Session Abstract

Vernacular and popular musics in the Americas have often been ensconced in essentialized, nationalist discourses. Such rhetoric gives authenticity to particular musical styles in order to validate the cultural politics of populist, democratic, and authoritarian regimes. This session, “The Transnational Geographies of Music in the Americas, 1920s-1940s,” expands the geographic, racial, cultural, and political boundaries that shape the meaning of musical composition, performance, and dissemination. It shows how different transnational musical linkages—the international travel of musicians, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists; the use of radio across national boundaries; Mexican museum exhibits in the United States; and hemispheric organizations, like the Music Division of the Pan American Union—influenced how individuals racially and culturally identified themselves as well as how popular actors, intellectuals, and government officials articulated national cultures. Despite having distinct nationalist endgames, these cultural and political actors shared the desire to assign racial signifiers and geographic origins to vernacular and popular musical stylings and histories. Taking the transnationality of music as a common point of departure, this panel collectively argues that the construction of national musical authenticities emerged at the nexus of elite modernizing initiatives, ethnomusicological observations, popular nostalgia for what was perceived as the music of geographically distant or historically bygone cultures, and hemispheric ideas to distinguish the Western Hemisphere from Europe during the World Wars. This approach to musical production and reception highlights how black, indigenous, and Mexican “folk” musics as well as elite and popular discourses were in dialogue as national identities were forged in the early-to-mid twentieth century. To make these claims, “The Transnational Geographies of Music in the Americas” adds musicological treatises and empirical investigations to the more traditional historical sources—such as personal and institutional correspondence, radio programming, and newspaper articles—that have been employed by Latin American historians to discuss relationship between music and the cultural politics of national inclusion in the Americas.