Musical Frontiers in Martín Fierro

Abstract

José Hernández’s El gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) and its sequel, La vuelta de Martín Fierro (1879) (Hernández 1967 ed.), is poetry that tells a tale of frontiers—frontiers that include not only the unsettled Argentine pampas but also the unknown expanses that lay beyond the pale of shifting artistic, social, and scientific boundaries. In the nineteenth century, Latin American works of frontier fiction dealt in a variety of ways with space, newness, and the contiguity and conflict between groups, but Martín Fierro is remarkable because it frames the struggle of frontiers in terms of musical contact. Fictional music makers and listeners explore geographical and conceptual terrain, and struggle to lay rightful claim to them. It is a struggle that is part and parcel of the constitution of national culture, an undertaking that posed a particular set of problems to countries that had long been considered “‘backward peripheries,’ a mixture of ‘promised land’ … and irreducible ‘barbarism.’“ (Perus 1994: 48)