Experimentalisms in Practice Music Perspectives from Latin America

Experimentalisms in Practice explores the multiple sites in which experimentalism emerges and becomes meaningful beyond Eurocentric interpretative frameworks. Challenging the notion of experimentalism as defined in conventional narratives, contributors take a broad approach to a wide variety of Latin@ and Latin American music traditions conceived or perceived as experimental. The conversation takes as starting point the 1960s, a decade that marks a crucial political and epistemological moment for Latin America; militant and committed aesthetic practices resonated with this moment, resulting in a multiplicity of artistic and musical experimental expressions.

Experimentalisms in Practice responds to recent efforts to reframe and reconceptualize the study of experimental music in terms of epistemological perspective and geographic scope, while also engaging traditional scholarship. This book contributes to the current conversations about music experimentalism while providing new points of entry to further reevaluate the field.

Ana R. Alonso-Minutti is a music scholar who combines musicological and ethnomusicological inquiries into the study of contemporary musical practices across the Americas. Her research focuses on experimental and avant-garde expressions, music traditions from Mexico and the US-Mexico border, and music history pedagogy. She has presented her work in the Americas and Europe and has published her research in English and Spanish venues. She is assistant professor of music and faculty affiliate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico.

Eduardo Herrera is assistant professor in ethnomusicology and music history at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He specializes in contemporary musical practices from Latin America. His research interests include music and gender, art and the legitimation of elites, and music during the Cold War. He has done historical and ethnographic research in topics including Argentinean and Uruguayan avant-garde music, masculinity and violence in participatory chanting in soccer stadiums, and music and postcoloniality in Latin America.
Alejandro L. Madrid is a music scholar whose research focuses on the intersection of modernity, tradition and globalization in music and expressive culture from Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the circum-Caribbean. His books have received the AMS's Robert M. Stevenson and Ruth A. Solie awards, the Béla Bartók Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Mexico Humanities Book award from LASA, IASPM's Woody Guthrie Book Award, and the Casa de las Américas Musicology Prize. He is professor of musicology and ethnomusicology at Cornell University.

List of Figures

List of Music Examples

List of Tables

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

About the Companion Website

Chapter 1. The Practices of Experimentalism in Latin@ and Latin American Music: An Introduction
by Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid


I. Centers and Institutions

Chapter 2. "That's Not Something to Show in a Concert": Experimentation and Legitimacy at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales
by Eduardo Herrera

Chapter 3. Experimental Alternatives: Institutionalism, Avant-gardism, and Popular Music at the Margins of the Cuban Revolution
by Susan Thomas


II. Beyond the Limits of Hybridity

Chapter 4. "I Go against the Grain of Your Memory": Iconoclastic Experiments with Traditional Sounds in Northeast Brazil
by Dan Sharp

Chapter 5. Peruvian Cumbia at the Theoretical Limits of Techno-Utopian Hybridity
by Joshua Tucker

Chapter 6. Experimentalism as Estrangement: Café Tacvba's Revés/Yosoy
by Alejandro L. Madrid and Pepe Rojo


III. Anti-Colonial Practices

Chapter 7. "Gatas y Vatas": Female Empowerment and Community-Oriented Experimentalism
by Ana R. Alonso-Minutti

Chapter 8. Noise, Sonic Experimentation, and Interior Coloniality in Costa Rica
by Susan Campos Fonseca

IV. Performance, Movements, and Scenes

Chapter 9. "We Began from Silence": Toward a Genealogy of Free Improvisation in Mexico City: Atrás del Cosmos at Teatro El Galeón, 1975-1977
by Tamar Barzel

Chapter 10. Experimentation and Improvisation in Bogotá at the End of the Twentieth Century
by Rodolfo Acosta

Chapter 11. Experimental Music and the Avant-garde in Post-1959 Cuba: Revolutionary Music for the Revolution
by Marysol Quevedo

Chapter 12. Performance, Resistance, and the Sounding of Public Space: Movimiento Música Más in Buenos Aires, 1969-73
by Andrew Raffo Dewar

Chapter 13. Afterword: Locating Hemispheric Experimentalisms
by Benjamin Piekut


Bibliography