Abstract
The period from about 1850 to about 1914 in Latin America saw the continued development of art-music activities initiated in the first half of the century; it also saw the beginnings of musical professionalism, with closer attention to education institutions on the part of central governments, the fuller development of opera seasons and, by the end of the century, the gradual establishment of symphony orchestras, resulting in a more or less regular concert life and a corresponding attention to orchestral music by local composers. The abolition of official slavery in the 1880s facilitated the interpenetration of rural and urban areas, so urban popular musical genres developed at that time, providing immediate sources for the first nationalist composers. The expansion of the middle classes in all the major cities of the continent encouraged an increase in successful salon-music composers and music publishers. The incipient national characterization of composition, both among art-music and popular composers, helped to create a democratic sense of the function and purpose of music in society; by the end of the nineteenth century one could find associations of popular concerts in some of the major Latin American cities, and the theatre, especially with its lighter genres, attracted a much larger proportion of the urban population.
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Notes
A representative collection of these pieces is found in R. M. Campos, El folklore musical de las ciudades (Mexico, 1930).
See R. Stevenson, Music in Mexico: a Historical Survey (New York, 1952), 226–7.
From V. Gesualdo, Historia de la música en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1961), i, 527.
Bibliographical Note Historical background
Various histories of Latin America deal with the important socio-cultural developments during the period under consideration. Particularly useful, though not recent, are H. Herring, A History of Latin America from the Beginnings to the Present (London and New York, 3/1968);
G. Arciniegas, Latin America: a Cultural History (New York, 1966);
and L. Zea, Dos etapas en el pensamiento en Hispanoamérica (Mexico, 1949).
Access to excellent sources on historical and sociological topics in English is provided in the second volume of L. Hanke’s anthology History of Latin American Civilization, Sources and Interpretations (London and Boston, 1967) and in
Readings in Latin American History, ii: The Modern Experience, ed. J. J. Johnson, P. J. Bakewell and M. D. Dodge (Durham, N. Carolina, 1985).
The first part of L. Manigat’s L’Amérique latine au XXe siècle, 1889–1929 (Paris, 1973) provides relevant explanations of the socio-political transformations of Latin America at the turn of the twentieth century.
Music
A proper social theory of music has not been developed for Latin America and the Caribbean. The general approach of available studies is therefore bio-bibliographical and stylistic. The most up-to-date biographical information on the composers mentioned in this chapter is available in Grove 6. Important studies of nineteenth-century music in various countries by some of the best-known Latin American musicologists appear in Die Musikkulturen Lateinamerikas im 19. Jahrhundert (Regensburg, 1982), ed. R. Günther, with English summaries.
Various national histories of music present good overviews of the period. For Mexico, R. Stevenson’s Music in Mexico (New York, 1952),
and vol.iii by G. Carmona of La música en México, ed. J. Estrada (Mexico, 1984), detail the music history from 1850 to the 1910 revolution.
The music of Cuba and Puerto Rico is treated respectively in A. Carpentiere La música en Cuba (Mexico, 1946)
and in H. Campos-Parsi, La música, Gran Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico, vii (Madrid, 1976).
Another good historical survey of Puerto Rican music is M. L. Muñoz, La música en Puerto Rico: panorama histórico-cultural (Sharon, Conn., 1966).
Cuban popular music is thoroughly discussed by A. León in Del canto y el tiempo (Havana, 1984),
while C. Dower provides a wealth of information on Puerto Rican music and musicians at the turn of the century in her Puerto Rican Music following the Spanish American War (Landham, Maryland, New York and London, 1983).
Musical activities and institutions in Caracas, Venezuela, are reviewed in J. A. Calcaño, La ciudady su música (Caracas, 1958),
while C. Salas and E. F. Calcaño give a historical account of 150 years of opera activity in Sesquicentenario de la ópera en Caracas (Caracas, 1960).
J. I. Perdomo Escobar dedicates several chapters to musical developments in Colombia in the latter part of the nineteenth century in Historia de la música en Colombia (Bogota, 3/1963) and
S. L. Moreno surveys music in Ecuador, including data on late nineteenth-century composers, in his monograph La música en el Ecuador in El Ecuador en Cien años de Independencia, ed. J. G. Orellana (Quito, 1930).
The multi-author volume La música en el Perú (Lima, 1985) includes a very informative chapter on nineteenth-century Peruvian music by E. Iturriaga and J. C. Estenssoro.
The Chilean music historian E. Pereira Salas reconstructs in great detail the diverse music-making of his country in the period 1850–1900, from primary documents, in his Historia de la música en Chile (Santiago, 1957),
brought up to date by S. Claro-Valdés and J. Urrutia Blondel in their Historia de la música en Chile (Santiago, 1974).
Musical life in Bolivia was the subject of two publications: N. F. Naranjo, La vida musical en La Paz, in La Paz en su Cuarto Centenario (La Paz, 1948),
and J. de Mesa, La música en Bolivia, in La Iglesia y el Patrimonio Cultural (La Paz, 1969).
Late nineteenth-century Argentine music is studied in great detail by V. Gesualdo in the second volume of his Historia de la música en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1961);
L. Ayestarán’s La música en el Uruguay (Montevideo, 1953) provides an excellent account of music in that country up to 1860.
S. Salgado updates that history in her Breve historia de la música eulta en el Uruguay (Montevideo, 1971).
The most informative sources for Brazilian music history of this period are L. H. Corrêa de Azevedo, 150 anos de música no Brasil, 1800–1950 (Rio de Janeiro, 1956);
his Relacão das óperas de autores brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro, 1938);
F. C. Lange, ‘A música erudita na regência e no império’, in História da civilização brasileira, ii/3, ed. S. Buarque de Holanda (São Paulo, 1967);
G. Béhague, The Beginnings of Musical Nationalism in Brazil (Detroit, 1971);
B. Kiefer, História da música brasileira, dos primórdio s ao início do século XX (Porto Alegre, 2/1977);
and V. Mariz, Historia da música no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 2/1983).
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Béhague, G. (1991). Latin America: Reflections and Reactions. In: Samson, J. (eds) The Late Romantic Era. Man & Music. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11300-2_12
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