Introduction to the Special Issue on Musical Trajectories between Latin America and Europe, 1970–2000

Since its early development during the first half of the twentieth century, Latin American musicology has privileged national narratives over processes of transfer. Paradoxically, following models inherited from Central Europe, the first impulse for musicological research came from the imperative of identifying composers, musical styles, and schools that could be connected to the construction of a national identity, dissociating these histories from colonial European heritage. Through this approach, transnational biographies or musical genres have tended to stay invisible or were even regarded as problematic objects for a nation-centred categorization.¹ From the perspective of European musicology, studies on Latin American music and on the presence of Latin Americans within the European music scene are still marginalized.² While entering the third decade of the twenty-first century, as topics connected to cultural mobility, migration, transfer processes, and circulation have taken on a more prominent role within the humanities – also changing the methodologies and type of possible intellectual exchange within the academic field itself – research projects devoted to processes of musical transfer between Latin America and Europe have begun to increase, focusing on the interactions between both cultural spaces from a wide variety of perspectives.³

Although the power structures that have historically shaped the relationship between Latin America and Europe cannot be ignored, in the twenty-first century a dialectic of ‘center and periphery’ should not define the way exchanges between Latin American and European musicologists are understood. This special issue is the result of a dialogue between musicologists working in Latin America and Europe, which has allowed researchers to explore differences, confront and complement perspectives on similar objects of study, and share sources and methodological approaches. To enable this kind of transnational dialogue, the research network ‘Trayectorias: Music between Latin America and Europe’ was established in 2014. Composed of scholars residing in European and Latin American countries, the research network has organized three international conferences, which have taken place alternatively in Latin America and Europe (Rio de Janeiro 2015; Berlin 2017; Santiago de Chile 2019).⁴

Trayectoria (trajectory) is a polysemic word. It can allude to life paths of persons, institutions, or social groups, and it can also refer to the path described by a body in movement, alluding to the circulation of persons or objects. In meteorology, trayectoria is the course followed by a hurricane or cyclone.⁵ Of course, this meaning can be metaphorically invoked to describe the history of the twentieth century, a period marked by several cultural–political ‘hurricanes’ that motivated the migration of people from Europe to Latin America and the other way around. The first two conferences and the first publication of the research network ‘Trayectorias’ were centred in the early post-war period (1945–70),⁶ and included research on the role of institutions devoted to cultural and musical exchange, the circulation of musicians and music through music festivals and concert tours, and individual biographies – especially focusing on European migrants who settled in Latin America escaping the Spanish Civil War and Nazism.

The articles in this special issue were first discussed at the network's Third International Conference, held in Santiago de Chile in March 2019. The meeting was devoted to the last three decades of the twentieth century,⁷ a period characterized by an increasing circulation of musicians, musical genres, and musical discourses between Latin America and Europe. Both the magnetic power of communism and socialism and the development of several military dictatorships drew attention to Latin American politics and culture among European audiences, while political exile and economic crises resulted in the emigration of numerous Latin American musicians to Europe. The period, which spanned the years 1970 to 2000, was also shaped by the globalization of the music industry, which opened new spaces and media for the reception of music, and was highly relevant for youth musical subcultures, resulting in the development of new music genres, such as electronic music and techno. Within this context, this special issue is a continuation of the debates started at the conference, which made the members of the network ‘Trayectorias’ aware of similarities and differences, transnational developments, and desiderata for new research projects.

The articles present different points of intersection. Concerning the contents, the first part is devoted to contemporary art music, while the second one discusses processes of transfer in traditional and popular music. Research topics, such as the Cursos Latinoamericanos de Música Contemporánea, European festivals that focus on Latin American music, or the paths and musical production of Latin American composers living in Europe, represent a fluid transit between different musical traditions. The theoretical approaches of the authors are diverse, taking the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall, Bruno Latour, and others authors well known in European and Anglo-American academia, as well as ideas and theories developed by Latin American scholars such as Rogério Haesbaert and Néstor García Canclini. Regardless of the wide theoretical spectrum, this scholarship shares a common interest in overcoming simplified hegemonic representations of the relationship between Latin America and Europe. A central concern is avoiding or critically questioning dichotomies such as ‘original/copy’, privileging instead a focus on processes of mutual exchange, appropriation, translation, and transformation of musical artefacts and meanings.

In their contributions, Iván César Morales and Martin Liut discuss the cases of Cuban and Argentinean composers living in Europe and their strategies to adapt to different European music scenes by negotiating between integration and contested notions of otherness. As seen in both articles, it was through institutional affiliation that Latin American composers were able to integrate to these scenes. As Liut suggests, in Paris, these transitions were enabled by the composers’ affiliations with prestigious institutions such as the IRCAM or the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. Composers working in other fields, such as the popular music scene, had to develop different strategies and reinvent themselves anew in the French capital. Iván César Morales's article focuses on Cuban composers who left their country in the 1990s. Morales highlights that cases such as Leo Brouwer's, a well-established composer from the older generation who was appointed conductor of the Orquesta de Córdoba in Spain, are very different from those of younger composers such as Eduardo Morales-Caso, Keyla Orozco, and Louis Aguirre. In Brouwer's case, the appointment was made possible due to the political affinities between the Cuban regime and the municipality of Córdoba; in the case of Morales-Caso, Orozco, and Aguirre, they had to develop different strategies to adapt and establish meaningful intercultural dialogues with composers and audiences in their new scene. Morales did it by invoking a shared Spanish heritage; Orozco preferred to address issues of otherness through irony; while Aguirre decided to embrace the spiritual heritage of Afro-Cuban religiosity.

The articles by Omar Corrado and Dörte Schmidt are presented almost like testimonials since they both write about music scenes they were part of in their youth. Corrado writes about the European composers who were invited to teach at the influential Cursos Latinoamericanos de Música Contemporánea (1971–89), an itinerant series of workshops that was hosted by different Latin American countries each year and in which he was an active participant in 1974 and 1977. As a forum consciously oriented to the development of Latin American discourses on contemporary (and popular) music, the importance of the presence of European composers and lecturers was twofold. On the one hand, they offered new aesthetic and technical perspectives to a young generation of Latin American composers hungry for new knowledge and ideas; on the other hand, they also came in contact with unique Latin American innovations that ultimately influenced their own creative processes. Schmidt's article complements Corrado's perspective by exploring the presence of Latin American composers at a variety of institutional events promoted by the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), including the International Summer Courses for Contemporary Music in Darmstadt, the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme, the Berlin Festival Weeks and the Horizonte Festival in Berlin. Schmidt discusses the cultural–political goals that motivated FRG governmental programmes to support Latin American music. Following on Corrado's and Schmidt's exploration of cultural diplomacy and independent music festivals, my contribution to the special issue studies the relationship between Anacrusa, a Chilean association devoted to the promotion of contemporary art music, and the Goethe-Institute Santiago during the Chilean military dictatorship. My work focuses on how music from the Chilean exile circulated in Chile at this politically contested time, due to West German cultural diplomacy efforts.

The articles by Stefano Gavagnin and Christina Richter-Ibáñez centre on practices and strategies of appropriation of Latin American music by Europeans, especially in the case of Nueva Canción, a leftist musical movement characterized by a pan-Latin American attitude that is reflected in works that combine instruments and genres from different Latin American countries. Nueva Canción began spreading throughout Europe via leftist political events in the early 1960s but it reached its apogee in the 1970s with the forced European exile of many musicians who had been central in the development of the movement. Although Richter-Ibáñez discusses the reception of Nueva Canción in both the FRG and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), she pays special attention to how the lyrics of many of these songs were translated into German in the GDR. Concentrating on the work of singer-songwriter Gerhard Schöne and his adoption of songs by Violeta Parra and Atahualpa Yupanqui, Richter-Ibáñez shows that because translation is embedded in the general cultural and political context of the time, it may give new signification to both music and lyrics. Instead of simply pushing a biased political agenda, Schöne's versions emphasize a broader message about humanity and freedom that resonates beyond dogmatic political ideologies. Subsequently, Gavagnin's article studies the appropriation of Andean music in Italy since the 1970s. Gavagnin explores how Italian musicians received and appropriated Andean music through recordings and personal contacts with Latin American musicians living in Italy – such as the members of Inti-Illimani. Gavagnin argues that these exchanges deeply influenced the sense of identity of these Italian musicians, to the point that they, paradoxically, became part of a musical scene that had first fascinated them for its otherness. Finally, Matthias Pasdzierny's contribution deals with the collaboration of Chilean and German musicians in the founding years of German techno. Children of Chilean exiles who were born in Germany have played an important role within the local techno scene, often acting as a bridge between German and Chilean scenes, as in the case of the 1994 Arica Eclipse Rave. Pasdzierny argues that techno was the musical language chosen by a young generation of Chilean-Germans in their search for a musical identity that could differentiate their parents for whom Nueva Canción was an identitarian banner.

The many points of intersection that readers will find among the articles in this special issue could be seen as opportunities for further research on the transnational and transatlantic dialogues between Latin American and European musicians and music scenes. Notions such as identity, otherness, (self)exoticization, or multiple identities, which are pervasive in the musics and musicians studied here, guide the study of how musicians and composers integrate to new cultural contexts, and establish meaningful exchanges with local actors. This is valid for the European trajectories of Latin American composers and musicians as well as for the European adoption of Latin American ideas and practices. Another important thread in these articles is the exploration of networks of institutions connected to the political Left, including the international network of the Communist parties that enabled or facilitated the establishment of exiled Latin American musicians and composers in Europe. This network, which was also connected to festivals, music labels, and publication projects related to Latin American solidarity and political resistance, offers an object of study full of potential for further research about transnational connections between Latin America and Europe. Many of the practices, experiences, and topics discussed in these articles could also profit from a methodological triangulation that articulated the United States (as in the case of the relationships between Latin America and West Germany) or the Soviet Union (as in the case of the relationships between Latin America and the GDR), since the trajectory of the Cold War can be read as a subtext informing most of the cases studied in these articles. These discussions must continue and should welcome researchers from other latitudes, whose contributions would inevitably enrich the conversation. Although none of the authors featured in this special issue are native English speakers, we embrace the possibility of publishing in this language as a way to further encourage academic dialogue within musicological debate. In this sense, one unexpected result of this project was the challenge of mediating between different academic and writing cultures, which made for another dimension of cultural transfer both challenging and enriching. For this enterprise, we are thankful to the editors Pauline Fairclough and Alejandro L. Madrid for their generous support, to Christina Azahar for her detailed editorial corrections of the entire special ussue, to Malena Kuss, who carefully translated Iván César Morales's article, and to Emma Gleeman and Jacob Rekedal for their editorial corrections of Omar Corrado's and Dörte Schmidt's drafts respectively.