Events

Thursday, 27 Sept, 2007 -- 4:10 pm

The Argentine national state took almost half a century to come together. Between the late 1820s and 1853, there was no working federal state, but only autonomous provincial states that held a vague collective desire of belonging together. Within this process, song was instrumental in transmitting notions of statehood that eventually fructified in the 1853 national constitution.

In Buenos Aires during the early 1830s, poet-ideologist Esteban Echeverría joined composer-businessman Juan Pedro Esnaola in a self-conscious effort aimed at inventing national song. Echeverría, who had recently arrived back from Paris, transplanted and adapted Romantic ideas of song as national foundation, and found that Esnaola could aptly project his lyrics through music. The resulting set of songs, however, is as far removed from “musical nationalism” as it could be. Written in an indistinct European style, the pieces bear a strong operatic influence, based upon both Mozart and Rossini, without any discernable folk trait. Their subject typically is romantic love, and their tone generally remains salonnard.

This talk critically revisits the project and its outcome in terms of nineteenth-century sociabilities as nation-building. Even though dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas’s take over of power in the late-1830s and his development of state-sponsored terror practices put an end to the venture, preventing the songs from achieving wider publicity through the printing press, they remained as a token of group solidarity within the Buenos Aires bourgeoisie. In the long run, they indirectly contributed to the construction of the Argentine national state and remained as the earliest attempt at erecting a national musical monument.

Bernardo Illari is a specialist in Latin American music from the colonial and early national periods who teaches in the College of Music at the University of North Texas. He is an internationally-renowned scholar of cathedral music from Spanish America, and the colonial Andes in particular, and he has also studied everything from operas to the sounding representations of festivals. His awards include the Howard Mayer Brown award in 1996 and an AMS 50 fellowship in 1997. For over fifteen years he has been contributing scores, advice and notes to an international array of early music soloists, ensembles and recording artists. Professor Illari's many publications and projects include Domenico Zipoli: Para una genealogía de la música clásica latinoamericana (Domenico Zipoli: Towards a Genealogy of Latin American Classical Music) which was awarded the 2003 Premio de Musicología "Casa de las Américas".

presented by the Faculty of Music and Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto