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Juan Bautista Plaza (1898-1965) was one of the most important musicians in the history of Venezuela. In addition to composing in a variety of genres and styles, he was the leading figure in Venezuelan music education and musicology at a time when his compatriots were seeking to solidify their cultural identity. Plaza's compositions in the emerging nationalist style and his efforts to improve musical institutions in his home country parallel the work of contemporaneous Latin American musicians including Carlos Chávez of Mexico, Amadeo Roldán of Cuba, and Camargo Guarnieri of Brazil. Plaza's life and music are little studied, and Labonville's ambitious book is the first in English to be based on his extensive writings and compositions. As these and other documents show, Plaza filled numerous roles in Venezuela's musical infrastructure including researcher, performer, teacher, composer, promoter, critic, chapel master, and director of national culture. Labonville examines Plaza's many roles in an attempt to assess how the nationalist spirit affected art music culture in Venezuela, and what changes it brought to Venezuela's musical landscape.
Venezuelan music has remained largely unnoticed in the academic English literature. Boasting a tremendous wealth of traditions, it displays influences from the Spanish, indigenous, and enslaved African communities that populated the territory from the “conquest” on and offers a tremendous diversity of genres and styles that vary by region, occasion, time, and sometimes ethnic influences. This book presents critical discussions of some of these traditions in connection with the issue of identity. The discussions capture country and city life, illustrate foundational myths, bring secular traditions closer to Christianity, explore surviving cultural strategies, et cetera. They also analyze the interface between Venezuelan identity and European classical music. The book displays diversity of perspectives in terms of (a) subject matter, as it includes traditional and concert musics; (b) disciplines on which the inquiries are grounded, as it includes essays by scholars and artists from musicology, performance, composition, history, cultural history, and education; and (c) epistemological approaches, as it includes critical, historical, and ethnographic research.
Nineteenth-Century Choral Music is an in-depth examination of the rich repertoire of choral music and the cultural phenomenon of choral music making throughout the period. The book is divided into three main sections. The first details the attraction to choral singing and the ways it was linked to different parts of society, and to the role of choral voices in the two principal large-scale genres of the period: the symphony and opera. A second section highlights ten choral-orchestral masterworks that are a central part of the repertoire. The final section presents overview and focus chapters covering composers, repertoire (both small and larger works), and performance life in an historical c...
A reference guide to the vast array of art song literature and composers from Latin America, this book introduces the music of Latin America from a singer's perspective and provides a basis for research into the songs of this richly musical area of the world. The book is divided by country into 22 chapters, with each chapter containing an introductory essay on the music of the region, a catalog of art songs for that country, and a list of publishers. Some chapters include information on additional sources. Singers and teachers may use descriptive annotations (language, poet) or pedagogical annotations (range, tessitura) to determine which pieces are appropriate for their voices or programming needs, or those of their students. The guide will be a valuable resource for vocalists and researchers, however familiar they may be with this glorious repertoire.
"The one source that sets reference collections on Latin American studies apart from all other geographic areas of the world.... The Handbook has provided scholars interested in Latin America with a bibliographical source of a quality unavailable to scholars in most other branches of area studies." —Latin American Research Review Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year b...
Between 1941 and 1963, Aaron Copland made four government-sponsored tours of Latin America that drew extensive attention at home and abroad. Interviews with eyewitnesses, previously untapped Latin American press accounts, and Copland’s diaries inform Carol A. Hess’s in-depth examination of the composer’s approach to cultural diplomacy. As Hess shows, Copland’s tours facilitated an exchange of music and ideas with Latin American composers while capturing the tenor of United States diplomatic efforts at various points in history. In Latin America, Copland’s introduced works by U.S. composers (including himself) through lectures, radio broadcasts, live performance, and conversations. Back at home, he used his celebrity to draw attention to regional composers he admired. Hess’s focus on Latin America’s reception of Copland provides a variety of outside perspectives on the composer and his mission. She also teases out the broader meanings behind reviews of Copland and examines his critics in the context of their backgrounds, training, aesthetics, and politics.
Winner of the 2015 Robert M. Stevenson Award from the American Musicological Society In Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream, Carol A. Hess investigates the reception of Latin American art music in the US during the twentieth century. Hers is the first study to probe Latin American art music in relation to Pan Americanism, or the idea that the American nations are bound by common aspirations. Under the Good Neighbor policy, crafted by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to cement hemispheric solidarity amid fears of European fascism, Latin American art music flourished and US critics applauded it as "universal." During the Cold War, ...
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"The one source that sets reference collections on Latin American studies apart from all other geographic areas of the world.... The Handbook has provided scholars interested in Latin America with a bibliographical source of a quality unavailable to scholars in most other branches of area studies." —Latin American Research Review Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year b...