Description
Like the platypus, an animal that defies taxonomic boundaries by living between water and land, laying eggs like a bird yet nurturing its young like a mammal, the musicologist working with Argentine art music of the so-called 'national school' necessarily inhabits an interdisciplinary space between historical musicology, ethnohistory, and music theory.
Argentine ‘national music’ conveys its Argentine-ness through a series of musical topoi drawn from the country’s vernacular traditions, cast in the idiom of the broader European tekhne. My approach, grounded in a topic theory shaped by cultural history and aimed at responding to Monelle’s call for a 'full cultural study' of each topos, has always required sustained dialogue among those traditionally separate disciplines. I trace the genealogy of each of the topoi within art music and conduct an archaeology of the vernacular references to which they allude. This strategy aligns with critical perspectives that challenge the opposition between oral and written sources (Comaroff, Ginzburg, de Certeau, Sahlins) and echoes ongoing dialogues between ethnomusicology and historical musicology (Kaufman Shelemay, Tomlinson, Jeffery, Irving, van Orden).
In this paper, I discuss some of the insights gained from this interdisciplinary dialogue in advancing our understanding of Argentine vernacular and art musics. They include the potential of art music as a source for oral traditions no longer accessible; dismantling teleological narratives about traditional music and making evident the fluidity of traditional genres before their standardisation by ethnomusicology; the role of urban revivalist performances as early forms of ethnographic record; the value of concepts such as melodic families in revealing hidden inter-repertoire connections; and the ability of in-depth textual analysis to uncover intersections between European and Latin American cultural tropes, emphasising sameness over difference and cultural interaction over exoticism. The paper is illustrated with works by Alberto Ginastera, Carlos Guastavino, and Alberto Williams.
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