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The Latin American centennial celebrations of independence (ca.1909-1925) constituted a key moment in the consolidation of national symbols and emblems, while also producing a renewed focus on transnational affinities that generated a series of discourses about continental unity. At the same
time, a boom in archaeological explorations, within a general climate of scientific positivism provided Latin Americans with new information about their grandiose former civilizations, such as the Inca and the Aztec, which some argued were comparable to ancient Greek and Egyptian cultures. These
discourses were at first political, before transitioning to the cultural sphere. As a result, artists and particularly musicians began to move away from European techniques and themes, to produce a distinctive and self-consciously Latin American art. In Inca Music Reimagined author Vera Wolkowicz explores Inca discourses in particular as a source for the creation of national and continental art music during the first decades of the twentieth century, concentrating on operas by composers from Peru, Ecuador and Argentina. To understand this
process, Wolkowicz analyzes early twentieth-century writings on Inca music and its origins and describes how certain composers transposed Inca techniques into their own works, and how this music was perceived by local audiences. Ultimately, she argues that the turn to Inca culture and music in the
hopes of constructing a sense of national unity could only succeed within particular intellectual circles, and that the idea that the inspiration of the Inca could produce a music of America would remain utopian.
Sommario
- List of Figures
- List of Musical Examples
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction - Indigenous musical heritage and Latin American art music
- 1. Shaping a continental identity: race, nations, civilizations, utopia, and the arts
- 2. "We are the Incas" Discussing Indigenism in national musical discourse in Peru
- 3. To be Inca or not to be Inca? Building Ecuador's musical past
- 4. Argentina and the appropriation of the Inca past?
- 5. The Incas go to the opera?
- Epilogue - Art music and the Incas: past and present
- Bibliography
- List of journals and newspapers consulted
- Index
Info autore
Vera Wolkowicz holds a PhD in Music from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on Latin American musical nationalisms during the first decades of the twentieth century, and Italian opera in mid-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. She has been recently awarded an H2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship at the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She is the author of Música de América. Estudio preliminar y edición crítica (2012) and has co-edited the unpublished scores of Argentine composer Carlos Guastavino (1912-2000).
Riassunto
In Inca Music Reimagined, author Vera Wolkowicz argues that Peruvian, Ecuadorian, and Argentine composers in the early twentieth century consciously featured indigenous signifiers in their operas in order to produce a self-consciously Latin American art.
Testo aggiuntivo
Inca Music Reimagined explores how Latin American musicians brought ideas of Incan music into their twentieth-century modernist compositions...the project is an engaging one, and a much-needed contribution to the field of historical music studies. The book makes one think about Latin America as an imaginary, and the ways in which musical experimentation might draw on imaginaries in new, inventive ways.
