Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDecentring Topic Theory: Musical Topics and Rhetorics of Identity in Latin American Art Music(Faculdade de Ciencias Sociais e Humanas - Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2017)The article, which functions as an introduction of the dossier of the same name, argues that both mainstream (European) and vernacular topics play equally important roles in the construction of meaning in Latin American art music. It also suggests the existence of Latin American "topics of Europe", i.e., musical configurations that--to Latin Americans--may signify "Europe". Offers a brief critique of the use of "musical nationalism" as a historiographical category when applied to the Latin American case. It suggests that studying the use, function and semantic status of European musical topics and the strategies of their adoption, adaptation and re-signification in Latin American art music is as relevant to our understanding of this music as the use of vernacular topics and the establishment of local topical universes.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Learned Style in Argentine Music: Topic Simultaneity and Rhetorics of Identity in the Work of Carlos Guastavino(Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2017)This article examines the interplay of European and Argentine vernacular topics in two works by Carlos Guastavino: ‘Un domingo de mañana’ (A Sunday Morning), a three-part fugue from his Diez preludios for piano (1952) that combines the learned style with the topic of the children’s song, and the fourth movement—‘Fuga y final’—of his Sonata for piano in C sharp minor (1946), whose subject uses the topic of a South American folk dance and song called cueca. The learned style is not only present through the fugal procedure, but also by the use of a specific subtopic, briefly presented here, that connects these works to the Baroque organ tradition and its nineteenth-century reception in piano music. Against the essentialist view that privileges the identification of the so-called “folk idioms” in the study of Latin American art music, the article aims to emphasise the fact that European topics are as important as vernacular ones in the construction of the musical rhetoric of Argentine identity.
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ItemThe Cultural Biography of a Music Periodical: Boletín Musical (Buenos Aires, 1837)(Brepols Publishers, 2017)This chapter offers a "cultural biography" of Boletín Musical, a periodical published in Buenos Aires in 1837, which survives in only one, nearly-complete, copy. Following Appadurai’s and Kopytoff's conceptualisation of the "social life of things", which considers that the meanings of an object are intrinsically related to the different cultural values bestowed on it at specific points in its "biography", I explore the many lives of this periodical, how it has been imagined and construed as it passed through various hands from its original publication until the present. Spanning the Boletín's nearly 180 years of history, this exploration reviews its appearance in the complex political context of the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas; its life as a bibliographic rarity and collectors’ item from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries; its role as an elusive source for the history of Argentine music during the second half of the twentieth century, leading to its facsimile edition at the beginning of the twenty-first; and its recent role in commemorations and performances of Argentine history. Undertaking the cultural biography of a periodical, I propose, helps uncover the multiple regimes of value at play at different historical junctures and allows us to perceive the social and cultural dimensions of the meanings it accrued throughout its history. Thus, the periodical illuminates its context (or, more properly, contexts), rather than the other way round.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTeoría, musicología y Antón Pirulero. (Rondó en varias secciones)(Asociación Argentina de Musicología, 2016)In light of the numerous reports on the death of theory and the alleged arrival of a post-theoretical era, I review some of the key moments in the history of the debate around the so-called theoretical turn in the humanities, including its reception by musicology. I examine the body of scholarly literature that thematizes the idea of an “after theory”–whether to celebrate or resist it–and identify five recurring warnings proceeding from both the critical voices raised against theory and theory’s own self criticism. Against this background, I propose a reflection on our engagement with theory in the everyday practice of the discipline. I use the nursery rhyme Antón Pirulero as a ritornello to frame the different “episodes” through which the text perambulates. Even though it might seem so, this choice is neither casual nor flippant. The history of the Antón Pirulero in Hispanic-American culture from the 17th century onwards, which I explore towards the end, provides the key to the criticism put forward in the article.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTopics of Spanishness in Tango Scenes. A Postcolonial Reading of Mainstream Film(Center for Iberian and Latin American Music, 2013)