Music and Political Imprisonment in Pinochet's Chile

Over 1,000 political imprisonment and torture centers existed across Chile during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-90). Music was often present in those centers, both as a response to and part of human rights violations. In this pioneering book, Katia Chornik explores the relationships between music, politics, memory, and human rights, discussing a broad range of music experiences and repertoire and how these are remembered, preserved, and disseminated decades later.

The book probes how pieces written, performed, and listened to in captivity are threaded into survivors' memories of mistreatment, resilience, and experiences beyond resistance. Chornik blends sources from the Cantos Cautivos digital archive with interviews with ex-political prisoners, agents of secret services, and visitors to prisons, proposing the notion of "memory cacophony" to describe the discordant kaleidoscope of voices, memories, repertoire, and experiences unveiled. Chornik demonstrates how music, as an expression of powerful lived experiences, is an essential component of the cultural history and legacy of the Pinochet period.

Katia Chornik is Research Associate at the University of Cambridge's Centre for Latin American Studies. She grew up in the Chilean diaspora as her parents experienced political imprisonment and exile under the Pinochet regime. Her work explores music's relationships with literature, history, and society. She is the author of Alejo Carpentier and the Musical Text (2015) and numerous academic and media articles on Latin American topics. She is the founder of the Cantos Cautivos project, documenting music and political imprisonment under Pinochet. She has worked in the cultural, higher education, and public sector in Chile and the UK.

IntroductionChapter 1. Music Threaded into Torture and Other MistreatmentChapter 2. The Memories and Songs of a Convicted PerpetratorChapter 3. Beyond Canonic Narratives of ResistanceChapter 4. Grassroots Commemoration and RevivalChapter 5. Archiving Memories: The Cantos Cautivos Digital ProjectCoda