The Latin-American premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1928 in Buenos Aires caused a sensation, and in subsequent years the work was regularly performed across much of the continent. The work also found many imitators, but Latin-American composers understood the work differently from their peers elsewhere. Whereas in Europe and North America, The Rite’s avowed primitivism appeared mostly as a lurid but non-specific signifier of otherness, composers such as Alberto Ginastera and Heitor Villa-Lobos drew direct parallels between Stravinsky’s paganism and indigenismo, the evocation of the continent’s pre-Columbian past and indigenous heritage. In a move characteristic of settler colonialism, what they found in Stravinsky’s work was not a European import but an Asiatic, pre-Christian legacy that could act as a foundation for an indigenous form of musical modernism beyond Eurocentric models. By contrast, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier associated Stravinsky’s Scythians with the descendants of the Yoruba, the largest group of enslaved Africans in Cuba. In this way, the chapter analyses transnational networks and entanglements between Russia, Europe and several Latin-American countries.

Chapter 4 examines Aaron Copland’s Short Symphony (1931–3) in the context of Copland’s friendship with Mexican composer and conductor Carlos Chávez. Short Symphony was partly written in Mexico. Chávez suggested a title for the work, ‘The Bounding Line’, which Copland temporarily adopted, and he conducted the premiere in Mexico City in November 1934. Chávez’s title raises questions about mutuality within a border-crossing American symphonic project, as well as the place in Copland’s classicist symphony of bodily presence, dance, and Hellenic erotics. Copland’s aesthetics of balletic line and bodily motion suggest analytic paradigms of gentle mediation, interdependence, contact, and touch – paradigms that thus spoke to the grassroots pan-American climate of political solidarity across the American continent in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Yet, mobilising an aesthetics of the body to gently utopian symphonic ends in this context proves unsustainable. Copland does not return from this border-crossing encounter acquitted of the colonial charge.