Audible Geographies in Latin America

Sounds of Race and Place

Dylon Lamar Robbins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030105587
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Audible Geographies in Latin America examines the audibility of place as a racialized phenomenon. It argues that place is not just a geographical or political notion, but also a sensorial one, shaped by the specific profile of the senses engaged through different media. Through a series of cases, the book examines racialized listening criteria and practices in the formation of ideas about place at exemplary moments between the 1890s and the 1960s. Through a discussion of Louis Moreau Gottschalk's last concerts in Rio de Janeiro, and a contemporary sound installation involving telegraphs by Otávio Schipper and Sérgio Krakowski, Chapter 1 proposes a link between a sensorial economy and a political economy for which the racialized and commodified body serves as an essential feature of its operation. Chapter 2 analyzes resonance as a racialized concept through an examination of phonograph demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro and research on dancing manias and hypnosis in Salvador da Bahia in the 1890s. Chapter 3 studies voice and speech as racialized movements, informed by criminology and the proscriptive norms defining "white" Spanish in Cuba. Chapter 4 unpacks conflicting listening criteria for an optics of blackness in "national" sounds, developed according to a gendered set of premises that moved freely between diaspora and empire, national territory and the fraught politics of recorded versus performed music in the early 1930s. Chapter 5, in the context of Cuban Revolutionary cinema of the 1960s, explores the different facets of noise—both as a racialized and socially relevant sense of sound and as a feature and consequence of different reproduction and transmission technologies. Overall, the book argues that these and related instances reveal how sound and listening have played more prominent roles than previously acknowledged in place-making in the specific multi-ethnic, colonial contexts characterized by diasporic populations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

© The Author(s) 2019

D. L. RobbinsAudible Geographies in Latin Americahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10558-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Notes for an Audible Geography

Dylon Lamar Robbins¹

(1)

Department of Spanish and Portuguese/Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), New York University, New York, NY, USA

Dylon Lamar Robbins

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

There is an ecology of sound that is subject to an anthropology of noise.

—José Miguel Wisnik, O som e o sentido: uma outra história das músicas ¹

And I opened my eyes in the boat, upon the song of the sea. The sea was singing. We set out from the Cape, with storm clouds and heavy winds, at ten at night; and now, at dawn, the sea is singing. The skipper straightens up and listens carefully, with one hand on the plank and another on his heart: the helmsman, leaves the rudder halfway: “That’s nice”: “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in this world”: “I’ve only heard something that beautiful two other times in all my life.” And then he laughs: the vaudous, the Haitian sorcerers, will know what that is: today is the day of a vaudou dance at the bottom of the sea, and the men of the earth will now know: sorcerers are casting their spells. The slow music , vast and harmonious, is like the unified sound of a tumultuous orchestra of platinum bells. The resonant echo vibrates sure and true. The body feels as if it were clothed in music . The sea sang for an hour,—more than an hour.—The boat pitches to and fro, en route to Montecristi.

—José Martí , “Diario de Montecristi a Cabo Haitiano” ²

Sonorous Tempest

The pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869) fell ill during his farewell concert in Rio de Janeiro on November 25, 1869. He had traversed a hemispheric itinerary by this juncture, one of several connecting San Francisco to Panamá, Perú to the West Indies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and St. Thomas to New York, to Washington, and to his native New Orleans. Speaking first French, then English, Italian, and Spanish, he was the honored guest of presidents and monarchs, social organizations and writers’ circles, and he had a reputation for virtuosic performance, prolific and copious composition, and a drive toward dissipation, disquiet, and overexertion. He was a Southerner, yet an abolitionist, while his Jewish father, was a merchant and sometimes slave trader. His francophone mother’s family had come to the Mississippi Delta from Haiti [Saint-Domingue] decades before his birth. Those that did not flee the “insurrection,” he would report, “were all massacred,” save his grandmother and great-grandfather, the Count de Bruslé, who would evade capture, incredibly, dressed in the guise of his slave “an old mulattress ‘woudou,’” only to die, shortly after, fighting with “the colonial troops.” He would ask, moreover, “what cause,” in light of “the grand form of Toussaint Louverture,” was “more legitimate than that of [the enslaved] in their agony rising in one grand effort to reconquer their unacknowledged rights and their rank in humanity?” ³ Nonetheless, the very sound of the word “Saint-Domingue,” had the force to muster in him overpoweringly “somber memories” and “melancholy,” carried by the voice of his grandmother in her “recitals” of the “terrible” events there while gathered around the fireplace of his childhood home on Rampart St in New Orleans. ⁴ Yet it would be in other latitudes, in Rio, before a large audience at the Theatro Lyrico Fluminense, dressed in a white tie and tails, that his pale and sickly body, “subjected to a series of syncopes,” would crumple at the piano just a few bars into Tremolo, the second piece of his program. ⁵ The first piece that evening, in an ironic anticipation of the fate that would agonizingly befall him in a matter of weeks, had been his composition, Morte!.

Only a few evenings before, his Concerto monstro had premiered on that very stage. It was to be his grand departure from Rio de Janeiro after a warm and personal reception by both the Imperial family and the Republican bourgeoisie (see Fig. 1.1). It was an ambitious production with an elaborate set including Brazilian and American pavilions and illuminated by suspended chains of gaslights specially installed for the occasion. ⁶ The 650 musicians were gathered from the theater’s standing orchestra, private ensembles, a select group of teachers, and the musical regiments of the different branches of the Brazilian military, the rest of which was engaged at that very moment in a devastating and unpopular war in Paraguay. ⁷ He had been working intensely in the months prior composing and arranging for the concert, and rehearsing the different groups of musicians for a three-part program including his symphony La nuit des Tropiques among a number of other pieces. One journalist would describe their occupying the entire breadth and depth of the stage, including “a mass of drums” and military bands with their “brilliant uniforms lending an even greater shine to the compact mass of men.” ⁸ The concert, he would add, was a “sonorous tempest” reigned over by the “musical genius,” who would conduct the “army of musicians.” ⁹ The finale sounded to the journalist like the din of “battle,” in which could be heard “the march and formation of battalions, the screams of the wounded, and combat accompanied by actual musket and artillery fire,” a reference, no doubt, to the discharge of a cannon during the performance. ¹⁰ If this and the other period responses are a fair indication, then it was the sonic analogue of the war underway near the southern border rendered in what was perceived by the public as the latest of tendencies in musical aesthetics, and all staged according to a masculinist nationalism of conquest and sacrifice. It was also a more transparently paradoxical presentation. It was, in this regard, a grandiose staging of militarist, Republican nationalism , sponsored by a monarch. It was a celebration of Brazilian nationalism, furthermore, presided over by—his unique musical sense notwithstanding—a composer from the United States. It was produced by a vocal abolitionist in, by 1869, one of the few remaining slaveholding nations in the hemisphere. And unlike the similarly elaborate performances held ten years earlier in Havana’s Gran Teatro Tacón, there is no evidence in the period descriptions of the Brazilian spectacle that Gottschalk had showcased any of the Afro-diasporic musical traditions or instruments that he almost certainly heard during his nearly six months in Rio de Janeiro —nearly half of whose residents were enslaved according to a register from only two decades prior. ¹¹ He was renowned, after all, for a diverse repertoire of compositions that were infused with a rhythmic vocabulary of Central and West African origin that he knew from his childhood in Southern Louisiana, and his wide-ranging travels throughout the Americas. The second movement of his La nuit des Tropiques is a particularly obvious example of his dialogue with these traditions, and yet it is noteworthy that there is no mention of it in the numerous period reviews of the Concerto monstro , despite its having been featured there. They were sounds, presumably, that were either too unexceptional to comment despite their being relevant to reviews of his earlier concerts in Rio, or they were sounds, on the other hand, whose presence in any recollection of this concert would have clashed with the staging and the sounding of the state, including, among other pieces, an elaborate orchestration of the Brazilian national anthem, the Grande fantasia triunfal (Variations on the Brazilian National Anthem). ¹² Perhaps they were sounds whose omission would have been necessary to impart the projected “racelessness” of the modernity being showcased. Their missing register in the period reception of the concert signals an important concern with analyzing a performance practice through a number of mediated registers, while appealing to a central distinction involving sound and its perception through listening that carries implications well beyond the context of music . It is a reminder of the essentially relational character of sound, of the inevitable implication of a listener, and of the influence of a greater totality in its reception and cognition that implicates a blend of other senses according to a historically inflected matrix.

Fig. 1.1

Gottschalk’s Concerto monstro, Jornal do Commercio of November 24, 1869

Audible Geographies is, broadly speaking, an examination of instances like this one. It is not, to be clear, an examination or analysis of musical genres or form, nor organized around musicians and performers or the other reception contexts implied by Gottschalk’s concerts throughout the Americas. My concern here, alternatively, is with listeners like Gottschalk, just as it is with listeners like the anonymous journalist who heard a war in the sounds of strings and brass, woodwinds and percussion, while not hearing those other shards of sound organized according to an Afro-diasporic temporal rationale that were likely sounded at different moments there. It explores the audibility of place as a racialized phenomenon, and it is an inquiry into the latent logic of these procedures and thus dialogues with work in African-American and American studies concerned with the audibility of difference, while listening for the different tenors of their articulations in other languages. ¹³ It is a foray into assorted contexts in which an attention to sound would participate in shaping not only processes of racialization, but also their positions in informing notions of place . As Steven Feld would suggest with respect to a very different context than the ones addressed here, “the ways in which sound is central to making sense, to knowing, [and] to experiential truth” are “particularly relevant to understanding the interplay of sound and felt balance in the sense and sensuality of emplacement, of making place .” ¹⁴ Ana María Ochoa has asked related questions of different listeners in circumstances similar to those under consideration here, and with an exceptional care for thinking through the implications of listening across boundaries—whether national or ethnic, social or regional. ¹⁵ This is part of a larger critique involving a greater sensorial range of a central problem set in Latin Am...