From Tejano to Tango

Essays on Latin American Popular Music

Walter Aaron Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780815336402
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136536878
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Author of two books on Issac Albeniz, including Issac Albeniz: A Guide to Research (1998), Walter Aaron Clark has compiled thirteen essays that discuss the various aspects of Latin American music. The essays cover the social and political impact the music generated as well as the rhythmic development of the various genres. In this essential book, significant personalities, including Carmen Miranda, are discussed. The scope of the contributors is vast as divergent musical styles such as the Macarena dace craze, Bob Marley's reggae music and the seductive strains of the tango are analyzed.

Part I

Politics and Identity

Argentina and Nicaragua

1

The Popularized Gaucho Image as a Source of Argentine Classical Music,1880–1920

DEBORAH SCHWARTZ-KATES

Between 1880 and 1920 in the city of Buenos Aires, classical and popular music stood worlds apart. The classical milieu was dominated by a small but influential group of composers who identified with the European “high art” tradition. Out of necessity, this group came from the ranks of the elite because Argentina at the time lacked the infrastructure to support professional development of the fine arts. These composers scorned an emergent group of working-class musicians who grew up in Argentine slum regions known as the arrabal and who created popular forms such as the urban milonga and early tango. When the socially prominent writer Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) decried the tango as obscene and pornographic, he spoke for many members of the intellectual and artistic elite (Novati and Cuello 1980, 40). Yet, despite the seemingly unbridgeable gulf that separated classical and popular musical traditions, at a certain critical moment in their history, their paths intertwined.¹

This chapter focuses on this critical stylistic juncture, which occurred at the precise moment the popular and classical repertoires assumed definitive shape. Specifically, the chapter examines the earliest group of professionally trained classical composers, who appropriated symbolic resources derived from popular traditions to create a sense of argentinidad (or “Argentineness”) in their works. In previous studies, the majority of scholars have emphasized rural folk music as a primary source of Argentine national art music (Kuss 1976; Veniard 1986; Plesch 1998). My own writings have followed down this path by exploring the symbolic role that the gaucho (or native horseman) played in forging a distinctive national identity (Schwartz-Kates 1997 and 1999). The present chapter both supports and expands upon these findings by demonstrating how the gauchesca tradition proved inseparable from the urban popular milieu through which the rural horseman's folk culture was mediated.

The Musical Actors

The classical composers active between 1880 and 1920 came of age during a dynamic period in Argentine history. The country achieved unprecedented wealth as it emerged as a world exporter of leather, beef, wool, and grains. As the nation fulfilled its dreams of progress and prosperity, its creative artists sought to transform Buenos Aires, the capital city, into a magnificent cultural showplace. The composers of this generation perceived Europe (particularly Paris) as a model of artistic emulation. They therefore based their aesthetic ideals on external models, and, prompted by the desire to master an art largely defined in foreign terms, identified with the European classical tradition. Yet, in this age of self-conscious nation building, the composers also aimed to create something uniquely representative of their culture that could be understood alongside the prestigious foreign “masterworks” of the day. Out of these competing and contradictory cultural claims emerged the earliest art music of a definitively national character.

To express their veneration for foreign culture and overcome ostensible feelings of native backwardness, Argentine composers traveled to Europe, where they fulfilled the social expectations of their class and secured the technical foundations of their art.² Ironically, once these composers arrived on foreign soil, they encountered the doctrine of musical nationalism, which, by the late nineteenth century, had earned widespread currency throughout Europe and which prompted them to turn toward their own cultural heritage as a source of inspiration. The principal composers associated with this generation encountered European musical nationalism in various ways. Yet, by the time they returned to Buenos Aires, they identified with the unique musical resources of their nation and began writing in a distinctively Argentine style.

As the basis of their nationalist conception, these composers embraced the tradición gauchesca: a potent aesthetic movement that extolled the native horseman as the embodiment of the national essence. During this period, political statesmen, cultural architects, and intellectual leaders used the gaucho figure as the personification of the rich heartland of the nation, upon which its future prosperity was based. They endowed the native horseman with noble attributes such as courage, individualism, machismo, and independence, which they promoted as the basis of national values, traditions, and beliefs. Eloquent writers established the practice of idealizing the heroic lifestyle of the gaucho in first-rate works of Argentine literature. These literary figures set a valuable precedent for classical composers by showing how Argentine nationality in the arts could meaningfully be portrayed.

Urban Transmission

On the surface, it would appear that the gauchesca basis of Argentine classical music derived exclusively from rural sources. Yet, the urban transformation and popularization of this repertoire also formed a significant part of composers' nationalist representations. One reason for this development stemmed from the gaucho's changing position in Argentine society. During the late nineteenth century, a radical transformation of the countryside uprooted the native horseman's lifestyle on the plains. New technologies in refrigerating, preserving, and shipping meat allowed ranchers to reap handsome profits from the export of quality livestock products. They rejected previous methods of selling the hides of native animals and instead raised superior grades of cattle that commanded competitive prices. They therefore bred, selected, and branded their animals with care and protected them in pens enclosed with barbed-wire fencing. These changes led to the commercialization of the Argentine ranch (or estancia) and eliminated the open range. Fencing eradicated the traditional lifestyle of the gaucho by imprisoning him inside, or marginalizing him outside, the new borders.

The Argentine horseman now faced difficult choices as he was forced to adapt to a modern system that no longer valued his work. Sadly, many gauchos were unable to make the change and were forced to live on the margins of society, where they robbed and scavenged for food. Others remained on the estancia but were relegated to menial tasks, working as servile peons ruled by the overseer of the ranch. Still others migrated to the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where they found new employment in industries such as slaughterhouses, refrigeration plants, and meat-packing factories. Highly characteristic of the age were the transplanted gauchos or compadres who earned a living by traversing the borders between the countryside and the city. A typical occupation was that of a carretero, or wagon-driver, who transported commercial goods between rural regions and Buenos Aires. As he sold his wares in city plazas, train stations, and fruit markets, the carretero mingled with a new group of immigrants, who were also socially marginalized and economically displaced. Out of the resulting mixture between native and foreign, on the meeting ground between urban and rural, a syncretic process took place. Ultimately, it was the music product resulting from this cultural synthesis that classical composers associated with the gauchesca tradition.

New Performance Contexts

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, new performance contexts arose that facilitated the integration of rural and urban traditions. Many of these contexts involved spectacles and performers that moved from place to place, thus fostering the diffusion and intermixture of Argentine vernacular forms. Within these new contexts, musicians sought to intensify audience identification with their works by creating fresh styles, forms, and genres and by revitalizing traditional modes of expression that suited their artistic purposes. Both individually and in conjunction, these contexts thus fostered great innovation during the period. In particular, the professional payador, circus, and theater emerged as three central means of performance that influenced classical composers and their stylization of Argentine music.

The Professional Payador

Prior to the urbanization of Argentine rural life, the payador figured as a gaucho singer and guitarist, who improvised, composed, and memorized music. He was regarded as an essential member of traditional gaucho society, and no rural gathering was complete without him. The payador appeared as a musician in local fiestas and performed in pulperías (bars and stores), where anyone who sang could drink for free. There he played music for his own enjoyment, providing an accompaniment for dancing and improvising songs. The payador was most known for his improvised duels known as payadas, which were performed in competitions with other gauchos. These contests demonstrated his verbal dexterity, as he contrived clever poetic responses in the form of riddles, puns, and double entendres to counter, challenge, and defeat his opponents.

Beginning in the 1880s, a new type of musician emerged, still known as a payador, who affected a markedly urban style. Instead of singing exclusively at local gatherings, he performed throughout Argentina. He traveled by train, slept in comfortable hotels, and dressed in modern clothing. He was treated like a professional musician and reaped substantial economic benefit from his work. While his music still referred to old gaucho song types,it increasingly emphasized the new styles of the day.The urban payador helped transmit these musical changes because he took the old gaucho repertoire out of the countryside and brought it into the city, which led to the urbanization of rural forms. Later he reversed this process by reintroducing the urbanized repertoire back into provincial regions, where it invigorated the existing musical culture. In addition to his activities as a solo singer, the professional payador appeared in popular entertainments such as the circus and theater.

The Circus

The circo criollo,³ or native circus, emerged as another central context that contributed to the popularization of rural forms. It drew extensively upon Argentine characteristics and placed special emphasis on the gaucho. Fostered by an emergent spirit of Romanticism and its emphasis on popular values, the circo criollo retained close ties to the masses. While other musical settings (such as the urban salon) appealed exclusively to the elite, the circus was for everyone. It maintained a strong core of popular support, and, unlike the theater, which was concentrated in the cities, circulated widely throughout the interior of the nation. Because of its broad range of appeal, the circo criollo proved invaluable in transmitting new forms of music throughout Argentina.

The earliest national circuses, which began in the late eighteenth century, differed little from their foreign counterparts. They were simple and modest affairs that enterta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I Politics and Identity: Argentina and Nicaragua
• II Locality and Interlocality: North America and Cuba
• III Globalization and Mass Mediation: Brazil and Peru
• Contributors
• Index