Listening to Cultures in Conflict: the Politics of Sound in Buenos Aires in the 1960s
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13534645.2014.957546
ISSN1460-700X
Autores Tópico(s)Music Technology and Sound Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 Ramón Chao, ‘Interview with Luigi Nono’, Revista Triunfo, 614 (1974), p.41.2 In his piece Desde su voz amada (From Your Beloved Voice, 1970), Cuban composer Juan Blanco included recordings of Lenin's voice to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, and he received support from the revolutionary government to install a sound system along Havana's principal avenue with thirty-six loud-speakers. Cf. Ramón Chao, ‘Interview with Luigi Nono’, p. 41.3 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Difficulties’, trans. by Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. by Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp.644–814 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘New Music Today’ [1955] trans. by Wieland Hoban, in Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Calcutta: Seagull, 2009), p.198.5 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘New Music Today’, p.1996 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Difficulties’.7 The Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales, under the direction of composer Alberto Ginastera was founded with the idea of promoting the modernization of Latin American music and bringing its composition techniques up to date in order to synchronize practices with international contemporary production and aesthetic debates. With a decidedly anti-traditionalist orientation, the CLAEM made it possible to acquire knowledge and come into contact with the most recent directions in post-War music thanks to a program of regular courses, conferences and invited professors. The project received support from the Rockefeller Foundation in the context of the Cold War and the Alliance for Progress, and in order to thoroughly comprehend it, one must keep in mind the pressing need to bring things up to date that permeated the era and the region. In Latin America, accepting modernization via developmentalist policies was an alternative for change for those countries that did not opt for the route of revolution. Cf. M. Laura Novoa, ‘Proyecto de renovación estética en el campo musical argentino y latinoamericano durante la década del sesenta: el CLAEM’, Revista Argentina de Musicología 8, and M. L. Novoa, ‘CLAEM: ¿Renovación, experimentalismo o vanguardia?’, VIII Jornadas, estudios e investigación, pp.161–169.8 Lydia Goehr, ‘Political Music and Politics of Music’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52:1, The Philosophy of Music (Winter, 1994), pp.99–112.9 The meaning that Rancière re-elaborated of the term aesthetic abandons the conception of aesthetic as related to an overall theory of art or a theory of art that refers back to its effects on sensibility. On the contrary, the meaning he gives the term has to do with ‘a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships (which presupposes a certain idea of thoughts effectively).’ Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p.4.10 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’, trans. by Steve Corcoran in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. by Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), pp.134–152.11 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. by Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), p.24.12 Jacques Ranciere, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’, p.148.13 Cf. Andrea Giunta, Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política. Arte argentino en los años sesenta (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2001); Ana Longoni and Mariano Metsman, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde” (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2010); Ma. Eugenia Mudrovcic, Mundo Nuevo. Cultura y Guerra Fría en la década del 60 (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997); A.A.V.V., Cultura y política en los años 60s (Buenos Aires: UBA, 1997).14 Cf. Omar Corrado: ‘As opposed to the explicit marks practiced by numerous Latin American musicians in different eras, Argentina's musical production remains almost exclusively contained within the aesthetic series and formal autonomy rooted in the artistic, obstinately resistant to reveal itself as social text’. Omar Corrado, ‘Del pudor y otros recatos. Apuntes sobre música contemporánea argentina’, Punto de vista 60 (1998), p.29.15 Pablo Fessel juxtaposes the production of the generation of composers linked to the Di Tella during the sixties, which typically took a stance distanced from any explicit implications of political content, and the composers who emerged in the years following the last military dictatorship, whose production evidently emphasizes a new relationship with traditional music and with the political realm. Cf. Pablo Fessel, ‘Política y tradición en la música de Juan Pampín, Jorge Horst, Carlos Mastropietro y Oscar Strasnoy’, p.2, < http://www.latinoamerica-musica.net/historia/fessel/sitio-Fessel-LM2.pdf>16 César Bolaños (Perú, 1931–2012). He studied at the Lima Conservatorio de música and later undertook studies at the Manhattan School of Music (1959). Before entering the CLAEM (1963) with a scholarship, he studied at the RCA's Institute of Electronic Technology. He composed his principal body of work at the CLAEM, and from his arrival until 1970 with certain intermittence, he developed an intense labor related to electroacoustic composition techniques with live electronics and multi-media.17 Of Hungarian origin, Kröpfl was born in Romania in the ‘30s and was raised in Argentina, where his entire production (both instrumental and electroacoustic works) was developed. He was a disciple of Juan Carlos Paz, a representative of the erudite modern tradition of Argentinean music. He practiced and disseminated the Vienna group's and multi-serialism techniques and was a pioneer of electronic music in Latin America. In 1958 he founded the Estudio de Fonología Musical at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, whose name is a tribute to the Estudio de Fonología de Milan, founded by Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berio in 1955.18 Coriún Aharonián (Montevideo, 1940-) studied in Montevideo with Héctor Tosar and Lauro Ayestarán, and was also one of Luigi Nono's students. He received a scholarship to attend the CLAEM during the two-year period 1968–1970, and he composed Que in the laboratory there. Aside from composing, he was also a professor, essayist and researcher. He was co-founder of the Cursos Latinoamericanos de Música Contemporánea and a member of the SIMC and the IASPM. On the website he founded with composer Graciela Paraskevaidis, we can read that he was an active participant in the cultural resistance against the Fascist dictatorship in his country. Cf. < www.latinoamerica-musica.net/bio/aharonian.html> [15-12-2013].19 In one way or another, they are all related in some way to this genre's foundations and paradigms, Thema (Ommagio a Joyce) (1958) by Luciano Berio and the Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) by Karlheinz Stockhausen.20 Cf. Ismael Viñas, Orden y progreso (Buenos Aires: Editorial Palestra, 1960); Carlos Altamirano, Arturo Frondizi (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998); Nicolás Babini, Arturo Frondizi y la Argentina moderna (Buenos Aires: Gedisa, 2006).21 This same process can be detected in other countries throughout the region, but it was particularly concentrated in Argentina at the CLAEM.22 Jacques Rancière, The Pensive Image', trans. by Gregory Elliott in The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), pp.126–127.23 The duo sound/noise finds a definition of its own in the contingency of each cultural or historical experience. In this context, noise circulated as a signal that contained all unintelligible sound, more closely connected to an everyday practice of listening than to cultural practice.24 Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. by Roger Lusting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).25 Lydia Goehr, ‘Writing Music History’, History and Theory, 31:2 (1992), Wesleyan University: Blackwell Publishing, p.190.26 Lydia Goehr, ‘Writing Music History’, p. 191.27 Moles, Abraham, Teoría de la información y percepción estética. Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, 1976. There is an English edition: Information Theory and Esthetic Perception [1966], trans. Joel E. Cohen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).28 At the outset, when electronic music production techniques were done with analog media, it involved an arduous craft, cutting and assembling tape fragments by hand.29 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Aging of New Music’, tran. by Susan H. Gillespie in Essays on Music, ed. by Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p.193.30 Lydia Goehr, ‘Writing Music History’, p.189.31 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, p.13.32 Lydia Goehr, ‘Writing Music History’, p.191.33 Jaques Rancière, ‘Prelude’, trans. by Paul Zakir in Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (New York: Verso, 2013), p.xii.34 Gisèle Brelet, ‘Música y estructura’ [1965] trans. José Sazbón, in Estructuralismo y estética (Buenos Aires, Nueva Visión, 1969), p.105.35 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, pp.31–32.36 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Intolerable Image’, trans. by Gregory Elliott in The Emancipated Spectator, p.92.37 In traditional music, sound fulfilled a structural function as a support for signifying structures within traditional forms. When sound is freed from this structural function and takes on a formal function, form and content identify with one another.38 ‘Intensidad y Altura’, ‘Orillas’ and ‘Que’ are indebted to the emblematic and foundational pieces Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) and Thema (Omaggioa Joyce) by Luciano Berio (1958). In this context, using the human voice implied the introduction of a “human presence” in a medium where the artificial and the human seemed to be irreconcilable, in addition to being a source of interesting sound in terms of his sonic repertoire. Electronic music seemed to redeem itself, at least briefly, from its so-called dehumanization and inexpressiveness.39 Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Problèmes esthétiques de la musique électronique’, in Essais sur la Nouvelle Musique (Paris: Contrechamps, 2004), p.132.40 The ideals of a union between music and words and the utopian condition of the myth of a synthesis between them continued to be pondered and redefined at the heart of post-War avant-garde groups, even when a certain allergy to text and linguistic-musical elements brought the relationship between language and music to a critical point.Within the continual historical transformation of the ties between poetic text and music, the question regarding the aesthetic nature and pertinence of each continues to be relevant and is brought up to date in different musical contexts. Concerns about whether musical translation of a poem's content–with or without political content–is possible and how it might be carried out in a musical medium like electro-acoustic wound up subsuming other issues such as the problem of semanticity.41 Jacques Rancière, ‘Prelude’, p.xi.42 Roland Barthes, Lo obvio y lo obtuso (Barcelona: Paidós, 1986), p.268. [There is an English edition: The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)]43 The female voice is that of Italian-Argentinian singer Lucía Maranca.44 Cf. César Bolaños, Técnicas del montaje audiovisual (Santa Fe: Universidad Nacional del Litoral, 1969), p.3.45 Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Problèmes esthétiques de la musique électronique’, p.129.46 In his book Próximo prójimo, Benedetti inaugurated writing with more explicit social content, and the poem Todos conspiramos is dedicated to the emblematic revolutionary figure Raúl Sendic. A translation of this poem (“We All Conspire”) can be found in Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry, trans. Sophie Cabot Black and María Negroni (Texas: University of Texas Press, 1996).47 Cf. Coriún Aharonián, ‘Que’ (electroacoustic compositions CD booklet), Gran Tiempo (Uruguay: Tacuabé, 1995), pp.4–5.48 He changes and normalizes verb tenses–respires (that you may breathe) is replaced with respiras (you breathe), conspires (that you may conspire) is replaced with conspiras (you conspire)–perhaps in order to favor a more affirmative tone.49 Coriún Aharonián, ‘Que’, p.5. Uruguayan actor Armando Halty recites the text.50 At that time the standard duration of this type of composition generally surpassed 5 minutes. In 1971, the piece ‘Qué’ formed part of a concert by the Olimareños, a Uruguayan popular music group including Pepe Guerra and Braulio López. Cf. Coriún Aharonian, ‘Que,’ notes in the event program for Festival internacional. La música en el Di Tella. Resonancias de la modernidad, p.36.51 Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Problèmes esthétiques de la musique électronique’, p.127.52 Jacques Rancière, ‘Prelude’, p.xi.53 Jacques Rancière, ‘Prelude’, p.x.54 Jacques Rancière, Metamorphosis of the muses [2002], in Sound, ed. Caleb Kelly (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Whitechapel Gallery London, 2011), p.127.55 Jacques Rancière, ‘Prelude’, p.xii.56 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’, p.139.57 Jacques Rancière, La métamorphose des Muses, Sonic process : une nouvelle géographie des sons (Paris : Centre Georges Pompidou, 2002), pp.25–35.58 Denis Smalley, Contemporary Music Review, 13:2 (1992), pp.77–107, Harwood Academic Publishers (1996), p.98–99.59 Aharonián stated that ‘the cultural parceling characteristic of the European tradition naturally lead to separating hearing from vision, movement, smell or anything else’ and further, that ‘the usual concert-going public, deformed by mistaken practices, misses the circus because it never learned to listen’. Cf. Aharonián, ‘La música, la tecnología y nosotros, los latinoamericanos’, Revista Lulu (Buenos Aires, 1992), p.54.60 In traditional dramatic forms' narrative – both instrumental and on stage – the emotional aspect of the music is expressed and sustained.61 Henri Pousseur, La nuova sensibilità musicale, quoted in Umberto Eco, Obra abierta [1962]. (Barcelona: Planeta-Agostini, 1984), pp.74–75.62 Umberto Eco, La definición del Arte [1968] (Barcelona: Planeta-Agostini, 1985), p.175.63 Richard Leppert, ‘The Social Discipline of Listening’, in Aural Cultures, ed. Jim Drobnick (Toronto, ON: YYZ. 2004).64 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p.105.Additional informationNotes on contributorsM. Laura NovoaM. Laura Novoa teaches Musical Aesthetics at the University of Buenos Aires. She graduated from the National Conservatory Carlos L. Buchardo, and earned her B.A. in Art History from the University of Buenos Aires. She a researcher at the Institute of Theory and Art History Julio E. Payro and a member of a collaborative research group organized by both Paris VIII and the University of Buenos Aires. Her work deals mostly with the creation of the Musical Center at the Di Tella Institute (CLAEM), and the process that led to the introduction of technology in musical composition during the 1950s. She is also the author of several articles published in journals, catalogs, and edited volumes specialized in Latin American music. In 2009 she earned a grant from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes to publish her book Alberto Ginastera en el Instituto Di Tella: correspondencia 1958–1970. Email: lauritatis@yahoo.com
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