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Representing the Good Neighbor Carol A. Hess (Professor, Department of Music, Professor, Department of Music, University of California, Davis)

Representing the Good Neighbor By Carol A. Hess (Professor, Department of Music, Professor, Department of Music, University of California, Davis)

Summary

In this book, Carol A. Hess investigates the reception of Latin American art music in the US during the Pan American movement of the 1930s and 40s. Hess uncovers how and why attitudes towards Latin American music shifted so dramatically during the middle of the twentieth century, and what this tells us about the ways in which the history of American music has been written.

Representing the Good Neighbor Summary

Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream by Carol A. Hess (Professor, Department of Music, Professor, Department of Music, University of California, Davis)

In Representing the Good Neighbor, Carol A. Hess investigates the reception of Latin American art music in the US during the Pan American movement of the 1930s and 40s. An amalgamation of economic, political and cultural objectives, Pan Americanism was premised on the idea that the Americas were bound by geography, common interests, and a shared history, and stressed the psychological and spiritual bonds between the North and South. Threatened by European Fascism, the US government wholeheartedly embraced this movement as a way of recruiting Latin American countries as political partners. In a concerted effort to promote a sameness-embracing attitude between the US and Latin America, it established, in collaboration with entities such as the Pan American Union, exchange programs for US and Latin American composers as well as a series of contests, music education projects, and concerts dedicated to Latin American music. Through comparisons of the work of three of the most prominent Latin American composers of the period - Carlos Chavez, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Alberto Ginastera - Hess shows that the resulting explosion of Latin American music in the US during the 30s and 40s was accompanied by a widespread - though by no means universal - embracement by critics as an exemplar of cosmopolitan universalism. Aspects shared between the music of US composers and that of their neighbors to the south were often touted and applauded. Yet, by the end of the Cold War period, critics had reverted to viewing Latin American music through the lens of difference and exoticism. In comparing these radically different modes of reception, Hess uncovers how and why attitudes towards Latin American music shifted so dramatically during the middle of the twentieth century, and what this tells us about the ways in which the history of American music has been written. As the first book to examine in detail the critical reception of Latin American music in the United States, Representing the Good Neighbor promises to be a landmark in the field of American music studies, and will be essential reading for students and scholars of music in the US and Latin America during the twentieth-century. It will also appeal to historians studying US-Latin America relations, as well as general readers interested in the history of American music.

Representing the Good Neighbor Reviews

The breadth of research presented in Representing the Good Neighbor expands its potential audience, and the presence today of Latinos as the largest minority in the United States gives the work added significance. Readers who are unaware of the intense collaboration that took place between US and Latin American artists and intellectuals during this era of pan-American accord will be surprised to discover a period in which our collective vision of 'American' music (and 'America' itself) extended far beyond US borders ... Representing the Good Neighbor is a compelling contribution to the deterritorialization of Americanist musicology, one whose model vantage point is capable of discerning cultural sameness without expunging cultural difference. * Journal of the American Musicological Society *
This brilliant book offers the first critical analysis of the reception of Latin American art music in the US during and after the Cold War... Highly recommended. * Choice *

About Carol A. Hess (Professor, Department of Music, Professor, Department of Music, University of California, Davis)

Carol A. Hess is Professor of Musicology at Michigan State University. She is author of Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 1898-1936 (Chicago, 2001, winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and the Robert M. Stevenson prize for outstanding scholarship in Iberian music) and Sacred Passions: The Life and Music of Manuel de Falla (Oxford 2004).

Table of Contents

CONTENTS ; Acknowledgements ; Editorial matters ; List of musical examples ; List of figures ; Chapter One. Introduction ; I. Difference and History in the Americas ; II. The Narrative ; Chapter Two: The Roots of Pan Americanism ; I. Historical Premises ; II. Pan Americanism and Music: An Overview ; Chapter Three: Carlos Chavez and Ur-Classicism ; II. Absolute Mexican Music: True Classicism and Universalism in the Americas ; Chapter Four: Carlos Chavez's H.P.: Dialectical Indigenism, Mestizaje, and the Politics of Sameness ; I. To Suggest Objectively the Life of All America: Chavez and Dialectical Indigenism. ; II. Find Me a Primitive Man: Premiere and Reception ; Chapter Five: Brazilian Modernism and the Making of American Rhythm: Villa-Lobos at the 1939 World's Fair ; I. From Hallucinated City To Democracity: Villa-Lobos, the Many Faces of Brazilian Modernism, and the Good Neighbor ; II. Caliban Unbound: Villa-Lobos and Unsublimated Primitivism ; Chapter Six: The Golden Age: Pan Americanist Culture, War, and the Triumph of Universalism ; I. Pan Americanist Culture and Music in the United States ; II. Folklore Cults and the League of Minor Musical Nations ; III. Nationalism: The Greatest Foe ; IV. The Brazilian Oklahoma! and the Memory of Universalism ; Chapter Seven: Alberto Ginastera's Bomarzo: Sublimation and the Annihilation of Difference ; I. Ginastera in the United States: Becoming a Musical McNamara ; II. Bomarzo: Sublimation and the Strength of the Repressed Urge ; III. Censorship and the Limits of Aleatory ; Chapter Eight: Memory, Music, and the Latin American Cold War: Frederic Rzewksi's Variations on 'The People United Will Never Be Defeated! ; I. Nueva Cancion, Musica Nacional, and the Cold War ; II. The People United Will Never Be Defeated! and the Rhetoric of Memory ; Chapter Nine: Epilogue. Utopia and Pan Americanism's Legacy ; Bibliography

Additional information

NPB9780199919994
9780199919994
0199919992
Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream by Carol A. Hess (Professor, Department of Music, Professor, Department of Music, University of California, Davis)
New
Hardback
Oxford University Press Inc
2013-11-28
336
N/A
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