Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review

En este artículo muestro cómo en la década de 1940 del siglo pasado una generación de estudiosos trató de liberar a la llamada música incaica de las connotaciones femeninas que le habían sido atribuidas debido a su propensión al modo menor y a su calidad de música conquistada. Mediante una revisión de la obra del musicólogo ecuatoriano Segundo Luis Moreno (1949, 1957) y del musicólogo peruano Policarpo Caballero Farfán (1946, 1988) discuto las estrategias urdidas por una corriente indigenista y nacionalista para construir una imagen viril y corajuda de la música incaica acorde con un nuevo ideal del indio surgido en la primera mitad del siglo XX, que lo presentaba como un ser indómito y rebelde.

En este estudio se analiza de manera global y crítica la recepción y circulación de las principales fuentes con música instrumental -sobre todo para tecla- de compositores que trabajaron en instituciones valencianas entre los siglos XVIII y XIX. Asimismo, se presentan algunas poco conocidas -localizadas fundamentalmente en el Real Colegio Seminario de Corpus Christi de Valencia- y se formulan hipótesis sobre su procedencia. Estas ponen de manifiesto la importancia de las instituciones periféricas y sus músicos y las amplias y diversas redes de conexión. Algunos de los manuscritos estudiados son misceláneos y presentan fugas, pasos, preludios, recercadas, salmodias, sonatas y versos junto a obras vocales. Las fuentes contienen piezas de compositores casi desconocidos que trabajaron en tierras levantinas y también anónimas. Varias obras son de compositores foráneos, casi todos vinculados a la Capilla Real de Madrid y a la catedral de Tortosa. Se incluyen otras fuentes poco conocidas conservadas en los archivos locales de las iglesias de Morella y Villarreal en Castellón, así como las escasas noticias disponibles sobre música de cámara con el fin de presentar una panorámica general sobre la música instrumental del período.

Between 1920 and 1936, Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and his friend and folk-music pupil    Federico García Lorca, Spanish poet and playwright, wrote many of their best-known works, all affected by the other artist.  The many interconnections between them exceeded the printing space available to the author for his 2014 book on those links.  The present article puts those silenced finds into print for the first time.  Falla´s 1908 piece “Andaluza” attempts to express the soul of Andalusia by imitating rhythms, modalities, melodies, adornments, and folk cadences of that southern Spanish region.  The work, together with others by Falla, inspires at least two poems and two poetic dialogues by Lorca: the two “Rider's Songs” from the 1924 anthology Canciones or Songs and two short allegorical dialogues of 1925 gathered into Poema del Cante Jondo or Poem of Deep Song.  While all these analogies between Falla's music and Lorca´s poetry center around a variety of male Andalusian archetypes, still other likenesses between the two artists show up in Falla´s compositions examining feminine innocence and the two Lorca poems “Two Girls,” two studies on Andalusian woman's purity from Poem of Deep Song.

From the appearance of sound film in the late 1920s to the spread of media outlets such as television and personal computers to today’s video-enabled mobile phones, the immediacy of audiovisual culture has changed the way people navigate and manipulate content. Visual images often instinctively induce aural and musical associations, and vice versa. Yet musical analysis in audiovisual culture often presumes the constraint of the visual on the musical (i.e., the primacy of a visual product over its accompanying music). In this paper, I take a diverging approach. I present Roberto Sierra’s Sch. as a case study for the effects of multimedia technology in a twenty-first-century composer’s creative process and product, which conjures up the imagination in historical and contemporary ways. This investigation complements research in music analysis, film music, and music pedagogy in relation to audiovisual culture by highlighting the mutually influential effects of musical and visual cultures.

In response to the news of a murdered Indian chief around 1980, Marlos Nobre composed Yanománi, op. 47 as a symbol to the suffering of an indigenous nation facing annihilation. With this work, Nobre pioneered an advocacy on behalf of the Yanomami through art, at a time when only international attention could potentially change their situation. Yet, as a cultural artifact, this work builds upon a history of stereotypical images of the índio brasileiro (Native Brazilian) in the arts, literature, and music, which ranges from representations of the exotic and noble savage to a figure that poses a threat to national security.

As I demonstrate, Nobre represents an imagined rendering of the Yanomami’s ritual of death within a musical language that, while emulating “native” sounds, is built upon avant-garde techniques of Western music. As such, it emphasizes the sense of otherness of the Brazilian Indians. Indeed, while the indigenous words in the lyrics are hardly understood, the Portuguese words are clear: “Mata cacique” (kill the Indian chief). Ultimately, Yanománi joins the work of anthropologists and other artists in bringing international attention to the negligence and criminal acts against the indigenous communities in Brazil.