Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review

Considering fin-de-siècle symbolism and its ideological landscape as a reaction against naturalism in the arts and against positivism in philosophy, this article seeks to examine the technical and conceptual features present in two pieces of contemporary vocal chamber music by Ruy Coelho (1889-1986). The examined works, 6 Kacides Mauresques — a cycle, apparently inspired by 10^th-century Iberian Arabic poetry translated into French by Franz Toussaint and published in Mercure de France in 1909 — and Sur la jetée d’Alexandrie — a piece composed after an excerpt from Aphrodite, a novel by Pierre Louÿs published in 1896 — were probably composed in the early 1910s. Given this historical context, the influence of Claude-Achille Debussy (specifically his Trois chansons de Bilitis) will be evaluated — particularly in the relation between the text and music, and in its erotic dimension.

This article addresses the development of the violin in eighteenth-century Spain from an esthetic point of view. This was a complex history, full of nuances and dramatic turns, until the instrument finally opened up to the Italian way. First we analyze its Iberian background in parallel with contemporaneous developments in other countries. Likewise, we analyze the reasons for the slow acceptance of purely instrumental music and the continued use of the instrument in Church services. These discussions are based on aesthetic controversies between theorists, composers and instrumentalists. We consider in more detail, the Aposento Anticrítico, by Francisco Corominas, as an aesthetic reference book in the defense of the use of the violin in the cathedrals and churches of eighteenth-century Spanish. Parallel to this, we engage on a discursive controversy emanating from the contrariety of underestimating the instrument, and in turn, accepting the music of Corelli and the Italian masters. An aesthetic diatribe that persists in the Iberian Peninsula until the end of the century of lights.

En 1989, en un artículo de la Revista Patagónica, el investigador argentino  Rubén Pérez Bugallo refuta la afirmación del musicólogo chileno Luis Merino, respecto de la existencia de cualquier tipo de flauta en el área cultural  fueguina/patagónica. Esta afirmación del Dr. Merino, aparece en el número 128 de la Revista Musical Chilena (1974). La tesis de Merino provenía de referencias etnohistóricas como la de Musters, que en su Vida entre patagones, dice haber observado la ejecución de una flauta vertical durante una bacanal tehuelche. Los argumentos de Pérez Bugallo, en contra de la existencia de la flauta fueguina eran sólidos, la referencia de Musters era controversial. A su vez, las réplicas de flautas fueguinas/patagónicas de los museos de Río Gallegos y Mar del Plata, no fueron producidas a partir de un modelo original, hecho que este investigador pudo comprobar por sí mismo. Sin embargo, la aparición de una flauta de tres agujeros, encontrada en la bahía de San Gregorio, en el Estrecho de Magallanes, y actualmente conservada en el Instituto de la Patagonia de la ciudad de Punta Arenas, refuta a su vez la tesis de Pérez Bugallo, demuestra que la hipótesis del Dr. Merino era correcta y presenta a la comunidad científica un aerófono fueguino por primera vez en la historia de la musicología mundial, un instrumento muchas veces mencionado como posible por Hornbostel, Gusinde y Grebe, pero jamás confirmado hasta ahora.