was then fleshed out by a transnational network of scholars who undertook the work of theorizing the nature of Latin American music and thus defining its aesthetic ethos. Finally, US foreign policy interests in the region, in particular as articulated by the Music Division of the Pan-American Union and later by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, helped to legitimize the work and expertise of these Latin American music scholars, naturalizing the aesthetic category defined by them and laying the foundation for decades of research, educational initiatives, cultural exchanges, music festivals, and music industry categories that continue to invoke the category.The Invention of Latin American Music covers a great deal of ground and offers a number of important insights for readers interested in the historiography of music research in Latin America. Based on meticulous archival research in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, and the United States, the various case studies included in this book are engrossing in their own right, many of them providing tantalizing leads for future research. The book is also important because of its emphasis on social actors, institutions, and perspectives within the regional context of Latin America, a much-needed complement to other recent research that has tended to privilege the role of US-based individuals and institutions. The book's regional emphasis also offers a good alternative vantage point from which to broach the subject of music nationalism in Latin America, one that meshes well with the work of music scholars like Cristina Magaldi, Fernando Rios, and Leonora Saavedra and that helps to highlight and complicate the overlaps and continuities between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.