Defining Conjunto Quantitatively: Classical and Modernist Styles in a Texas-Mexican Genre
2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19452349.40.1.03
ISSN1945-2349
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoBetraying the genre's heritage in European influences, one of the most frequently recorded songs within the Texas-Mexican conjunto tradition is the “Beer Barrel Polka,” translated into Spanish as “El Barrilito.” Composed by Czech musician Jaromír Vejvoda and popular worldwide during World War II, the tune has been recorded by a variety of conjunto artists, including the so-called “father of conjunto music” Narciso Martínez; other eminent early stars like Tony De La Rosa, Valerio Longoria, and Ruben Vela; more stylistically innovative musicians like Flaco Jiménez; and even members of the subsequent generation like Max Baca. However, contemporary Texas-Mexican musicians like Juanito Castillo, Piñata Protest, and Sunny Sauceda have not recorded the classic song. This first group of artists represents a collective tradition comprising a common repertory passed down through oral tradition. Meanwhile, recent musicians like Castillo, Piñata Protest, and Sauceda instead create original repertory alongside borrowed songs and stylistic traits from rock, country, and the blues (among others). In addition, while conjunto itself and many of its early artists initiated in rural communities along the Texas-Mexican border in the Rio Grande Valley, this “modernist” group of musicians (my term) emanates from the urban center of San Antonio. The quantitative methods in this article then highlight two divergent versions of the genre, both characterized as “conjunto.” The “classic” version of the genre represents a rural, working-class, shared tradition. Meanwhile, the modernist version of the genre has increasingly become an urban, middle-class, autonomous art form.Furthermore, a number of inter/national musicians have recently started participating in the regional conjunto tradition. Although these artists might be expected to insert elements of their own geographic and/or cultural heritages into the music, they instead closely follow classic practices. For example, “Ay Te Dejo En San Antonio” was written by Santiago Jiménez Sr., the father of Flaco and a pioneer of the conventional conjunto sound. The song has been recorded by a range of local artists, international conjunto participants, and nationally oriented musicians like the Texas Tornados and Los Lobos. However, it has not been recorded by the modernist group of local conjunto artists—a network of musicians who, secure in their cultural positionality, largely eschew classical repertory for independent song choices and connections to genres like rock and country.1In recent practices, shared songs represent the role of either classicism or modernism in each musician's interpretation of conjunto. Quantitative methods demonstrate that inter/national artists join with an older generation of regional musicians to maintain a shared repertory, consistent structures, and expected sounds; in short, a classical style. Younger artists in the Texas-Mexican community instead modernize the music through new stylistic traits and original songs. Furthermore, while both versions of the music are subsumed under a categorization of “conjunto,” each represents a distinctive repertory and associated group of people. As such, the tradition complicates analytical links between genre and sociocultural identity. The historical notion of genre—as cultivated most prominently as a marketing device in popular music throughout the twentieth century—sets up a homologous system of categorization that connects musical traits to demographics. As David Brackett describes, in historical practices, “a race record finds an African American audience; an old-time record finds a rural, white, Southern audience; a mainstream record finds a white, bourgeois, Northern, urban audience; and a foreign record finds a foreigner.”2 As this article will explore, despite these essentializing connections (i.e., conjunto as idiomatically Texas-Mexican; the music and associated community inextricably linked as simplistic and old-fashioned), such systems often remain stubbornly in place. While such categorizations do not seem to indicate any purposeful exclusions, the conjunto genre remains linked to intrinsic understandings of identity, beyond interpretation or intent.Throughout this analysis, I use the term classical to refer to music that maintains a shared repertory among a wide range of musical participants, considers individual songs as belonging to the community rather than a single artist, and does not address a national, mainstream audience or use monetary incentive as a primary method of stylistic continuation. As with earlier usages of the term, classicism implies devotion to a long-established art form. In contrast, the term modernist indicates music that produces new and original repertory, stylistic distinctions between individual artists, consideration of songs as “belonging” to the original composer rather than the group as a whole, and intended association with an inter/national, mainstream, and/or money-oriented audience (regardless of actual participation with the mainstream community or total money earned). As with earlier usages of the term, modernism implies a conscious break from the past, leading to new forms, urbanism, and engagement with social issues. That being said, what is now considered “classic” was once new, and certain elements of the older historical tradition—here categorized as classical—display characteristics more in line with modernist impulses (original repertory, individualism of style, and commercialization, to start). For our purposes, the characterization of conjunto as “classical” thus refers to connections between these historical practices and younger artists who maintain the repertory and creative techniques of the tradition. In contrast, modernist pursuits comprise contemporary artists who push the boundaries of the classical understanding. In short, these characterizations refer to a recent snapshot of musical practices, rather than a full analysis of the role of “classical” musicians within their own eras.Beginning with a brief history and sociocultural analysis of the Texas-Mexican conjunto tradition, this article theorizes the connection between genre and identity to explore musical category as it relates to repertory. In particular, it uses quantitative evidence to examine song choice across the range of accordion-based ensembles situated in or influenced by the conjunto genre in South Texas during the long twentieth century. These inclusions are purposefully broad, striving to categorize musicians who fall neatly within historical conjunto characterizations, but also those who do not. In including artists typically grouped under designations of Tejano, norteño, popular, orchestral, or progressive—genres closely related but considered separately from conjunto in local and commercialized performance spaces—I anticipate a distinction between these musicians and those more closely tied to traditional understandings of conjunto. I recognize that song choice alone cannot account for all—or even most—musical connections. However, in this case, the invocation of particular songs (in a recorded capacity) creates groupings of artists that closely correspond to categorizations in performance structures and awards-based recognitions, as corroborated by the regional community. I then compare the repertories of these musicians with geographic location, noting the creation of contrasting musical communities as connected to point of origin. I explore commonalities between groupings of song choice with artist designations in community-based festivals and other recognitions. I drill deeper into the data to uncover more complicated musical connections through social network analysis and conclude with further consideration of meaning and identity in music.A surface-level analysis demonstrates a range of musical characteristics and sociocultural backgrounds included under the contemporary categorization of conjunto. It would seem that characterizations of the genre as strictly related to either aesthetic traits or groups of people are no longer relevant. At the same time, closely related genres like Tejano or norteño encompass similar musical elements and/or demographics as conjunto while in no way gaining admittance into the alternate generic classification. In both of these regards, contemporary conjunto seems to have been disconnected from older connections between genre and identity. Yet the separation of conjunto into subcategories based on musical repertory and artistic points of origin—as detailed throughout this essay—suggests that homologous notions of genre are more prevalent than might be expected. This article analyzes the recorded song choices of a variety of regional and inter/national conjunto artists, using social network visualizations to demonstrate an inverse relationship between location and techniques of modernism. In other words, the further artists emanate from the historical Texas-Mexican community, the more “classical” their choice of repertory; conversely, artists more closely situated within stereotypical understandings of Texas-Mexican identity tend to experiment with new songs, thus creating a “modernist” interpretation of the traditional music. The commercialized classification of contemporary recordings as “conjunto” then demonstrates the societal obstinance of essentialist stereotypes according to demographic characteristics. Despite narratives of increasing inclusivity in music and culture—in scholarship, in the popular US “melting pot” mythology, and in promotional materials for regional events like the Tejano Conjunto Festival—such generic depictions indicate the persistence of participatory limitations for music based on ethnicity, class, location, and power. Inter/national musicians can participate in the Texas-Mexican genre, but only according to strict limitations of repertory.Texas-Mexican conjunto music began with the adoption of the button accordion in the early years of the twentieth century by the working-class community in South Texas. Taking influence and early repertory from German polka music—brought, along with the railroad, to urban centers in Texas and Mexico—the genre idiosyncratically blends the sound of the accordion with bajo sexto, a twelve-string Mexican bass guitar. By the middle of the twentieth century, the music had settled into a relatively standard instrumentation, repertory, and sound. As Manuel Peña describes, following a period of stylistic formation corresponding to an initial commercialization from the 1920s through the end of World War II, conjunto achieved a “classic” era from the late 1940s through about 1970. Although regional performers like Flaco, Steve Jordan, and Mingo Saldívar challenged traditional stylistic boundaries, in general the remaining years of the twentieth century brought “a period of consolidation and decline, as many of the stylistic elements of the classic era—now considered ‘the tradition’—were worked and reworked into a less and less dynamic style.”3 From this point, the music became, in essence, a “folkloric” tradition, celebrated as a symbol of Texas-Mexican culture and historical struggles, but largely devoid of continuing musical evolution. While many among the regional community took pride in this continued cultural significance (in fact, Cathy Ragland attests that conjunto has maintained its lengthy local popularity primarily due to this perseverance of style), the lack of innovation within the genre at the middle of the century failed to attract the younger, increasingly urbanized and Americanized ethnic constituency, and local conjunto was threatened by alternate styles.4Although the music stagnated stylistically in the second half of the twentieth century, a new form of social relevance and national recognition for the working-class cultural tradition came with the Chicano rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s. While the traditional music had historically provided a symbol of cultural identity within the local, working-class Texas-Mexican constituency, the representative recognition of the genre among the broader Chicano community served as an important revitalizing force for the contemporary regional sound. At this point, the working-class music became separated from its humble socioeconomic beginnings, and, corresponding to many of its original, increasingly upwardly mobile constituents, gained meaning among an educated, middle-class population. It is within this atmosphere that regional artists like Castillo, Piñata Protest, and Sauceda (among many others) started producing music. Rather than remaining tied to the relative stagnation of the conjunto tradition, these musicians write new music and insert interesting, cross-cultural hybridizations into the Texas-Mexican form. It is also within this atmosphere that inter/national artists have started including conjunto elements in their own performances. While these inter/national artists might be expected to insert external characteristics emanating from their own cultural heritages into the conjunto tradition, it is the younger regional musicians who actually stray furthest from conventional practices. Inter/national artists instead maintain the classical style of the older generation of local conjunto stars. In this way, in contemporary practices, two separate networks of conjunto musicians exist. Common repertories connect older generations of local artists with more culturally precarious participants, while a younger generation of local musicians instead challenges historical boundaries of interpretation. Both methods challenge generic links between musical characteristics—here determined by repertory—and stereotypical associations of ethnicity, class, and location.From a theoretical perspective, generic characterization invokes a formalistic system of meaning by way of certain indicators. As John Frow explains, a specific text (a word I use to include a specific song) uses a “compressed form” to establish “a set of knowledges.”5 In other words, certain salient characteristics of a work combine to invoke a genre of (in this case) music; the suggestion of such genre then constructs knowledge of the piece based on experiential understandings of generic significance. As Frow explains, this process allows a listener to “infer the whole from the part”; to determine “the kind of thing this is from the representation of a few of its scattered features.”6 In the case of Texas-Mexican conjunto, surface-level indicators—local performance spaces, historic instrumentation, classical song choices, or expected sociocultural identity—mark the music as “conjunto,” allowing audiences to construct a schematic world that provides the framework for musical understanding. Among local artists, sociocultural identity allows for immediate association with “conjunto,” regardless of strict correspondence to historical elements of the genre (assuming some broad categorization based on instrumentation or the like). Audiences recognize the music as such and activate understanding according to this generic framework. They create patterns of meaning based on a “broader frame of background knowledge” that “lies latent in a shadowy region from which we draw it as we need it”; a frame of significance that “we may not know we know and that is not directly available for scrutiny.”7As such, the characterization of conjunto relies on cursory decisions by the subconscious. Certain indicators allow an audience to classify a piece of music according to more generalized interpretations and thus attribute significance (or acceptance) through this broader framework. Such generic “clues” are immediate and therefore superficial: a performer who presents as “conjunto” based on stereotypical notions of ethnicity, gender, clothing, instrumentation, and performance context is interpreted as such, even if less immediately apparent characteristics of the music (song choice, structure, harmonies) contrast with historical expectations. As such, local conjunto musicians read as “conjunto” and continue to receive interpretation as such, even when repertory and other musical elements stray from convention. As Eric Drott explains (theorizing the functionality of titles), “by signaling to listeners the genre to which a piece belongs,” these indicators serve “a ‘rhetorical’ or communicative function, in addition to a taxonomic one.”8 In this regard, surface-level signifiers—such as visual cues of sociocultural identity—signal to an audience that a performer should be classified as “conjunto,” allowing the listener to then access the range of interpretations based on prior knowledge of the genre. Conversely, lacking cultural indicators of belonging, inter/national conjunto musicians must harness this generic framework via alternative methods. As explored below, one such signal is the classical conjunto repertory.Over time, the categorization of conjunto has arguably remained more closely related to elements of sociocultural identity than individual musical traits. In this regard, the tradition functions according to analytical conceptions that characterize genre not “as a stable class of objects, defined by possession of some discrete set of fixed characteristics,” but “as a dynamic ensemble of correlations, linking together a variety of material, institutional, social, and symbolic resources: repertories, performance practices, distinctive formal and stylistic traits, aesthetic discourses, forms of self-presentation, institutions, specific modes of technological mediation, social identities, and so forth.”9 Participation within conjunto historically implied a particular identity: conjunto musicians as inherently working class, ethnically Mexican, and emanating from a rural community in South Texas. At the same time, identification according to these traits suggested a stereotypical affinity for conjunto—Texas-Mexican musicians as “naturally” attracted to the genre, evidence of alternative pursuits and artists like Flaco absorbing many musical styles notwithstanding. Christabel Stirling dismantles similar essentializations in the gendering of electronic/dance music, confronting the perceived “‘maleness’ of extreme volume, sonic complexity and heavy bass, or the ‘femaleness’ of vocals and danceable tempos” to consider the ways such stereotypical associations “reproduce social differences and inequalities.”10 Genre and identity have thus been inextricably linked, regardless of the veracity of such characterizations.These connections play into persistent representations—among politicians, the mainstream media, and even scholars—of the Texas-Mexican community as old-fashioned and fundamentally working class, despite a range of sociocultural identities actually present across the region. For example, Flaco recalls the difficulties of his father's generation in gaining support from record companies: “They considered [conjunto] low-class, cantina music, Mexican hillbilly music.”11 Likewise, in initiating the collaborations that would jumpstart Flaco's career and bring global attention to the genre, Ry Cooder conveys similar stereotypes of the music and associated community as low class and simplistic: “The records are made on obscure labels in trashy little studios on the Texas-Mexican border, but they still sound great. Of course, the music was even better back in the ’50s, before commercialism started affecting everything, but it's still some of the best stuff I've heard.”12 Journalists like Travis Buffkin compliment Flaco through analogous characterizations: “I don't respect Flaco Jiménez because the Grammys gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award after 67 years of playing masterful accordion, but because he spent those 67 years in relative obscurity, as a master, playing for beer, tacos, pretty women and some spending money.”13 While more recent manifestations of conjunto superficially demonstrate a separation from homologous notions of genre as identity,14 as evidenced by the local incorporation of hybrid traits and inter/national participation in the artform, closer analysis instead indicates that categorical ties between musical elements, sociocultural stereotypes, and generic characterization persist.As such, the manifestation of genre in Texas-Mexican conjunto follows Franco Fabbri's depiction of musical genre as “a set of musical events (real or possible) whose course is governed by a definite set of socially accepted rules.”15 According to Fabbri, this framework consists variously of formal/technical rules, semiotic rules, behavior rules, social/ideological rules, and economical/juridical rules. In this regard, the definition of musical genre illustrates a spectrum of identity-based distinctions. Performers more closely aligned with the historical conjunto community (and thus, sociocultural identity) achieve generic categorization through a reliance on Fabbri's idea of social and ideological rules, with less adherence to expected formal elements. In order to achieve coherent analysis as “conjunto,” performers less closely connected to historical interpretations of Texas-Mexican identity must instead rely on formal and technical rules (instrumentation, structure, repertory, etc.). In this way, local performers are consistently characterized as quintessential “conjunto” musicians, despite using a range of formal/technical elements. Inter/national artists conversely exploit these formal/technical elements (song choice, in particular, as described below) to signal a classification of “conjunto” to audiences inclined to create groupings based on social/ideological rules. Identity thus remains intricately linked to some understandings of genre, but not all. Generic categorization is a complex process, tied to fickle rules developed subconsciously according to a variety of prior understandings and biases. As Fabbri notes, musicological literature tends to emphasize generic definition through formal and technical rules, “to the point where genre, style, and form become synonymous.”16 Acknowledging instead the “enormous quantity of information” in such categorization helps to remove genre from “rules and regulations” and emphasize the “relationships between various laws, by transgressions against them and above all by ambiguities” in the attribution of genre.17For example, while regional artists like Flaco (through stylistic traits) and the modernist group of musicians characterized below (through distinctive repertory, among other elements) incorporate a range of musical characteristics emanating from a variety of cultures, they remain stubbornly characterized among the mainstream population (i.e., in awards shows, recording labels, and marketing efforts) as idiosyncratically “conjunto.” In contrast, Tejano and norteño musicians, with musical techniques often more closely connected to classical conjunto than many modernist conjunto artists but with sociocultural identities disconnected from historical representations of conjunto in terms of class and location, respectively, remain separate from the conjunto categorization. Similarly, for inter/national musicians—fundamentally disconnected from historical notions of Texas-Mexican identity—to gain acceptance within the conjunto genre, they must closely imitate the classical repertory, structure, and sound of the most traditional interpretations of the music. While these types of characterizations are not unique to the Texas-Mexican community, as demonstrated by the multifaceted theories of genre detailed by Fabbri, the resulting effects limit economic success for marginalized musicians confined to lower-valued genres. These categories represent systems of power, and the insistence of the mainstream music industry to use sociocultural distinctions to characterize local musicians as “conjunto,” for example, despite musical elements aligned with alternate genres, limits the earnings potential for such artists in more serious ways than in the classification of generically ambiguous, hegemonic artists. As Robin James discusses, “Fans, critics, musicians and music industry professionals use stereotypes about gender, race, sexuality and class as tools to draw, express, and police genre boundaries, and to rank the value of genres, styles and songs.”18Local promotion of international participation in conjunto music likewise creates a narrative of multicultural acceptance disconnected from actual inclusions of music or people. For example, journalist Ramiro Burr, writing for the San Antonio Express-News in 2000, refers to the programming of bands from France and Japan at that year's Tejano Conjunto Festival as “the festival's International Day,” noting audiences’ “new excitement” in watching the multilingual performances from “halfway around the world.”19 Similarly, while (in 2001) Burr acknowledges that international participation in the festival is “not something one would expect,” he describes Los Gatos de Japón as “the [recent] darling of the festival.”20 Likewise, writing for the San Antonio Current in 2010, Bryan Rindfuss notes that Verheyden “won over the somewhat skeptical-looking crowd . . . by belting out charming renditions of classic Flaco tunes in adorably broken Spanish.”21 Writing for the Current in 2012, Enrique Loptegui refers to Verheyden as “most likely to steal the show (again)” and advocates for an invocation of the Dutch artist “next time anyone tells you conjunto is dead or just a regional thing.”22 As Juan Tejeda (musician, educator, and longtime coordinator of the Tejano Conjunto Festival) notes, international conjunto artists are “not really changing the [local] repertory or the style,” instead “play[ing] conjunto music the way we [local artists] play it.”23 Observing that “imitation is the highest form of flattery,” local audiences “love that these bands are performing [Texas-Mexican] music around the world.”24 However, despite a sanguine narrative of music as universal language—an optimistic portrayal promoting the inclusion of characteristics and musicians from outside of the primary cultural context—the genre of conjunto remains persistently tied to Texas-Mexican identity.Brackett notes the “absurdity of rigid essentialist stereotypes” in symbolic connections between music and identity but also acknowledges the persistent role of race in categorical designations of particular types of music.25 Historically generic divisions categorize groups of people more essentially than specific musical elements. As Brackett describes, these relationships are most clear in music industry categories from the 1920s like “race,” “hillbilly,” and “popular.” However, I would assert, such designations persist in genres like conjunto that initiated in connection to a certain sociocultural identity. Certain musical elements distinguish the characterization—in the case of conjunto, the distinctive sound of button accordion with bajo sexto, to start—but the boundaries of interpretation within a particular distinction fundamentally correspond to societal designations between people who look or act differently from each other, whether or not we want to admit that distinction. In order for inter/national conjunto musicians to gain acceptance within the genre, they must remain closely tied to classical characteristics of the music; to do otherwise separates these external identities from identity-based interpretations. In contrast, local conjunto musicians like Castillo, Piñata Protest, and Sauceda remain categorized as “conjunto” artists among local events like the Tejano Conjunto Festival and nationally oriented awards shows like the Grammys, regardless of any number of musical elements outside of classical interpretations of the genre.In this way, the apparent inclusivity of current practices in fact gives way to distinctive subgenres of the music based on strict demographics. As Brackett asserts, rather than demonstrating a set of “empirically based stylistic traits,” genres indicate “a tacit and contingent collective agreement about the ‘proper’ place for different types of music and the social groups most associated with them.”26 Instead of clearly defined musical elements, the designations of certain genres, particularly those historically tied to marginalized communities, demonstrate a “form of symbolic communication imbricated in a lengthy history of power struggles.”27 Conjunto's history as an ideological response to Anglo-American oppression, as Peña argues, maintains a barrier of entry for musicians demographically associated with former systems of discrimination. It is within this context that we look more deeply into recent conjunto practices.For this project, I have analyzed the recorded repertories of twenty-eight different artists. These include members of the principal Texas-Mexican generation of conjunto musicians, local members of subsequent generations, national and international artists who play conjunto or use conjunto elements, and regional Tejano and norteño artists. In determining which artists to include, I have tried to represent the best-known conjunto artists, both within the Texas-Mexican community and across a more mainstream audience, as confirmed by hall of fame inductions, festival participation, and awards presentations. In this context, the Tejano and norteño artists serve a comparative function; they are expected to lie outside of standard conjunto practices (and do). This analysis demonstrates two contrasting musical communities: those who maintain the classical heritage of conjunto through traditional song choices and those who expand the genre into a more modernist endeavor through a variety of original songs. Table 1 lists the musicians in this study.28 The list is not comprehensive, but strives to provide a range of generations, locations, and styles (including Tejano, norteño, and popular artists) for analytical comparison.Th
Referência(s)