Music in the Americas The Nineteenth Century:  Looking Forward, Looking Back

This website represents a collaboration among students at various universities as part of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics on the subject of music.  While the focus of these collaborations was intended to focus on the music of the nineteenth century, some students have chosen to emphasize a different moment in the trajectory of the musical form they studied.  Following are links to the students' web pages.

Amauri Araujo Antunes, Universidade do Rio de Janeiro
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Carla Corona, New York University
"Corridos"
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Natalie Corvington, Ohio State University
"MULATTA AND SUPERFLY:" CUBA'S GOLDEN AGE NOSTALGIA
Abstract: The development of Cuban nationalism is a compelling history, one that must not be understood as separate from the country's racial and gendered history.  The inclusion of African heritage in Cuba's popular conception of national identity is intricately linked to the slave trade, struggles against colonial and imperial domination, and the development of Cuba's distinct socialist character.  So how has the capitalist market used Cuba's "ethnic" culture to perpetuate racist, sexist stereotypes and cater to "Golden Age," pre-Castro nostalgia?  With the country's emphasis on tourism after the fall of the Soviet Union, is Afro-Cuban culture being exploited?  How is the country dealing with increase of prostitution around Guantanamo Bay and US tourist hot-spots?  And perhaps most importantly, where do Pan-African nationalism, Latina feminism, the Cuban revolution, and Afro-Cuban music intersect?  These are the questions that this study hopes to complicate.

Cathlyn A. Harris, New York University
Los Pastores/Las Pastorelas: Public Theatre, Popular Devotion
Abstract: This website explores the roots of the pastorelas or shepherd's plays performed in Mexico and her diaspora, offers scores of the music performed in these pastorelas, and provides bibliographic resources related to pastorelas.

Michael Birenbaum Quintero, New York University
Composing the Nation (awaiting link)
Abstract: Colombia is a nation rich in cultural, regional, economic, and musical diversity.  The fact that, unlike in neighboring states, a centralized civilian elite has mostly managed to stay in power despite various threats since the founding of the Republic, speaks to the pervasiveness of the dominant discourse of national identity which has consistently marginalized contestatory claims to nationhood.  This is particularly evident in the question of race.  Although home to 81 indigenous language groups and the largest population of African descendents in Hispanophone America, the national identity as a mestizo white-Indian nation persists.
In this paper, I will view music's inclusion in nationalist discourse to tease out the workings of the official doctrine of mestizaje in Colombia. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Colombian elite composers of classical art music used the mestizo bambuco genre both to present Colombian distinctiveness and to exclude non-mestizo conceptions of Colombian identity.  I will show how this served the white elite.  It simultaneously cancelled out black claims to Colombian-ness, and reduced indigenous identity to a purely discursive foil to pure whiteness in the creation of the mestizo nation.

Yarí Rodríguez, New York University
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