Books by Eduardo Herrera
Experimentalisms in Practice explores the multiple sites in which experimentalism emerges and bec... more Experimentalisms in Practice explores the multiple sites in which experimentalism emerges and becomes meaningful beyond Eurocentric interpretative frameworks. Challenging the notion of experimentalism as defined in conventional narratives, contributors take a broad approach to a wide variety of Latin@ and Latin American music traditions conceived or perceived as experimental. The conversation takes as starting point the 1960s, a decade that marks a crucial political and epistemological moment for Latin America; militant and committed aesthetic practices resonated with this moment, resulting in a multiplicity of artistic and musical experimental expressions.
Experimentalisms in Practice responds to recent efforts to reframe and reconceptualize the study of experimental music in terms of epistemological perspective and geographic scope, while also engaging traditional scholarship. This book contributes to the current conversations about music experimentalism while providing new points of entry to further reevaluate the field.
Essays in edited volumes by Eduardo Herrera
Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America, 2018
This chapter introduces the main theoretical issues discussed in the book and puts them in dialog... more This chapter introduces the main theoretical issues discussed in the book and puts them in dialogue with contemporary discussions about them. The book’s adoption of the plural term “experimentalisms” points toward a purposeful decentering of the usual US and Eurocentric interpretative frameworks. The case studies in this volume contribute to this by challenging discourses about Latin@s and Latin Americans and experimentalism that have historically marginalized them. As such, the notion of “experimentalisms” works as a performative operation of sound, soundings, music, and musicking that gives social and historical meaning to the networks it temporarily conforms and situates. The authors propose an understanding of music experimentalisms as a series of continuous presences that navigate fluidly in a transhistorical imaginary encounter of pasts and presents.
Articles by Eduardo Herrera
Within the world’s current geopolitical configuration, Latin American creative acts tend to have ... more Within the world’s current geopolitical configuration, Latin American creative acts tend to have fewer opportunities to become viable cultural models, and easily succumb to models coming from more powerful regions. In this context, the music by Uruguayan composer Coriún Aharonián (Montevideo, b.1940) has remained in the underground of Latin American art music circles, overshadowed by other composers of the region who are more accepting of and compliant to the trends stemming from the centers of power. It is this conscious effort in generating countermodels that do not conform to the prevalent expectations radiating from traditional cultural centers which lends significance to Aharonián’s music.
This article examines three features present in Aharonián’s compositions: austerity, non-discursive syntax, and the use of microprocesses. Their particular manifestations are traced in numerous examples taken from several of Aharonián’s acoustic and electroacoustic compositions created between 1966 and 1999. These show an application of the idea of austerity to pitch content, timbre, rhythmic and melodic figures, and notation; two main ways of generating non–discursive syntax (high sectionalization and stratification); and finally the use of microprocesses as means for development of material including the use of microtonalism, microvariations and recontextualization.
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Book Chapters by Eduardo Herrera
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Book Reviews by Eduardo Herrera
Review: Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream. By Carol A... more Review: Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream. By Carol A. Hess. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II. By Annegret Fauser. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
The two books reviewed here both contribute to our understanding of how transnational participation and negotiation are embedded in the classical music tradition of the United States. Hess shows us that the study of music in the Western classical tradition cannot escape its intrinsic cosmopolitanism and that transnational dialogues are actually central to its expressive and discursive universes. Fauser asks us to attend to musical practices beyond the concert hall and that may involve musical actors peripheral to grand narratives of music.
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Encyclopedia Entries by Eduardo Herrera
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Papers by Eduardo Herrera
“Avant-Garde Music, Patronage, and the Consolidation of Elite Status in Argentina during the 1960... more “Avant-Garde Music, Patronage, and the Consolidation of Elite Status in Argentina during the 1960s.” 50th Annual Conference of the Latin American Studies Association, New York, NY, May 27–30, 2016.
The apparently inevitable nomination of Donald Trump as Republican candidate to the presidency of the United States has made visible, in an unprecedented way, the process in which economic and social capital can be used to consolidate political power even against long-established party elites. Trump, a real estate mogul turned into television personality whose candidacy less than a year ago was deemed a ruse, a marketing opportunity, and plainly unviable, has allowed us to gain unusual insight into the transformation of his elite status as he has consolidated a political power that he lacked in very short time. In this presentation I argue that it is imperative to to study elite groups in their cultural performances, their discursive practices, and their social constructions of place, self, and other. What this can bring to the table is a rich understanding of the many forms that elite status may take, the ways it becomes legitimized, and the overall impact of its articulation.
“Studying up” and “at home” are not new concepts in anthropology or ethnomusicology, but research on Western cosmopolitan art worlds and the elite individuals and institutions who shape them still draws only a small fraction of ethnographic interest. This paper poses a theoretical framework for an ethnomusicology that shifts focus from subaltern subjects to elites. The first part highlights contributions of the intellectual history of elite studies that I have found useful to approach my research. The second uses my experience studying one of the wealthiest families in Argentina and major patrons of avant-garde music to demonstrate how we can provide a better understanding of the process that leads to the consolidation of power in the hands of specific elite groups while still considering them dynamic and heterogeneous.
“Musicology: A Reflection on Taxonomies, Genealogies, and Approaches to Music Research.” Sponsore... more “Musicology: A Reflection on Taxonomies, Genealogies, and Approaches to Music Research.” Sponsored by the Research Resources Interest Group, 42nd Annual Conference of the Society for American Music, Boston, MA, March 9–13, 2016.
“From Tango Nuevo to Avant-Garde: Disenchantment with the Fringes of Music Making.” 58th Annual M... more “From Tango Nuevo to Avant-Garde: Disenchantment with the Fringes of Music Making.” 58th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Indianapolis, IN, November 14–17, 2013.
In 1967, Ariel Martínez (b.1936), one of the top bandoneón performers of Uruguay, recorded four tangos with his Trio Nuevo. The first two, Homo sapiens and Homo faber, were certainly at the vanguard of tango music, aligned with the emerging 1950s Tango Nuevo and its main representative Astor Piazzolla. However, in Homo ludens I and II, the score asks the musicians to spontaneously choose and repeat at will one of several short motivic cells with only brief moments of synchronized playing among them, taking instrumental tango-making to its fringes. After this recording, Martínez abandoned tango, feeling there was no possibility left for a novel creation in the genre. He became a full time classical music composer, a free improviser and an active participant of Buenos Aires’s most important electronic music studio. After many years of struggling to get performances and gain the acceptance of the public and critics Martínez became recluse and unwilling to share his work, in the same manner he had stopped to play the bandoneón. Today, disillusioned with all avant-garde aesthetics, he has become very critical of the push for the destruction of musical paradigms during the zenith of avant-garde composition. This paper explores the way Martínez negotiated music making on the fringes both in the popular and classical realm, looking in particular at his narratives of disenchantment with tango and contemporary classical music. His story provides an unconventional insight to the embrace and rejection of avant-garde aesthetics in the southern cone.
“‘It Is Not Really Something You Would Show In A Concert, Right?’ Experimentation and Legitimacy ... more “‘It Is Not Really Something You Would Show In A Concert, Right?’ Experimentation and Legitimacy at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales.” Experimental Music in Practice Symposium, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, September 25, 2015.
“Iannis Xenakis en Argentina: recepción, diálogos e intercambios.” 6th UFRJ International Symposi... more “Iannis Xenakis en Argentina: recepción, diálogos e intercambios.” 6th UFRJ International Symposium on Musicology & International Colloquium Ibero-American Institute / University Of Arts (UdK), Berlin “Cultural Exchanges: Music Between Latin America and Europe,” Rio de Janeiro, August 10–15, 2015.
Iannis Xenakis visitó Argentina como profesor del Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella durante fines de agosto y comienzos de septiembre de 1966. Xenakis, quien entonces tenía 44 años, era conocido en la escena de la vanguardia musical de Buenos Aires: Achorripsis había recibido su estreno mundial en el Teatro Colón en 1958, y Diamorphoses y Pithopraktá fueron escuchadas en 1962 y 1963 respectivamente. A pesar de que las obras recibieron una irregular acogida, la prensa local anunció con anticipo la llegada del compositor, y dio amplia cobertura a su estadía, incluyendo su conferencia-concierto titulada “Nuevos principios de composición musical”. El carácter interdisciplinario y el lenguaje cientificista en el que se enmarcaba la obra de Xenakis—matemática, arquitectura, y composición asistida con ordenadores—estimuló la imaginación del público porteño respecto a la relación entre arte y ciencia, en sintonía con el discurso modernizador que buscaba establecer relaciones entre la producción artística, tecnológica, y el desarrollo industrial . Las actividades del compositor en el CLAEM se centraron en un curso intensivo llamado “Música estocástica, estratégica y simbólica”, donde compartió su experiencia con teorías de probabilidad y composición asistidas por ordenador, enfocándose en sus obras tituladas con el prefijo ST. No obstante, las interacciones fueron mas allá del aula de clase, e incluyeron largas discusiones con los compositores, socialización, y momentos de esparcimiento. Las ideas de Xenakis impactaron de manera profunda a varios de los compositores latinoamericanos becarios del CLAEM, quizá de forma mas evidente a la compositora argentina Graciela Paraskevaídis. El interés por dar prioridad a parámetros tímbricos y texturales por encima de lo tónico y lo rítmico—que tanto para Xenakis como para Paraskevaídis pasaba por la obra de Varèse—y los vínculos en común con Grecia—Paraskevaídis es de ascendencia griega por padre y madre—crearon una resonancia entre los dos creadores. Finalmente, la visita también estimuló la imaginación de Xenakis en cuanto la posibilidad de transformar material gráfico a material sonoro luego de sus intercambios con el ingeniero encargado del laboratorio de música electrónica, Fernando von Reichenbach, hecho que se pone en evidencia con el desarrollo del Convertidor Gráfico Analógico de Reichenbach (funcional desde 1969), y la Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu de Xenakis (UPIC, en desarrollo desde principios de la década del setenta, y funcional desde 1977). Utilizando fuentes de archivo y una extensa recopilación de historia oral, este trabajo explora estos tres aspectos del viaje de Xenakis a Argentina: (1) el contexto y la forma cómo los medios de comunicación enmarcaron la visita del compositor Europeo y la recepción que tuvieron los eventos organizados alrededor de ésta bajo un discurso modernista; (2) el impacto directo que la visita tuvo sobre algunos compositores del CLAEM, en particular Paraskevaídis; y (3) el intercambio que Xenakis tuvo con el ingeniero Fernando von Reichenbach.
Iannis Xenakis in Argentina: Reception, Dialogues, and Exchanges
Abstract
Iannis Xenakis visited Argentina as professor of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute during late August and early September 1966. The 44-year old Xenakis was known in the Buenos Aires avant-garde music scene: The world premier of Achorripsis had taken place at the Teatro Colón in 1958 and Diamorphoses and Pithopraktá had been heard in 1962 and 1963, respectively, all to lukewarm response from the audience. Nevertheless, the local press announced his arrival with excitement and gave ample coverage to his stay, including his lecture-recital “New Principles of Musical Composition”. The interdisciplinary character and scientificist language in which Xenakis’s work was framed—mathematics, architecture, and computer-aided composition—stimulated the imagination of the public in Buenos Aires regarding the relationship between art and science, and resonated with a modernizing discourse that looked to establish relations between artistic production, technology, and Argentina’s industrial development. At the CLAEM, Xenakis offered a course titled “Stochastic, Strategic, and Symbolic Music”, in which he shared his experiences with theories of probability and computer-aided composition, focusing on his series of works titled with the prefix ST. However, the interactions went beyond the classroom, and included long discussions with composers, socialization, and time for leisure. Xenakis’s ideas made an impact on several of the Latin-American composers working at the CLAEM, perhaps most evident in the case of the argentine Graciela Paraskevaídis. The young Paraskevaídis resonated with Xenakis in his interest to prioritize parameters of timbre and texture over pitch and rhythm—something that both composers had embraced from Varèse—and in their common ties to Greece—Paraskevaídis paternal and maternal family were Greek. Finally, the visit stimulated Xenakis’s imagination regarding the possibility of transforming graphic material into sound after his exchanges with Fernando von Reichenbach, something that crystallized with the development of Reichenbach’s Convertidor Gráfico Analógico (functional since 1969), and Xenakis’s Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu (UPIC, in development since the early seventies, and functional since 1977). Using archival resources and a thorough compilation of oral history, this work explores these three aspects of Xenakis’s trip to Argentina: (1) the way the media framed the visit of the European composer, and the reception of the events organized around it under a modernist discourse; (2) the impact that this visit had over some of the composers at the CLAEM, particularly Paraskevaídis; and (3) the exchanges that Xenakis had with the engineer Fernando von Reichenbach.
"The Rockefeller Foundation and the Creation of Indiana University’s Latin American Music Center:... more "The Rockefeller Foundation and the Creation of Indiana University’s Latin American Music Center: Patronage, Knowledge, Power.” Frederick Loewe Symposium in American Music: Who Pays? Who Plays? Patronage and Entrepreneurship in American Music, University of Redlands, California, October 26–30, 2015.
In the beginning of the 1960s the Rockefeller Foundation gave two significant grants towards the study of Latin American music. Sponsored by John P. Harrison, Assistant Director for Humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, their aim was to help the creation of institutions that would provide a sustaining environment in which cultural work may flourish. The first grant was for the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which under the leadership of Alberto Ginastera offered graduate training in avant-garde musical composition. The second grant was given to Indiana University, Bloomington, to establish the Latin American Music Center (LAMC) for the study and performance of Latin American music under the direction of Juan Orrego-Salas. By tracing the constitutive actor-networks that led to these grants, my paper seeks to destabilize the concept of philanthropy as a preexisting third force located between the public and private sector (Fisher 1983). Instead it presents it as an emerging domain, the result of complex entanglements, webs of relations and ideas that are mediated and enacted as the result of human, institutional, technological, discursive, and material actors (Latour 2005). This project illuminates the relationships between foreign policy, corporate interests, and funding for the arts in the mid-twentieth century, and brings to the foreground the part played by individuals in actually existing philanthropy.
“La vanguardia encarnada/la vanguardia como forma de ser: El caso del Centro Latinoamericano de A... more “La vanguardia encarnada/la vanguardia como forma de ser: El caso del Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales del Instituto Di Tella.” VIII Coloquio Internacional de Musicología and I Latin American and Caribbean Regional Conference of the International Musicological Society, (ARALC/IMS), Havana, Cuba, March 17–21, 2014.
Es equivocado pensar en la vanguardia sólo como un estilo de composicional o un grupo de preferencias estéticas. La vanguardia como fue recibida y apropiada por múltiples compositores latinoamericanos durante la década de 1960 becarios del Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) fue también un posicionamiento particular con respecto al campo de producción artística en general. Por una parte, muchos de los compositores becarios del CLAEM que adoptaron actitudes de vanguardia lo hicieron por su capacidad subversiva y emancipadora con respecto a formas anteriores de hacer música. A través de la música de vanguardia expresaron su adherencia a un sentimiento de desconformidad con el canon y con los límites existentes de la música clásica. Por otra parte, la vanguardia era un signo de adopción exitosa de las tendencias de producción artística internacionales contemporáneas, y por lo tanto se convertía en un índice de cosmopolitismo. En esta ponencia se demuestra el delicado balance que había en el CLAEM entre una creencia personal comprometida en el potencial de impacto social de la vanguardia de los 60s y las tácticas y estrategias profesionales específicas al estilo musical en un campo de producción artística que premiaba la novedad y la innovación.
“Towards an Ethnomusicology of Elites and the Construction of Elite Art Worlds.” 56th Annual Meet... more “Towards an Ethnomusicology of Elites and the Construction of Elite Art Worlds.” 56th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Philadelphia, PA, November 18, 2011.
This paper poses a general theoretical framework for the ethnomusicology of elites and the construction of elite art worlds. As suggested by George E. Marcus—an early proponent in socio-cultural anthropology of elite studies—anthropologists, and therefore ethnomusicologists, can make a distinctive contribution to elite studies through ethnographic research. Research on elites can include diachronic perspectives that are lacking in other studies, and can provide an analysis of the values and shared interests of elite groups (Marcus 1983). The first part will present an overview of the intellectual history of elite studies ranging from the classic studies of Mosca, Michels and Pareto to recent work from Pina-Cabral and Lima and from Shore and Nugent. The second part explores how ethnomusicological research that brings together ‘power elite’ and ‘functionalist elites’ views can provide a better understanding of the process that leads to the consolidation of power in the hands of specific elite groups while still considering them dynamic and heterogeneous across different realms of social life. Ethnographic work complemented by oral histories can provide a much-needed understanding of how elites in a ‘forming phase’ achieve ‘distinction’ in Bourdieu’s sense (1984), and how they maintain it and reproduce it, giving insight into the hegemonic process of sustaining elite power. This paper uses my own fieldwork experience with one of the wealthiest families in Argentina, and a major patron for music, to point out some problems with traditional methods of participant observation and long-term fieldwork for the study of elites.
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Books by Eduardo Herrera
Experimentalisms in Practice responds to recent efforts to reframe and reconceptualize the study of experimental music in terms of epistemological perspective and geographic scope, while also engaging traditional scholarship. This book contributes to the current conversations about music experimentalism while providing new points of entry to further reevaluate the field.
Essays in edited volumes by Eduardo Herrera
Articles by Eduardo Herrera
LINK TO PAPER IN RUTGERS INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T36H4KJV
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This article examines three features present in Aharonián’s compositions: austerity, non-discursive syntax, and the use of microprocesses. Their particular manifestations are traced in numerous examples taken from several of Aharonián’s acoustic and electroacoustic compositions created between 1966 and 1999. These show an application of the idea of austerity to pitch content, timbre, rhythmic and melodic figures, and notation; two main ways of generating non–discursive syntax (high sectionalization and stratification); and finally the use of microprocesses as means for development of material including the use of microtonalism, microvariations and recontextualization.
LINK TO PAPER IN RUTGERS INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3TM7DC9
Book Chapters by Eduardo Herrera
Book Reviews by Eduardo Herrera
The two books reviewed here both contribute to our understanding of how transnational participation and negotiation are embedded in the classical music tradition of the United States. Hess shows us that the study of music in the Western classical tradition cannot escape its intrinsic cosmopolitanism and that transnational dialogues are actually central to its expressive and discursive universes. Fauser asks us to attend to musical practices beyond the concert hall and that may involve musical actors peripheral to grand narratives of music.
LINK TO PAPER IN RUTGERS INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3WM1GGT
Encyclopedia Entries by Eduardo Herrera
Papers by Eduardo Herrera
The apparently inevitable nomination of Donald Trump as Republican candidate to the presidency of the United States has made visible, in an unprecedented way, the process in which economic and social capital can be used to consolidate political power even against long-established party elites. Trump, a real estate mogul turned into television personality whose candidacy less than a year ago was deemed a ruse, a marketing opportunity, and plainly unviable, has allowed us to gain unusual insight into the transformation of his elite status as he has consolidated a political power that he lacked in very short time. In this presentation I argue that it is imperative to to study elite groups in their cultural performances, their discursive practices, and their social constructions of place, self, and other. What this can bring to the table is a rich understanding of the many forms that elite status may take, the ways it becomes legitimized, and the overall impact of its articulation.
“Studying up” and “at home” are not new concepts in anthropology or ethnomusicology, but research on Western cosmopolitan art worlds and the elite individuals and institutions who shape them still draws only a small fraction of ethnographic interest. This paper poses a theoretical framework for an ethnomusicology that shifts focus from subaltern subjects to elites. The first part highlights contributions of the intellectual history of elite studies that I have found useful to approach my research. The second uses my experience studying one of the wealthiest families in Argentina and major patrons of avant-garde music to demonstrate how we can provide a better understanding of the process that leads to the consolidation of power in the hands of specific elite groups while still considering them dynamic and heterogeneous.
In 1967, Ariel Martínez (b.1936), one of the top bandoneón performers of Uruguay, recorded four tangos with his Trio Nuevo. The first two, Homo sapiens and Homo faber, were certainly at the vanguard of tango music, aligned with the emerging 1950s Tango Nuevo and its main representative Astor Piazzolla. However, in Homo ludens I and II, the score asks the musicians to spontaneously choose and repeat at will one of several short motivic cells with only brief moments of synchronized playing among them, taking instrumental tango-making to its fringes. After this recording, Martínez abandoned tango, feeling there was no possibility left for a novel creation in the genre. He became a full time classical music composer, a free improviser and an active participant of Buenos Aires’s most important electronic music studio. After many years of struggling to get performances and gain the acceptance of the public and critics Martínez became recluse and unwilling to share his work, in the same manner he had stopped to play the bandoneón. Today, disillusioned with all avant-garde aesthetics, he has become very critical of the push for the destruction of musical paradigms during the zenith of avant-garde composition. This paper explores the way Martínez negotiated music making on the fringes both in the popular and classical realm, looking in particular at his narratives of disenchantment with tango and contemporary classical music. His story provides an unconventional insight to the embrace and rejection of avant-garde aesthetics in the southern cone.
Iannis Xenakis visitó Argentina como profesor del Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella durante fines de agosto y comienzos de septiembre de 1966. Xenakis, quien entonces tenía 44 años, era conocido en la escena de la vanguardia musical de Buenos Aires: Achorripsis había recibido su estreno mundial en el Teatro Colón en 1958, y Diamorphoses y Pithopraktá fueron escuchadas en 1962 y 1963 respectivamente. A pesar de que las obras recibieron una irregular acogida, la prensa local anunció con anticipo la llegada del compositor, y dio amplia cobertura a su estadía, incluyendo su conferencia-concierto titulada “Nuevos principios de composición musical”. El carácter interdisciplinario y el lenguaje cientificista en el que se enmarcaba la obra de Xenakis—matemática, arquitectura, y composición asistida con ordenadores—estimuló la imaginación del público porteño respecto a la relación entre arte y ciencia, en sintonía con el discurso modernizador que buscaba establecer relaciones entre la producción artística, tecnológica, y el desarrollo industrial . Las actividades del compositor en el CLAEM se centraron en un curso intensivo llamado “Música estocástica, estratégica y simbólica”, donde compartió su experiencia con teorías de probabilidad y composición asistidas por ordenador, enfocándose en sus obras tituladas con el prefijo ST. No obstante, las interacciones fueron mas allá del aula de clase, e incluyeron largas discusiones con los compositores, socialización, y momentos de esparcimiento. Las ideas de Xenakis impactaron de manera profunda a varios de los compositores latinoamericanos becarios del CLAEM, quizá de forma mas evidente a la compositora argentina Graciela Paraskevaídis. El interés por dar prioridad a parámetros tímbricos y texturales por encima de lo tónico y lo rítmico—que tanto para Xenakis como para Paraskevaídis pasaba por la obra de Varèse—y los vínculos en común con Grecia—Paraskevaídis es de ascendencia griega por padre y madre—crearon una resonancia entre los dos creadores. Finalmente, la visita también estimuló la imaginación de Xenakis en cuanto la posibilidad de transformar material gráfico a material sonoro luego de sus intercambios con el ingeniero encargado del laboratorio de música electrónica, Fernando von Reichenbach, hecho que se pone en evidencia con el desarrollo del Convertidor Gráfico Analógico de Reichenbach (funcional desde 1969), y la Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu de Xenakis (UPIC, en desarrollo desde principios de la década del setenta, y funcional desde 1977). Utilizando fuentes de archivo y una extensa recopilación de historia oral, este trabajo explora estos tres aspectos del viaje de Xenakis a Argentina: (1) el contexto y la forma cómo los medios de comunicación enmarcaron la visita del compositor Europeo y la recepción que tuvieron los eventos organizados alrededor de ésta bajo un discurso modernista; (2) el impacto directo que la visita tuvo sobre algunos compositores del CLAEM, en particular Paraskevaídis; y (3) el intercambio que Xenakis tuvo con el ingeniero Fernando von Reichenbach.
Iannis Xenakis in Argentina: Reception, Dialogues, and Exchanges
Abstract
Iannis Xenakis visited Argentina as professor of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute during late August and early September 1966. The 44-year old Xenakis was known in the Buenos Aires avant-garde music scene: The world premier of Achorripsis had taken place at the Teatro Colón in 1958 and Diamorphoses and Pithopraktá had been heard in 1962 and 1963, respectively, all to lukewarm response from the audience. Nevertheless, the local press announced his arrival with excitement and gave ample coverage to his stay, including his lecture-recital “New Principles of Musical Composition”. The interdisciplinary character and scientificist language in which Xenakis’s work was framed—mathematics, architecture, and computer-aided composition—stimulated the imagination of the public in Buenos Aires regarding the relationship between art and science, and resonated with a modernizing discourse that looked to establish relations between artistic production, technology, and Argentina’s industrial development. At the CLAEM, Xenakis offered a course titled “Stochastic, Strategic, and Symbolic Music”, in which he shared his experiences with theories of probability and computer-aided composition, focusing on his series of works titled with the prefix ST. However, the interactions went beyond the classroom, and included long discussions with composers, socialization, and time for leisure. Xenakis’s ideas made an impact on several of the Latin-American composers working at the CLAEM, perhaps most evident in the case of the argentine Graciela Paraskevaídis. The young Paraskevaídis resonated with Xenakis in his interest to prioritize parameters of timbre and texture over pitch and rhythm—something that both composers had embraced from Varèse—and in their common ties to Greece—Paraskevaídis paternal and maternal family were Greek. Finally, the visit stimulated Xenakis’s imagination regarding the possibility of transforming graphic material into sound after his exchanges with Fernando von Reichenbach, something that crystallized with the development of Reichenbach’s Convertidor Gráfico Analógico (functional since 1969), and Xenakis’s Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu (UPIC, in development since the early seventies, and functional since 1977). Using archival resources and a thorough compilation of oral history, this work explores these three aspects of Xenakis’s trip to Argentina: (1) the way the media framed the visit of the European composer, and the reception of the events organized around it under a modernist discourse; (2) the impact that this visit had over some of the composers at the CLAEM, particularly Paraskevaídis; and (3) the exchanges that Xenakis had with the engineer Fernando von Reichenbach.
In the beginning of the 1960s the Rockefeller Foundation gave two significant grants towards the study of Latin American music. Sponsored by John P. Harrison, Assistant Director for Humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, their aim was to help the creation of institutions that would provide a sustaining environment in which cultural work may flourish. The first grant was for the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which under the leadership of Alberto Ginastera offered graduate training in avant-garde musical composition. The second grant was given to Indiana University, Bloomington, to establish the Latin American Music Center (LAMC) for the study and performance of Latin American music under the direction of Juan Orrego-Salas. By tracing the constitutive actor-networks that led to these grants, my paper seeks to destabilize the concept of philanthropy as a preexisting third force located between the public and private sector (Fisher 1983). Instead it presents it as an emerging domain, the result of complex entanglements, webs of relations and ideas that are mediated and enacted as the result of human, institutional, technological, discursive, and material actors (Latour 2005). This project illuminates the relationships between foreign policy, corporate interests, and funding for the arts in the mid-twentieth century, and brings to the foreground the part played by individuals in actually existing philanthropy.
Es equivocado pensar en la vanguardia sólo como un estilo de composicional o un grupo de preferencias estéticas. La vanguardia como fue recibida y apropiada por múltiples compositores latinoamericanos durante la década de 1960 becarios del Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) fue también un posicionamiento particular con respecto al campo de producción artística en general. Por una parte, muchos de los compositores becarios del CLAEM que adoptaron actitudes de vanguardia lo hicieron por su capacidad subversiva y emancipadora con respecto a formas anteriores de hacer música. A través de la música de vanguardia expresaron su adherencia a un sentimiento de desconformidad con el canon y con los límites existentes de la música clásica. Por otra parte, la vanguardia era un signo de adopción exitosa de las tendencias de producción artística internacionales contemporáneas, y por lo tanto se convertía en un índice de cosmopolitismo. En esta ponencia se demuestra el delicado balance que había en el CLAEM entre una creencia personal comprometida en el potencial de impacto social de la vanguardia de los 60s y las tácticas y estrategias profesionales específicas al estilo musical en un campo de producción artística que premiaba la novedad y la innovación.
This paper poses a general theoretical framework for the ethnomusicology of elites and the construction of elite art worlds. As suggested by George E. Marcus—an early proponent in socio-cultural anthropology of elite studies—anthropologists, and therefore ethnomusicologists, can make a distinctive contribution to elite studies through ethnographic research. Research on elites can include diachronic perspectives that are lacking in other studies, and can provide an analysis of the values and shared interests of elite groups (Marcus 1983). The first part will present an overview of the intellectual history of elite studies ranging from the classic studies of Mosca, Michels and Pareto to recent work from Pina-Cabral and Lima and from Shore and Nugent. The second part explores how ethnomusicological research that brings together ‘power elite’ and ‘functionalist elites’ views can provide a better understanding of the process that leads to the consolidation of power in the hands of specific elite groups while still considering them dynamic and heterogeneous across different realms of social life. Ethnographic work complemented by oral histories can provide a much-needed understanding of how elites in a ‘forming phase’ achieve ‘distinction’ in Bourdieu’s sense (1984), and how they maintain it and reproduce it, giving insight into the hegemonic process of sustaining elite power. This paper uses my own fieldwork experience with one of the wealthiest families in Argentina, and a major patron for music, to point out some problems with traditional methods of participant observation and long-term fieldwork for the study of elites.
Experimentalisms in Practice responds to recent efforts to reframe and reconceptualize the study of experimental music in terms of epistemological perspective and geographic scope, while also engaging traditional scholarship. This book contributes to the current conversations about music experimentalism while providing new points of entry to further reevaluate the field.
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This article examines three features present in Aharonián’s compositions: austerity, non-discursive syntax, and the use of microprocesses. Their particular manifestations are traced in numerous examples taken from several of Aharonián’s acoustic and electroacoustic compositions created between 1966 and 1999. These show an application of the idea of austerity to pitch content, timbre, rhythmic and melodic figures, and notation; two main ways of generating non–discursive syntax (high sectionalization and stratification); and finally the use of microprocesses as means for development of material including the use of microtonalism, microvariations and recontextualization.
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The two books reviewed here both contribute to our understanding of how transnational participation and negotiation are embedded in the classical music tradition of the United States. Hess shows us that the study of music in the Western classical tradition cannot escape its intrinsic cosmopolitanism and that transnational dialogues are actually central to its expressive and discursive universes. Fauser asks us to attend to musical practices beyond the concert hall and that may involve musical actors peripheral to grand narratives of music.
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The apparently inevitable nomination of Donald Trump as Republican candidate to the presidency of the United States has made visible, in an unprecedented way, the process in which economic and social capital can be used to consolidate political power even against long-established party elites. Trump, a real estate mogul turned into television personality whose candidacy less than a year ago was deemed a ruse, a marketing opportunity, and plainly unviable, has allowed us to gain unusual insight into the transformation of his elite status as he has consolidated a political power that he lacked in very short time. In this presentation I argue that it is imperative to to study elite groups in their cultural performances, their discursive practices, and their social constructions of place, self, and other. What this can bring to the table is a rich understanding of the many forms that elite status may take, the ways it becomes legitimized, and the overall impact of its articulation.
“Studying up” and “at home” are not new concepts in anthropology or ethnomusicology, but research on Western cosmopolitan art worlds and the elite individuals and institutions who shape them still draws only a small fraction of ethnographic interest. This paper poses a theoretical framework for an ethnomusicology that shifts focus from subaltern subjects to elites. The first part highlights contributions of the intellectual history of elite studies that I have found useful to approach my research. The second uses my experience studying one of the wealthiest families in Argentina and major patrons of avant-garde music to demonstrate how we can provide a better understanding of the process that leads to the consolidation of power in the hands of specific elite groups while still considering them dynamic and heterogeneous.
In 1967, Ariel Martínez (b.1936), one of the top bandoneón performers of Uruguay, recorded four tangos with his Trio Nuevo. The first two, Homo sapiens and Homo faber, were certainly at the vanguard of tango music, aligned with the emerging 1950s Tango Nuevo and its main representative Astor Piazzolla. However, in Homo ludens I and II, the score asks the musicians to spontaneously choose and repeat at will one of several short motivic cells with only brief moments of synchronized playing among them, taking instrumental tango-making to its fringes. After this recording, Martínez abandoned tango, feeling there was no possibility left for a novel creation in the genre. He became a full time classical music composer, a free improviser and an active participant of Buenos Aires’s most important electronic music studio. After many years of struggling to get performances and gain the acceptance of the public and critics Martínez became recluse and unwilling to share his work, in the same manner he had stopped to play the bandoneón. Today, disillusioned with all avant-garde aesthetics, he has become very critical of the push for the destruction of musical paradigms during the zenith of avant-garde composition. This paper explores the way Martínez negotiated music making on the fringes both in the popular and classical realm, looking in particular at his narratives of disenchantment with tango and contemporary classical music. His story provides an unconventional insight to the embrace and rejection of avant-garde aesthetics in the southern cone.
Iannis Xenakis visitó Argentina como profesor del Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella durante fines de agosto y comienzos de septiembre de 1966. Xenakis, quien entonces tenía 44 años, era conocido en la escena de la vanguardia musical de Buenos Aires: Achorripsis había recibido su estreno mundial en el Teatro Colón en 1958, y Diamorphoses y Pithopraktá fueron escuchadas en 1962 y 1963 respectivamente. A pesar de que las obras recibieron una irregular acogida, la prensa local anunció con anticipo la llegada del compositor, y dio amplia cobertura a su estadía, incluyendo su conferencia-concierto titulada “Nuevos principios de composición musical”. El carácter interdisciplinario y el lenguaje cientificista en el que se enmarcaba la obra de Xenakis—matemática, arquitectura, y composición asistida con ordenadores—estimuló la imaginación del público porteño respecto a la relación entre arte y ciencia, en sintonía con el discurso modernizador que buscaba establecer relaciones entre la producción artística, tecnológica, y el desarrollo industrial . Las actividades del compositor en el CLAEM se centraron en un curso intensivo llamado “Música estocástica, estratégica y simbólica”, donde compartió su experiencia con teorías de probabilidad y composición asistidas por ordenador, enfocándose en sus obras tituladas con el prefijo ST. No obstante, las interacciones fueron mas allá del aula de clase, e incluyeron largas discusiones con los compositores, socialización, y momentos de esparcimiento. Las ideas de Xenakis impactaron de manera profunda a varios de los compositores latinoamericanos becarios del CLAEM, quizá de forma mas evidente a la compositora argentina Graciela Paraskevaídis. El interés por dar prioridad a parámetros tímbricos y texturales por encima de lo tónico y lo rítmico—que tanto para Xenakis como para Paraskevaídis pasaba por la obra de Varèse—y los vínculos en común con Grecia—Paraskevaídis es de ascendencia griega por padre y madre—crearon una resonancia entre los dos creadores. Finalmente, la visita también estimuló la imaginación de Xenakis en cuanto la posibilidad de transformar material gráfico a material sonoro luego de sus intercambios con el ingeniero encargado del laboratorio de música electrónica, Fernando von Reichenbach, hecho que se pone en evidencia con el desarrollo del Convertidor Gráfico Analógico de Reichenbach (funcional desde 1969), y la Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu de Xenakis (UPIC, en desarrollo desde principios de la década del setenta, y funcional desde 1977). Utilizando fuentes de archivo y una extensa recopilación de historia oral, este trabajo explora estos tres aspectos del viaje de Xenakis a Argentina: (1) el contexto y la forma cómo los medios de comunicación enmarcaron la visita del compositor Europeo y la recepción que tuvieron los eventos organizados alrededor de ésta bajo un discurso modernista; (2) el impacto directo que la visita tuvo sobre algunos compositores del CLAEM, en particular Paraskevaídis; y (3) el intercambio que Xenakis tuvo con el ingeniero Fernando von Reichenbach.
Iannis Xenakis in Argentina: Reception, Dialogues, and Exchanges
Abstract
Iannis Xenakis visited Argentina as professor of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute during late August and early September 1966. The 44-year old Xenakis was known in the Buenos Aires avant-garde music scene: The world premier of Achorripsis had taken place at the Teatro Colón in 1958 and Diamorphoses and Pithopraktá had been heard in 1962 and 1963, respectively, all to lukewarm response from the audience. Nevertheless, the local press announced his arrival with excitement and gave ample coverage to his stay, including his lecture-recital “New Principles of Musical Composition”. The interdisciplinary character and scientificist language in which Xenakis’s work was framed—mathematics, architecture, and computer-aided composition—stimulated the imagination of the public in Buenos Aires regarding the relationship between art and science, and resonated with a modernizing discourse that looked to establish relations between artistic production, technology, and Argentina’s industrial development. At the CLAEM, Xenakis offered a course titled “Stochastic, Strategic, and Symbolic Music”, in which he shared his experiences with theories of probability and computer-aided composition, focusing on his series of works titled with the prefix ST. However, the interactions went beyond the classroom, and included long discussions with composers, socialization, and time for leisure. Xenakis’s ideas made an impact on several of the Latin-American composers working at the CLAEM, perhaps most evident in the case of the argentine Graciela Paraskevaídis. The young Paraskevaídis resonated with Xenakis in his interest to prioritize parameters of timbre and texture over pitch and rhythm—something that both composers had embraced from Varèse—and in their common ties to Greece—Paraskevaídis paternal and maternal family were Greek. Finally, the visit stimulated Xenakis’s imagination regarding the possibility of transforming graphic material into sound after his exchanges with Fernando von Reichenbach, something that crystallized with the development of Reichenbach’s Convertidor Gráfico Analógico (functional since 1969), and Xenakis’s Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu (UPIC, in development since the early seventies, and functional since 1977). Using archival resources and a thorough compilation of oral history, this work explores these three aspects of Xenakis’s trip to Argentina: (1) the way the media framed the visit of the European composer, and the reception of the events organized around it under a modernist discourse; (2) the impact that this visit had over some of the composers at the CLAEM, particularly Paraskevaídis; and (3) the exchanges that Xenakis had with the engineer Fernando von Reichenbach.
In the beginning of the 1960s the Rockefeller Foundation gave two significant grants towards the study of Latin American music. Sponsored by John P. Harrison, Assistant Director for Humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, their aim was to help the creation of institutions that would provide a sustaining environment in which cultural work may flourish. The first grant was for the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which under the leadership of Alberto Ginastera offered graduate training in avant-garde musical composition. The second grant was given to Indiana University, Bloomington, to establish the Latin American Music Center (LAMC) for the study and performance of Latin American music under the direction of Juan Orrego-Salas. By tracing the constitutive actor-networks that led to these grants, my paper seeks to destabilize the concept of philanthropy as a preexisting third force located between the public and private sector (Fisher 1983). Instead it presents it as an emerging domain, the result of complex entanglements, webs of relations and ideas that are mediated and enacted as the result of human, institutional, technological, discursive, and material actors (Latour 2005). This project illuminates the relationships between foreign policy, corporate interests, and funding for the arts in the mid-twentieth century, and brings to the foreground the part played by individuals in actually existing philanthropy.
Es equivocado pensar en la vanguardia sólo como un estilo de composicional o un grupo de preferencias estéticas. La vanguardia como fue recibida y apropiada por múltiples compositores latinoamericanos durante la década de 1960 becarios del Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) fue también un posicionamiento particular con respecto al campo de producción artística en general. Por una parte, muchos de los compositores becarios del CLAEM que adoptaron actitudes de vanguardia lo hicieron por su capacidad subversiva y emancipadora con respecto a formas anteriores de hacer música. A través de la música de vanguardia expresaron su adherencia a un sentimiento de desconformidad con el canon y con los límites existentes de la música clásica. Por otra parte, la vanguardia era un signo de adopción exitosa de las tendencias de producción artística internacionales contemporáneas, y por lo tanto se convertía en un índice de cosmopolitismo. En esta ponencia se demuestra el delicado balance que había en el CLAEM entre una creencia personal comprometida en el potencial de impacto social de la vanguardia de los 60s y las tácticas y estrategias profesionales específicas al estilo musical en un campo de producción artística que premiaba la novedad y la innovación.
This paper poses a general theoretical framework for the ethnomusicology of elites and the construction of elite art worlds. As suggested by George E. Marcus—an early proponent in socio-cultural anthropology of elite studies—anthropologists, and therefore ethnomusicologists, can make a distinctive contribution to elite studies through ethnographic research. Research on elites can include diachronic perspectives that are lacking in other studies, and can provide an analysis of the values and shared interests of elite groups (Marcus 1983). The first part will present an overview of the intellectual history of elite studies ranging from the classic studies of Mosca, Michels and Pareto to recent work from Pina-Cabral and Lima and from Shore and Nugent. The second part explores how ethnomusicological research that brings together ‘power elite’ and ‘functionalist elites’ views can provide a better understanding of the process that leads to the consolidation of power in the hands of specific elite groups while still considering them dynamic and heterogeneous across different realms of social life. Ethnographic work complemented by oral histories can provide a much-needed understanding of how elites in a ‘forming phase’ achieve ‘distinction’ in Bourdieu’s sense (1984), and how they maintain it and reproduce it, giving insight into the hegemonic process of sustaining elite power. This paper uses my own fieldwork experience with one of the wealthiest families in Argentina, and a major patron for music, to point out some problems with traditional methods of participant observation and long-term fieldwork for the study of elites.
Also: 36th Annual Conference of the Society for American Music, Ottawa, ON, Canada, March 18, 2010.
During the 1970s and 80s, several young Latin American composers at the forefront of the musical avant-garde gained recognition in Europe. Their music was austere, violent, reiterative, and non-directional, and often claimed to be ideologically engaged. In this paper, I explore Graciela Paraskevaídis’s and Mariano Etkin’s musical ‘coming of age’ during the 1960s as avant-garde Argentinean composers and how this identification dialogues with what they refer to as a “committed militancy” to write música de nuestro tiempo [music of our time]. Drawing from ethnographic work in Argentina and Uruguay, and reflecting on the two years they shared as fellows at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires during 1965-66, I examine how their rejection of old compositional models, their discovery of experimentalism, their personal friendship, and the political conditions of Buenos Aires during the 1960s give particular insight on identity creation of cosmopolitan elites within the discourse of dependency theory. Of particular importance are the ways in which Etkin and Paraskevaídis confronted the avant-garde not as an absolute model to adopt but as a problem to be solved from within a unique Latin American perspective.