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2015
Musique et politique en Amérique Latine, XXe-XXIe siècles

Nationalist, Hemispheric, and Global: “Latin American Music” and the Music Division of the Pan American Union, 1939-1947

Pablo Palomino

Résumés

Durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la diplomatie états-unienne a mis en avant la notion de « musique latino-américaine » comme partie intégrante du système panaméricain. Placée sous la direction du musicologue Charles Seeger, la Division musicale de l’Union Panaméricaine a encouragé les échanges musicaux et musicologiques afin de valoriser les traditions nationales de la région, mais aussi de promouvoir une identité commune à l’échelle du continent. Cette politique impériale eut de multiples conséquences. Tout d’abord, elle favorisa l’accès aux sources musicales, faisant du folklore un élément des échanges transnationaux. Ensuite, elle ancra la notion de « musique latino-américaine » et développa une pédagogie musicale au-delà des frontières. Par ailleurs, elle encouragea la transformation de la musicologie latino-américaine en champ transnational, en récupérant les initiatives de son père fondateur, Francisco Curt Lange. Enfin, la Division musicale fournit un modèle pour l’établissement de la politique musicale de l’UNESCO au lendemain de la guerre, imposant une vision démocratique et populiste de la musique comme expression du « peuple ».

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Notes de la rédaction

Previous versions of this article, presented at the American Historical Association conference in 2012 and in the form of dissertation chapter (Palomino, Pablo, “Transnational Musical Networks in Latin America, 1910-1950”, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2014) benefited in particular from the generous reading of Eric Zolov, Anaïs Fléchet, Margaret Chowning, Mark Healey and Richard Cándida-Smith. Funding for the research came from a Social Science Research Council – International Dissertation Research Fellowship and a Mellon Foundation - Council on Library and Information Resources fellowship.

Texte intégral

  • 1 The Boletín Latino Americano de Música, published until 1946, featured virtually the whole musical (...)

1Before becoming a political symbol and a commercial brand, “Latin American music” was a tool of the cultural diplomacy of the United States during World War Two. The notion had in fact been proposed programmatically a few years before, in 1934, when Francisco Curt Lange, a Bavarian musicologist emigrated to Uruguay, launched in Montevideo a movement called americanismo musical and edited the Boletín Latino-Americano de Música. That was a truly transnational musicological project that considered Latin America as a distinct musical area.1 But World War Two turned this musicological idea, and the emerging network of Latin Americanists it created, into a quasi-imperial tool for the United States’ foreign policy through the Pan American Union. This article reconstructs the policies regarding “Latin American music” by the Pan American Union’s Music Division (MD), a wartime agency that formally represented all the American states, but was mainly sponsored by the US State Department and managed by US musicologists.

2The Music Division promoted the circulation and knowledge of “Latin American music,” and of each national tradition in Latin America, in the context of a larger “Pan American,” hemispheric framework. Its impact was manifold. First, it produced catalogues of “Latin American music” aimed at music educators throughout the Americas, and at cultural institutions in both the US and many Latin American countries willing to expand their musical collections beyond their national traditions. Second, it provided legitimacy to Latin American musicology, an emerging new field of knowledge. Finally, it was a testing ground for postwar UNESCO, particularly to its democratic and universalistic notion of culture, and of musical value, as expression of “the people.” Hence, this article presents the history of an imperial musical project that valorized the national folklore of its subordinated allies by promoting a regional musical identity, based on what can be called a populist understanding of music (in the sense of music being the expression of a collective identity, the people, instead of an individual genius or the aesthetic norms of the dominant social class). This odd ideological combination points out to the need of studying the history of Latin America’s music, and of Latin America’s culture, beyond the making of each of its distinct national traditions.

US hemispheric musical programs from the New Deal to World War II

  • 2 Schoultz, Lars, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America, Cambridge (...)
  • 3 Pan American Union, Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace, Buenos Aires, December (...)
  • 4 Hart, Justin, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Forei (...)
  • 5 Arndt, Richard, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, Po (...)

3How did music get involved in hemispheric relations? The Pan American Union, which had originated in diplomatic and juridical agreements among several American republics at the first Pan American Conference in 1889 in Washington, DC, intended to provide a framework for the economic expansion of US economic interests over Latin America, and to displace European interests in the Western hemisphere.2 These interests concerned music initially through the activities of cinema, radio, and recording firms. But in the 1930s a specifically cultural diplomacy emerged in Washington DC. Three converging factors—the economic crisis, which undermined US private educational and civil initiatives abroad; the New Deal philosophy of state activism; and the worsening European crisis—turned the State Department toward expanding its policies over cultural matters, and toward strengthening its position in the Western hemisphere. In 1936, the US participation at the Inter-American Conference for the Consolidation of Peace in Buenos Aires initiated an array of cultural and scientific agreements with Latin America.3 According to historian Justin Hart, this was not by chance, but a strategic move: “the State Department clearly intended to use Latin America as the ‘laboratory’ for honing an approach that it eventually deploy worldwide4”. In that conference, Francisco Curt Lange’s Boletín Latinoamericano de Música was signaled as a solid foundation for future musical exchanges. Two years later, the pressure of some Latin American delegates at the Pan American Conference (in December 1938 in Lima) created the short-lived Inter-American Institute of Musicology, under the direction of Lange, in Montevideo. But the State Department had created in July of the same year the first official agency for foreign cultural policy in the history of the United States: the Cultural Affairs Division, charged of planning its cultural policies towards Latin America5.

  • 6 Cramer, Gisela and Prutsch, Ursula, ¡Américas Unidas!: Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-Amer (...)
  • 7 Campbell, Jennifer, “Creating Something Out of Nothing: The Office of Inter-American Affairs Music (...)
  • 8 Similarly, the US publishing industry served diplomatic interests by translating Brazilian literatu (...)

4World War Two broke out in September of 1939 and the US rapidly attempted at displacing German and Italian interests in the region, including the musical ones. The “cultural front,” whose history has been reconstructed recently by historians of the cultural international relations, included the domestic public opinion regarding Latin America, and the image of the US among Latin Americans. These “audiences” were targeted by a set of propagandistic films, news, and broadcasting programs directed by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), created in 1940 by the White House6. The OCIAA had a short-lived but historically crucial Music Committee, from November 1940 to October 1941, which promoted tours of US music in Latin America and, to a lesser extent, the execution of modern art music by Latin American composers in the US. As musicologist Jennifer Campbell argues, this was the starting point and model for US musical diplomacy in the long run, in the sense that it generated collaboration between state and non-state actors and, ironically, in the sense that its results “paled in comparison to the grandiose ideas for musical exchange [it] had envisioned7”. Regarding the private actors, these were active partners of the State Department: in 1940 the NBC and the CBS radio networks funded competing tours of Latin America by Arturo Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski. Regarding the efficacy of these initiatives, they served to promote US music among Latin Americans, but failed to enable actual exchanges in both directions8.

5Less known is the parallel history that led to the creation of the MD. In October of 1939 the musicological establishment, a decentralized network of specialists across mostly public institutions across the country, converged at the Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music, organized in Washington DC by the State Department’s Cultural Affairs Division. As a result of the conference, musicologist Carleton Sprague Smith was commissioned to travel to South America from June to October 1940. Trained in Vienna, Sprague was the chief of the Music Division of the New York Public Library, an important figure in the Music Library Association and the American Musicological Society, and a veteran of the Federal Music Project—the musical branch of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. He was now in charge of probing the musical establishment of South America, in order to provide contacts and insights for musical diplomacy in the region to the MD, which finally was created, following an initiative of the Library of Congress’ Music Section Board, in July 29, 1940. This was an open dismissal of Lange’s Inter-American Institute of Musicology. The fact of Lange being German may have influenced this decision, as well as his hardly diplomatic personal style; but the decision suggested ultimately that the State Department considered inter-American relations as an instrument of US interests.

6Let us consider Carleton Sprague Smith’s tour between June and October of 1940 and the insights it provided to the MD.

  • 9 Sprague Smith, Carleton, Musical Tour through South America, June-October, 1940, New York, Conferen (...)
  • 10 Idem, p. III-IV. The surveys and polls that in those years were consolidating a national market in (...)

7He visited every South American country, except from Paraguay and the European territories of Guiana and Surinam. Musical life in those other republics seemed to him very different to the one in the United States, and above all very diverse, varying from one country to another. But despite this heterogeneity, the contrast with the US allowed him to see Latin America as a whole region.9 For instance, his assessment of the broadcasting infrastructure revealed that (according to his own numbers) Argentine had more than half (56%) of the receiving sets, and a quarter of all the region’s radio stations, while Peru, Bolivia or Ecuador each had 2% of the sets and 5% of the stations. But he also noticed that despite this contrast, in general “the number of loudspeakers in the streets around which crowds gather impresses the visitor,” making the actual number of radio listeners higher than the number of radios. For this and other reasons, he wrote, “it is difficult to work out a type of broadcasting which will appeal to every country since audiences have distinctive preferences in each city10”.

8In the realm of classical music, Sprague realized that the US was far behind Europe: “North American composers and conductors play no role in the musical life of the Southern Hemisphere,” dominated, on the one hand, by local modernist and nationalist composers and directors, and by a sort of star-system of Italians, European Jews, and other European artists on the other. A global network ran by European impresarios hired the most famous European figures to perform in South America. “The favorite performers are much the same as those in the United States, an international managerial syndicate controlling the concerts just as in North America. Indeed, it is practically the same group.” Local “managerial chains” extended the reach of these networks through representatives mainly in the coastal cities. The influence of classical music varied from one country to another. While “popular music is preferred in practically every country,” in Uruguay, to the contrary, Francisco Curt Lange’s “SODRE [the state broadcasting station] exercises important influence,” and therefore the “Uruguayan public … is fed ‘classics’ by order of the government.” Opera “has meant a good deal in Brazil and Argentina,” more than in the other countries, because “Italian companies have toured for the last hundred years in practically every city of importance, and towns with any pretension whatsoever have an opera house,” a description that should have included Uruguay. On the other hand, in the region as a whole, “zarzuelas are really more popular than grand operas and Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian Operettas have been performed many times.”

  • 11 Idem, p. XXXII-XXXIII.
  • 12 Idem, p. XX.
  • 13 Shepard, John, “The Legacy of Carleton Sprague Smith: Pan-American Holdings in the Music Division o (...)

9The best orchestras “are in Rio, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Perú and Colombia boast ensembles, but they cannot compare with those on the East Coast. Santiago [Chile] has a particularly avid public and is more musical for its size than Buenos Aires.” But the overall underdevelopment was comparable to the US: there is a lack of “good native conductors in South America exactly as in the United States. Germans and Italians hold many of the most important orchestral posts11”. There is, however, a lively scene around the practice of the recital, “undoubtedly the most usual type of concert given in Latin American cities.” This is a practice based on local private musical associations that organize small concerts. These civil-society resources were scarce compared to the massive public investments made in the US under the New Deal: “the equipment is antiquated and the instruction less intense than in the United States. We have made very rapid strides in North America in Public School Music and in our conservatories during the past few years.” He added that such striking difference in resources made it “one field where we may really be helpful to our Southern friends12”. For Sprague, a man of the New Deal, who had directed a library program at the New York Public Library under the Federal Arts Project, the idea of building up Pan American musical programs was a natural continuation of that same civilizational and public-centered ethos13.

  • 14 Sprague Smith, Carleton, op. cit., p. XXV.

10Sprague identified a number of pioneering musicological studies that traced the history of classical music life and folklore in the region, especially the Rio de la Plata musicologists Lange, Lauro Ayestarán and Gastón Talamon. But he also noticed the institutional weakness of musicology: “there is no outstanding Latin American music library [...] Some of the conservatories have material but it has not been assembled scientifically”. Scarcity of resources regarding local traditions results from the fact that “foreign music from Europe was assiduously aped and copied during most of the 19th century with the result that local music and archives were neglected14”.

11In terms of musical culture, a notorious feature of South American musical life was, from the perspective of this US traveler, the dominance of bands over choirs. The population was more used to participating in and listening to bands – either at the small town or in urban carnivals – than to singing in choirs, which could explain both their novelty and limitations. But music markets could not thrive based on music bands: they acted locally, disconnected from one another, lacking the managerial networks of classical music.

  • 15 From William Berrien (American Council of Learned Societies), Irving Leonard (historian from Brown (...)
  • 16 The OCIAA’s director, for instance, was John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the creator of Standard Oil (...)

12This heterogeneous musical space required thus, from the perspective of the MD, a unifying policy from above. Lange’s Boletín was undoubtedly the single most important step in integrating the musical systems of the Americas, and his americanismo musical helped the development of many musicological initiatives across the region. But this publication and the Montevideo Institute lacked financial and institutional resources. (It basically consisted of Lange’s personal work, his wife’s aid, and a young assistant, Lauro Ayestarán). Lange finally managed to obtain support and funding in the US for the fifth volume of the Boletín (1941)15, but as part of a wider set of initiatives organized in Washington DC. The MD was created finally on July 29, 1940, and soon received, in January of 1941, $15,000 from the brand new OCIAA, a grant later renewed for a second and a third year with funds from the Carnegie Foundation. The MD was one of many public programs funded by private philanthropic foundations.16 The direction of the MD was assigned to someone alien to the Latin American musical scene, but close to the New Deal’s musical activism, the American composer and musicologist Charles Seeger (1886-1979).

Charles Seeger and the Music Division

  • 17 Cohen, Ronald, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970, Amherst, Univ (...)
  • 18 Cohen, Ronald, op.cit.
  • 19 Gough, Peter, “The Varied Carols I Hear’: The Music of the New Deal in the West”, Ph.D. Dissertatio (...)
  • 20 Bindas, Kenneth, All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA’s Federal Music Project and Ameri (...)
  • 21 Rees, Helen, “‘Temporary Bypaths’ ? Seeger and Folk Music Research”, in Yung, Bell, and Rees, Helen (...)

13Who was Charles Seeger? After his musical formation in the US and Germany, he had been involved in musical politics as a member of the Composers Collective, a New York offshoot of the official musical organization of the Communist Party, between its foundation in 1931 and 1935. The Composers Collective composed anti-capitalist songs for workers, some of which became indeed part of the musical repertoire of the left, although as a historian put it, its aesthetics “hardly connected with America’s masses”17. This made them however an object of congressional “Anti-American” investigation from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. Seeger’s political engagement with music was shared by a multifarious movement of folk musicians, composers and collectors, mainly on the Left, that produced a “folk revival” based on the appreciation of Southern rural traditions in the 1930 and 1940s in college campuses, clubs, festivals, and radio programming.18 Like many other progressive artists and intellectuals, Seeger joined public service under the New Deal and especially during WWII as a form of democratic and anti-fascist activism. His experience as music specialist began in 1935 under the Resettlement Administration, and continued under the Federal Music Project, the musical branch of F.D. Roosevelt’s Federal Arts Project. The later was “the largest of the cultural programs [of the New Deal] in terms of both employment and attendance,” compared to the programs dedicated to theater, arts, and writing19. It assigned public money to hiring unemployed musicians, promoting national composers, and subsidizing the consumption of classical music among the population20. The work with unemployed musicians and the promotion of national composers contributed to turning Seeger, whose musical training in Harvard and Cologne was classical, into a passionate folklorist.21 This project, like most of the Works Progress Administration, was cancelled in 1940, when Seeger was assigned the Music Division.

  • 22 The postwar mindset among policy makers was marked by global concerns: “at least in the United Stat (...)

14Seeger faced three major challenges as head of the MD. The first was political: how to get individual and institutional actors throughout the Americas on board for an initiative mostly funded and commanded by the US. The second was conceptual: how to promote a common musical identity for the Americas by valorizing folklore, a discipline oriented toward the particular? In the nationalist thinking of the 1930s, the “sister republics” saw themselves as culturally distinct nations, based on specific combinations of history, territory, blood, and costumes. How would the MD match individual nationalisms with hemispheric rhetoric? Finally, the third challenge was geopolitical: the State Department promoted Pan American policies, but it aimed, especially by the end of the war, at creating global, not regional, institutions22.

15Seeger did not lack support: he had many simultaneous appointments within the country’s cultural bureaucracy besides being Chief of the Music Division. He was member of the Consultant Commission of the State Department’s Division of Cultural Affairs, and of the Music Commission of the Council of National Defense. He remained (founding) member of the American Musicological Society, of the American Folklore Society, and became chairman of the Inter-American Committees of the Music Library Association and the Music Teachers National Association. This multiple positioning allowed the MD to collaborate with those and other organizations, like the Music Division of the Library of Congress, the Music Educators National Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Works Administration of the Federal Endowment of Defense. Vanett Lawler, the appointed MD’s Music Education Consultant, was also the liaison with the Music Educators National Conference. (During its first year it worked also with the OCIAA music committee). Hence, whereas in Europe and Latin America centralized policies by the state were the usual practice, US musical diplomacy was born, as we can see, as a clustering of organizations and agencies.

  • 23 Pernet, Corinne, “For the Genuine Culture of the Americas: Musical Folklore, Popular Arts, and the (...)

16US-sponsored cultural initiatives were, as shown by historian Corinne Pernet in a seminal study, a key factor in the consolidation of an emerging transnational network of Latin American folklore scholars, who benefited from them to autonomously develop an array of folklore-related projects in many Latin American countries23. From the perspective of Seeger, those initiatives were aimed at fostering folklore-related activities with the goal of integrating the musical and musicological life of the hemisphere under US leadership.

  • 24 Here the MD continued a trend of library accumulation on Latin American collections, which stemmed (...)

17The MD began its work by publishing a collection called “Music Series,” initially consisting of a list of Latin American music obtainable in the US, a historical index of US musicians, and a historical account of the musical exchanges between the Americas. Later on, the collection added a series of folk songbooks and popular music songbooks, and a series of national cases: “Music in Chile,” “Music in Peru,” and so forth. With funds from the OCIAA, it catalogued its own music collection for public access, created a bibliography of Latin American music, conducted a study of music teaching in South American schools, and published music scores of Latin American works to be provided to US orchestras, music centers, and schools24. Other funds were assigned to inviting composers and musicologists for long stays in the US, including many heads of public offices in their countries, like the Brazilian Luiz Heitor Corrêa de Azevedo, the librarian of the National Music School in Rio de Janeiro. The MD also conducted surveys of the availability of Latin American music scores at US schools, and gathered choral materials in the US that could be useful for exchange with the “sister republics.”

  • 25 Pan American Union, Informe Anual del Director General de la Unión Panamericana, Washington, 1941-1 (...)
  • 26 The number of bands is an estimate by the National Federation of Musical Clubs in the United States (...)
  • 27 Such as Filomena Salas (Fine Arts, University of Chile), Juan Bautista Plaza (music professor in Ve (...)

18If the musicians themselves did not travel as much as Seeger would have liked, their music did reach the United States. By mid-1942 the MD had gathered 5,240 volumes and references to 6,400 works on “Iberian-American music,” and started to develop an ambitious cataloguing project with the American Council of Learned Societies25. It also had expanded these resources domestically. The OCIAA’s project of building a “Directory of Ibero-American Musicians and Musical Societies” was transferred in January 1942 to the MD. That year, 21 of the most important music publishers of the US published 61 Latin American music scores, and many of them would take part in the music contests and festivals organized in 1943. More than 50,000 US military bands, orchestras, and choirs across the country could now gain access to this repertoire.26 Also collected and catalogued was music in Spanish recorded in the US, especially by Southwestern and Texan musicians. In part thanks to a Rockefeller Foundation grant, several important music educators toured the US giving conferences and advising their colleagues, and several young Latin American musicians received grants to study music in the US27. Finally, the MD expanded its web of collaborative work, through the Instituto Indigenista Pan Americano (in Mexico City), the Inter American Institute of Folkloric Research (in Panama), and the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, among others.

19What was Latin America in these projects? Each of them had a particular underlying definition: Latin America was referred to either as a cultural area, a collection of republics, or a series of musical regions (the Andes, the Brazilian sertão, etc.) But none of these initiatives originated in Latin America. This imperial feature reflected in part the fact that in 1942-3 the US provided 54% of the PAU budget, compared to Brazil’s 16%, Mexico’s 7%, Argentina’s 4.7%, or Colombia’s 3%, to mention the four major Latin American countries in terms of population, which was the basis for assigning the contributions.

  • 28 Seeger, Charles, “Review of Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music, 1940-1943”, s/f. [c.194 (...)
  • 29 Seeger, Charles, “Brief History of the Music Division of the Pan American Union”, 6/9/1947a, Archiv (...)

20In Seeger’s perspective, however, the two Americas were becoming musically independent from Europe, a process accelerated by the war, and depending on its result. “Dependence upon Europe […] is by no means ended. Belief, however, that the contribution of the New World to music may be substantial, is more and more commonly held. That this contribution is related to the outcome of the war is obvious28” (my emphasis). Still, there was an uneven “contribution” between the two Americas, given their economic differences. “The United States, while it comprises but about 50% of the population of the member republics of the Union, comprises upwards of 90% of its music resources29”. Those “music resources” were highly organized professional resources—“composition, performance, education, scholarship, library”—and commercial ones—“publication, industry, merchandising, concert management, mass communication.” During the war, he argued, the MD had to orient the 90% of resources in US hands towards the entire hemisphere.

21Reorienting these resources required a stronger state intervention. Whereas broadcasting, recording industry, music books, and even copyright legislation were domains in which inter-American relations were quite advanced, Seeger noticed that the US government was absent. In this regard, it had much to learn from Latin America:

  • 30 Idem, p. 3-4.

[whereas] most of the American Republics had long shown an interest in music as a concern of government, had established Ministries of Education and Fine Arts, and had subsidized opera and concert activity, the United States had always resisted proposals to establish a Department of Fine Arts, or to subsidize music composition, performance, or education. National music programs in emergency agencies of the New Deal were continually under fire and finally liquidated30.

22WWII, which drastically transformed the economic and institutional structures of the US, represented an opportunity for the state to orient the country’s cultural forces, or at least promote certain strands of it that market dynamics would not. And Latin America, with its centralized cultural authority, provided the model for Seeger and other former New Deal officers.

  • 31 National Music Council, Bulletin 1: 3, New York, National Music Council, March 1941, p. 6.
  • 32 Idem, p. 7.

23An array of musicological projects were produced by a powerful current of civil organizations in the United States during the years immediately prior to the entry in the war, and the war strengthened the process by making those organizations converge around national policies. What Seeger wanted was to consolidate this process beyond the war. In early 1941, the National Music Council (NMC) already included 28 member associations ranging from professional to corporate organizations, such as the American Musicological Society, League of Composers, National Association of Broadcasters, National Federation of Music Clubs, and Music Teachers National Association. The NMC authorities proudly signaled that unlike during the Great War, this time “all of the most important musical interests of the country are represented,” and were ready both to accept the “inevitable” wartime state regulations and to intervene whenever the lack of “wisdom and experience” from the government require those interests “speak with one voice31”. The NMC strategy was to promote its members’ interests through serving the state’s needs. For instance, they pushed for a program called “Advancement of Music in Smaller Cities Through Opera in English,” which was intended to employ foreign musicians received as war refugees in America, consolidate English-speaking opera productions, and partner the state in creating a nation-wide market for American music in small cities32. At the same time, the NMC collaborated with the War Department by providing the names of army officers with musical skills, and even civilian assistance to music-related activities within military bases.

  • 33 Pan American Union, Informe Anual del Director General de la Unión Panamericana, Washington, 1942-1 (...)

24The MD activities added to this current a Latin American branch, by inserting the Latin American repertoire into a wide range of activities. Its 1943 report describes the repertoire performed at the Day of the Americas: a choral concert interpreting “European music contemporary to the discovery of America, American music from the colonial period, and music by contemporary composers.” An Inter-American Folk Music Festival included dances and songs from 17 American countries, and the regular since 1924 PAU Summer Concerts featured in 1943 US military bands performing together with Latin American classic-trained singers33. At the same time, several projects devised by the MD were implemented by other organizations: the New School of Social Research distributed US music in Latin America, the ACLS provided technical equipment to the University of Chile, and the International Institute of Education awarded grants to Latin American young music students to attend classes in the US. Independently from these efforts, but in a similar direction, in August 1943 the Federation of Inter-American Societies of Authors and Composers (FISAC) was pushing a hemispheric legislation on copyright at the Inter-American Conference of Lawyers held in Mexico City.

  • 34 Seeger, Charles, “Musicology and the Music Industry”, paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the (...)
  • 35 Seeger, Charles, “Brief History…”, op. cit.

25Despite all these initiatives and musical organizations, US musicologists tended to agree, according to Seeger, “with the verdict of the nine Latin American musicians who visited the United States [in 1942] and saw high school bands, orchestras and choruses in action: ‘What a marvelous mechanism for performing such terrible music!’34” The vision of these musicologists was that the United States had a great institutional system in place for music performance, but that the repertoire and the performance itself needed improvement. More ambitious musical policies in education were needed. And here, musicologists needed to elevate their standards. (“Compared to the predictable results offered by sanitary experts, engineers, and even economists,” Seeger complained, “the promoters of music projects sooner or later have a hard time to keep from being regarded as bluffers35”).

  • 36 Cartés, Brunilda, “Informe de la Secretaria del Comité Consejero en Educación Musical para las Repú (...)
  • 37 Idem, p. 5-8.

26In the documents produced in 1945 and 1946, it became clear that the key instrument for inter-American relations, and music development in general, was the school, and Latin America provided the model for the whole hemisphere. For Brunilda Cartés, a Chilean musicologist who joined the MD, “the current organization of music education in Latin America is almost uniform,” and therefore the plans for organizing it at a hemispheric level could be based on “common principles and ideals36”. She was summarizing the debates among 17 Latin American musicians and educators at the Music Educators National Conference (MENC) convention celebrated in Cleveland in March 1946 – funding provided by a Rockefeller grant – to discuss the state of music education in Latin America. Interestingly, the Committee seemed to have agreed that Latin America, which was a model of state promotion of music, needed nonetheless to imitate the US emphasis on the formation of music teachers. They concluded that key for any successful plan in music education was the involvement of children and adults in educational and community contexts. Cartés recommended that every school have a department of musical education, in charge of “reaching every child in school” through “choral singing with participation of the school as a whole, connecting music with other disciplines such as history, literature, geography, etc.” This hemispheric plan for music education contemplated national and sub-national goals, such as “providing every child the opportunity of listening good music, by orienting him towards the appreciation of music by the national composers” and “promoting the interest for folkloric music by initiating him in the folkloric music of his region.” By folk music they meant music with either Indigenous, African, or Spanish origins, and they suggested that the educators themselves needed to be encouraged to appreciate the national composers, as well as folkloric and contemporary music37. The Committee suggested as well that official and private broadcasters arrive at agreements in terms of their programming content, to counterbalance commercial music.

27These musicologists arrived to the same conclusions Mexican revolutionary policy-makers, old Argentine liberals, Brazilian modernists, French republicans, German nationalists, and many other regimes and political movements around the world had done in the previous century: they saw choirs and collective musical practice as powerful society-builders and stabilizers. At school, students, teachers, and parent can come together through collective singing. At industrial centers, folkloric clubs, and other civil associations, collective singing and music bands and orchestras were means to promote musical advancement, social improvement and symbolic and emotional bonds. Folklore and nationalism were just means for social and cultural goals. Cartés went further in this direction by stating that

  • 38 Cartés, Brunilda, “Music Education in Latin America”, Doctoral Dissertation, Northwestern Universit (...)

Educators must emphasize the idea that we live in one world, that we are citizens of the world, that we need to know other peoples in order to understand them. This is not against the idea of nationalism. …[O]n the contrary, the richness of the world culture is based upon national diversities as long as they are harmonized in a greater whole. This is why educators should prepare the child, not only to become an efficient citizen of his country but an efficient citizen of the world. This means that education in international relations involves the whole range of human life and welfare38.

  • 39 Cartés, Brunilda, “Informe…”, op. cit., p. 13.

28The goal of serving, through music education, “the school, the community, the country, and the hemisphere” was broad enough to represent a variety of ideological actors in the field of music39. The idea of the broader world beyond the “hemisphere” was already looming in this project.

  • 40 Sprague Smith, Carleton, Musical Tour…, op. cit., p. 283-284.
  • 41 Roberts, John Storm, The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States, 2nd (...)
  • 42 “Con el Fox Trot y con el Tango hemos pagado a Europa el Descubrimiento de América, dice P. Whitema (...)

29But musicologists, educators, and diplomats viewed their impact as minor compared to the influence of market relations and the evolutions of popular taste. Carleton Sprague Smith pointed out in 1940 that whatever the State Department did to strengthen the links with Latin America in terms of music and dance would be based, in any case, on the simple fact that exchanges were already taking place. “North American Dance Music has certainly done a tremendous lot to win the youth of the southern hemisphere and young people in the United States are grateful for the Tango, Rumba and Conga.” In fact, he added, “North and Southern Americans are really co-partners in the field of modern dancing40”. The amazing expansion of Latin American music styles and artists in the US during the war through Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley could hardly be matched by the efforts of cultural diplomats41. Already in 1929 a popular Argentine newspaper interviewed jazz orchestra leader Paul Whiteman and titled the interview by quoting him: “With foxtrot and tango we have repaid Europe for discovering us42”. The consequences of inter-American musical diplomacy are to be seen in the innovations that this intervention into musical life produced in the realm of music ideologies and music education.

  • 43 Pan American Union, “Resolución sobre el folklore, entre las aprobadas por la junta de ministros y (...)

30The ideology of musical inter-Americanism was ambiguous. Cultural officers from across the Americas gathered in 1943 to sign a common document related to folklore and education, in which a peculiar concept of cultural identity emerged. First, culture is considered, above all, as folklore, and folklore is a series of profound “spiritual manifestations of the people,” present in “each local tradition,” which institutions have the mission of supervising (“vigilar”) in order to keep them safe “from superficial, strange and destructive influences.” Folklore is therefore a spiritual heritage, now threatened by commercial music. Second, despite of traditions being locally based, there is “a rich American folkloric tradition” that provides a common ground for “solidarity and friendship.” Third and finally, folklore “has to be cultivated at the school” with two goals: fulfilling its “patriotic duties” and at the same time “contributing to the formation of a hemispheric consciousness”43. The recommendations of the signatories consisted of adding a hemispheric sense to the patriotic musical education in each country, and to promote more musical and pedagogical exchanges. The key role was to be played by the school and the cultural experts – from musicologists to broadcasters – that fed schools with musical resources.

  • 44 Azevedo, Luiz H. Corrêa de, A Escola Nacional de Música e as pesquisas de folclore musical no Brasi (...)
  • 45 In Chile, for instance, the emergence of folk items from the country’s central valley as symbols of (...)

31Music was therefore a cultural tradition, a commercial trade, and a pedagogic matter, all at once, on which experts could intervene. Hemispheric programs influenced folklore initiatives by Latin American nationalists. For instance, a Center of Folkloric Research was created in late 1943 in Brazil, within the National School of Music, and it immediately launched a series of publications. The first one, A Escola Nacional de Música e as pesquisas de folclore musical no Brasil, was defined by its author as a resource to the School of Music and a tool for cooperating with similar organizations dedicated to the study of popular arts “in Brazil, in the hemisphere, and tomorrow, once the furies of the war are gone, in the pacific and scholarly world as a whole44”. Hence, folk research was possible, and folk music was valorized, on a global conversation rather than a national one45.

  • 46 “Music Speaks to the Hearts of All Men: The International Movement in American Music Education: 193 (...)
  • 47 After the war, the internationalism of music educators gave impulse to the foundation in 1953 of th (...)

32A folk canon of Latin American music began to be taught at US schools, as folk music became increasingly legitimate in the United States through the movement of festivals, archival collections and the radio and recording boom of folk music. It was also the continuation of a recently established pedagogical trend. According to music education historian Terese Volk, in the 1930s foreign songs began to be adapted, translated, or rearranged, and then presented in Western notation, without worrying excessively with the intricacies and particularities of different rhythms and ways of executing them46. This arguably ethnocentric appropriation was in fact a form of musical globalization. Music educators began this trend by incorporating music from Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the 1930s, but the war prompted the Music Education National Conference to adopt an inter-American policy and bring Latin American music, and to a lesser extent, African and Asian music, into an increasingly global pedagogical repertoire.47 Behind all these programs was MENC leader Vannette Lawler, who created during the war the program “Music to Unify the Americas” for US schools, consisting of adapting Latin American musical material provided by Seeger’s PAU. Lawler became later a founding figure at both UNESCO and at the ISME. Inter-Americanism during the war thus enabled a global ambition within the US musical establishment.

  • 48 MENC directive Leon Roddick argued that despite differences such as the fact that US music “is more (...)

33Music education and folk roots became an important concern among cultural officers, triggering the travel of two researchers to a variety of Latin American countries in the summer of 1941, funded by the PAU through the MENC program “Music for Uniting the Americas.” They wrote a series of articles on music education in Latin America published by the Music Educators Journal in 1941-1942.48

  • 49 Beattie, John, Curtis, Louis Woodson, “South American Music Pilgrimage II: Ecuador and Peru”, Music (...)

34The two MENC travelers, John Beattie and Louis Curtis, offered revealing depictions of the global nature of musical life in South America. In Ecuador, for instance, they contacted a local expert, Juan Gorrell, who was in fact a transplanted New Englander, whose father, Henry Gorrell, had Anglicized his name from Enrico Gorrelli, after a career as opera singer in Italy that ended teaching voice lessons in Kansas City. His son Juan (John) moved to Ecuador to engage “in the recording of native Ecuadorian music.” Juan Gorrell sponsored a local trio of guitars, Los Nativos Andinos (The Native Andeans), and recorded them for RCA-Victor, as well as the Grupo Típico Castro, also dedicated to folkloric songs. His other business was as international impresario, bringing foreign stars to perform in Quito, Ecuador’s capital49. The portrait of Juan Gorrell captures the difficulties of isolating an authentically folk tradition on Latin America.

  • 50 Santa Cruz, Domingo, “On Hemispherical Unity”, Music Educators Journal, 28: 6, 1942, p. 13.

35A response to Beattie and Curtis’ views came from Chile’s top musical figure, Domingo Santa Cruz – Dean of Fine Arts, organizer of the national symphonic orchestra, creator of music programs for public and private schools, and supporter of many other key musical activities. Santa Cruz attended MENC’s conference in Milwaukee in 1942 and wrote an article for the Music Educators Journal shortly afterward. After thanking Beattie and Curtis for their visit and acknowledging the extraordinary importance of learning from US musical institutions, he pointed out to a discrepancy in the way musicologists in the US and Latin America perceived Latin American folk music. “First of all,” he wrote, “we… would like to see here [in the US] a deeper and more careful understanding of our artistic and musical life. We would like to banish the ‘picturesque’ aspect and the preference for the obviously exotic, with which the selection of Latin American music is made.” More collaboration from Latin American experts was needed, in order to understand “the boundaries between the so-called folklore and the musical pastiches of our cafés,” and to avoid surprises like finding that two supposedly Chilean folk songs included in a US songbook for schools were “written and harmonized as four-voice part songs in the very serious form of a Protestant chorale50”. Hence, the interest in folk music bumped against the advanced degree of commercialization of music making in Latin America.

  • 51 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, “Hands Across the Air”, Music Educators Journal, 28:6, 1942, p. 14. Leading Me (...)

36The words of Brazilian composer and cultural titan Heitor Villa-Lobos at the Milwaukee conference, “Why should we Americans not be able to create music that, though typical and national, would have universal appeal?” revealed a new problem. Not only folk music was hard to isolate from commercialization: the very champions of musical nationalism were embracing at once a musical ideology that was Latin and Pan Americanist, and making claims of musical universalism51. This ideological shift from Pan Americanism to a global perspective on music was analogous to the geopolitical shift of the foreign cultural policies of the State Department.

From Pan Americanism to UNESCO

  • 52 Seeger, Charles, “Brief History…”, op. cit.

37The dependence of the MD on federal bureaucracy and funding was revealed in 1944, when the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs cut the MD funding and promoted instead a similar office within the State Department, the Division of Cultural Relations. Seeger believed that the new organization would be more powerful and that inter-American policies would be now part of larger universal ones. Among the recommendations he gave to the successor organization were “the formation of an inter-American organization of authors and composers” and the “formation of an inter-American association of music educators52”.

  • 53 Idem.

38Relieved of wartime pressures, Seeger expressed in 1947 some core principles that had guided his work, and some lessons learned along the way. UNESCO’s goal, he wrote, is world peace, but “to be avoided here is the belief that music is in itself [his emphasis] good for world peace. To the contrary, it is a highly competitive field and can be used as a medium for aggression as easily as any other53”. This principle operated both among large audiences and within the “small world” of professional music. There was no music in itself suitable for peace or war. Music, to the contrary, conveys a specific meaning

in each particular instance. In a radio broadcast, for example, the music used should be what the people who are to receive it like best and want most. This may or may not be the music thought ‘best’ for the program by specialists in Hollywood, New York or Paris. Music of all regions should be used without prejudice, as needed, using the idiom – primitive, folk, popular, fine art or any hybrid – most suitable for the audience addressed and the theme and occasion chosen. (…) The frame in which music is presented, often determines the value.

  • 54 Idem, p. 7.

39Another threat to be avoided was competition among national identities in culture. “The music program of UNESCO should be intercultural rather than international […] UNESCO must not become a lists in which ‘national’ music joust for advantages in competitive preliminaries traditionally leading to war.” The focus of UNESCO had to be “the building of strong national music organizations, upon which strong international music organization can be based.” In order to keep the stronger nations from subordinating the weaker ones, UNESCO had to seek a balanced development, among the different countries, of “unions or syndicates of performing musicians, associations of music educators, and of allied activities such as concert management, rights collection, and music industry54”. Cultures, and not nations, were the players of the global cultural exchange. And the musical content of such intercultural exchange, would not be determined by traditional musical hierarchies, but by the context of music – the intentions and expectations of music producers, consumers, and mediators.

40Two years later, in 1949, Luiz Correa de Azevedo, addressing the recently founded International Folk Music Council (IFMC), expressed UNESCO’s goal as creating, under conditions of peace, “a spiritual union of the men of all races, of all religions and political views, over a common ground in which their beliefs and expectations, far from being dissimilar, will tend to the same goal: the spiritual improvement through education, science and culture.” Azevedo was proposing to create an International Institute of Music, a “worldwide super-organization for music.” In his words, the first step towards such overarching institution would be creating a kind of

  • 55 “L’Unesco et la musique populaire”, Journal of the International Folk Music Council 1, 1949, p. 19- (...)

council of the international musical organizations in charge of coordinating the activities of the different organizations, encouraging the creation of new international organizations in the areas where there is none yet, encouraging the creation of musical organizations in the countries that need it, counseling UNESCO in any music-related matter, preparing or promoting Festivals or International Congresses of Music, and finally organizing the creation of an International Institute… We hope to establish such Council by 195055

41These internationalist words from a Brazilian musicologist who began his career studying his country’s musical nationalism illustrate the successive historical shifts operated by the MD: from a New-Deal style of cultural nationalism to Pan Americanism, and then to the promotion of global exchanges.

42Seeger imagined music interests around the globe organized in two levels, a governmental one and a civil one. His vision in 1948 was “an inter-government agency,” UNESCO, “surrounded by a planetary family of autonomous specialized organizations with which it can deal, but which are controlled and directed by private initiative.” Individuals and organizations would be able to operate at both levels, through their governments or by means of the international association of their particular field. In the first case – the governmental level – ingenuity was necessary to overcome the bureaucratic mediations that menaced to dilute any proposal by the civil society along the way to UNESCO’s top instances of decision. And among civil society organizations, rivalries among countries were to be avoided, as they could lead, one more time, to war. Seeger was blunt in this regard: “the worst wars in modern times […] have been fought between nations that have been ‘interchanging’ and ‘understanding’ for centuries.”

  • 56 Seeger, Charles, “UNESCO, February 1948”, Notes, 1948, p. 165-168.

43This was an important conceptual shift, from agreements among governments representing nations, to global cultural exchanges among civil associations. Even so, Seeger national agreements were essential: “each Member State is urged, but not required, to form a ‘national cooperating body’ or commission to secure mass participation of citizens within the Member State. Six, among them the United States, had done this by September 1, 1947,” by gathering top officers from the Department of State, National Music Council, American Library Association, National Education Association, American Council on Education and American Council of Learned Societies56. In Seeger’s view international exchanges and cooperation did not undermine the integration of different institutions within each nation.

44Pan American music, considered in retrospective, bridged the folk revival and musical nationalism of the 1930s with the global ideologies of the 1950s represented by UNESCO. The valorization of the “music of the Americas,” both in its folk and classical (but not commercial) forms, seems from this perspective a model for the “music of the world.” Pan American music policies shifted, thus, from the hemisphere to the globe.

  • 57 Weimar Germany’s cultural policy over Latin America suffered from a similar weakness: the assumptio (...)
  • 58 Pan American exchanges also shaped the careers of major Latin American composers like Villa-Lobos, (...)

45The OCIAA programs were in general un-consequential in relation to Latin American audiences’ sympathy for the US-Latin Americans liked and rejected US culture for reasons other than cultural diplomacy57. More consequential were the MD-funded catalogues and publications that helped establishing folklore and music education as a transnational conversation among Latin Americans.58

  • 59 Fléchet, Anaïs, “Le Conseil international de la Musique et la politique musicale de l’Unesco”, Rela (...)

46There were two important aspects to this hegemonic project. First, unlike the previous European musical hegemony and the postwar “Americanization,” WWII hemispheric musical diplomacy explicitly valorized Latin American musical practices, knowledge, and actors. Its goal was to articulate Latin Americans institutionally with financially and politically more powerful cultural organizations in the United States, through hemispheric networks under US hegemony. And second, the MD’s institutional and ideological energies were re-articulated on a fully global scale after the war by incorporating American, European, and also Latin American cultural diplomats into UNESCO, particularly the International Council of Music, founded in 1949. As historian Anaïs Fléchet has shown, the ICM brought first art music and later folk or “traditional” music into a vast theater of exchanges and conflicts around the globalization of music59. By the 1960s, folk music and its populist ethos were already rooted in musical education and in the national imagination of Latin America, thanks in part to the MD catalogues, feeding Latin America’s both anti-imperialist left and nationalist conservative right.

47Considered from the perspective of the history of the globalization of culture, the Music Division provided legitimacy, in the space of just a few years, to specific strands – folklore, art music compositions, musical pedagogy – of a vaster musical democratization produced by artists, repertoires, airwaves, experts, and musical associations, increasingly connecting with each other across the world. Regarding Latin America, it further expanded a musical life whose nature had always been, and continued to be, transnational.

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Notes

1 The Boletín Latino Americano de Música, published until 1946, featured virtually the whole musical establishment of Latin America. Lange wanted the musical nationalisms of the region joining a common modernizing musicological program – research, composition, pedagogy, publishing, etc. – in dialogue with the musicology developed in the United States, which enjoyed larger institutional resources. Pablo Palomino, “Transnational Musical Networks in Latin America, 1910-1950” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2014), Chapter 4.

2 Schoultz, Lars, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998; Grandin, Greg, “The Liberal Traditions in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty, and the Origins of Liberal Multilateralism”, The American Historical Review The American Historical Review, 117:1, 2012, p. 68-91; Morgenfeld, Leandro, Vecinos en conflicto: Argentina y Estados Unidos en las conferencias panamericanas, 1880-1955, Buenos Aires, Peña Lillo, 2011.

3 Pan American Union, Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace, Buenos Aires, December 1-23, 1936: Report on the Proceedings of the Conference, Washington, Pan American Union, 1937, p. 109. The only experience of Pan American musical exchanges so far had been a Pan American concert series for diplomatic audiences in Washington DC since 1924. Another concert was organized in Mexico City in July 1937.

4 Hart, Justin, Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy, Oxford - New York, Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 3.

5 Arndt, Richard, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, Potomac Books Inc., 2005, p. 49-74.

6 Cramer, Gisela and Prutsch, Ursula, ¡Américas Unidas!: Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-46), Madrid and Frankfurt, Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2012. Brazilian “audiences” were treated as such, in the sense of a universe of preferences measurable through scientific surveys and having an “average” that could be addressed by advertising techniques. During the war, polls conducted by Gallup, as part of the OCIIA policies, produced information that was also shared by US military and intelligence agencies. Antônio Pedro Tota, O imperialismo sedutor: a americanização do Brasil na época da Segunda Guerra, São Paulo, Brazil, Companhia das Letras, 2000, p. 51.

7 Campbell, Jennifer, “Creating Something Out of Nothing: The Office of Inter-American Affairs Music Committee (1940–1941) and the Inception of a Policy for Musical Diplomacy”, Diplomatic History 36:1, 2012, p. 36.

8 Similarly, the US publishing industry served diplomatic interests by translating Brazilian literature in order to promote the image of a war ally virtually unknown by US readers. Here too the results fell behind the expectations. Cf. Smith, Richard Cándida, “Érico Veríssimo, a Brazilian Cultural Ambassador in the United States”, Tempo 19: 34, 2013, p. 147-173. On the other end of the relationship, among the broader unintended consequences of the United States’ cultural activism in Brazil during World War Two, there was the shaping of a regional identity in the Northeast. See Campbell, Courtney J., “The Brazilian Northeast, Inside Out: Region, Nation, and Globalization (1926-1968)”, Ph.D. Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 2014.

9 Sprague Smith, Carleton, Musical Tour through South America, June-October, 1940, New York, Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music, 1940.

10 Idem, p. III-IV. The surveys and polls that in those years were consolidating a national market in the United States were absent in Latin America, with the exceptions of very specific experiences. See, for the Argentine case, Rocchi, Fernando, “La americanización del consumo: las batallas por el mercado argentino, 1920-1945”, in María I. Barbero y Andrés M. Regalsky (eds.), Estados Unidos y América Latina en el siglo XX. Transferencias económicas, tecnológicas y culturales, Buenos Aires, EDUNTREF 2003.

11 Idem, p. XXXII-XXXIII.

12 Idem, p. XX.

13 Shepard, John, “The Legacy of Carleton Sprague Smith: Pan-American Holdings in the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts”, Notes, 62:3, 2006, p. 621-622.

14 Sprague Smith, Carleton, op. cit., p. XXV.

15 From William Berrien (American Council of Learned Societies), Irving Leonard (historian from Brown University), Concha Romero James (PAU Intellectual Cooperation), Harold Spivacke (Library of Congress Music Section), Charles Seeger (MD), and Carleton Sprague Smith (American Musicological Association and New York Public Library Music Section). After the war, Lange moved to the National University of Cuyo, Argentina and published the last issue of the Boletín in 1946, this time with support from Brazilian institutions and individuals.

16 The OCIAA’s director, for instance, was John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the creator of Standard Oil and a businessman himself. Corporate interests not just funded, but directed public programs.

17 Cohen, Ronald, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2002, p. 17. See also Ashe, Jennifer, “Modernism and Social Consciousness: Seeger, Cowell, Crawford, and the Composers Collective, 1931-1936”, Ph.D. Dissertation, New England Conservatory of Music, 2006 ; Garabedian, Steven, “Reds, Whites, and the Blues: Lawrence Gellert, ‘Negro Songs of Protest,’ and the Leftwing Folksong Revival of the 1930s and 1940s”, American Quarterly, 57:1, 2005, p. 179-206; McCall, Sarah, “The Musical Fallout of Political Activism: Government Investigations of Musicians in the United States, 1930-1960”, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Texas, 1993, p. 15; Pescatello, Ann, Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

18 Cohen, Ronald, op.cit.

19 Gough, Peter, “The Varied Carols I Hear’: The Music of the New Deal in the West”, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2009, p. iii.

20 Bindas, Kenneth, All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA’s Federal Music Project and American Society, Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

21 Rees, Helen, “‘Temporary Bypaths’ ? Seeger and Folk Music Research”, in Yung, Bell, and Rees, Helen, Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1999, p. 92-3. Charles Seeger’s son, Peter Seeger, would be a key figure, from the late 1940s through the 1960s, in the full blossoming of the “folk revival,” closely linked to the radicalism among US youth during those years.

22 The postwar mindset among policy makers was marked by global concerns: “at least in the United States no generation was so thoroughly indoctrinated in Universalist values as the one coming of age around mid-century” (Wiebe, Robert, Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism, Princeton, N.J, Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 1).

23 Pernet, Corinne, “For the Genuine Culture of the Americas: Musical Folklore, Popular Arts, and the Cultural Politics of Pan Americanism, 1933-1950”, in Jessica Gienow-Hecht (ed.), Decentering America, New York, Berghahn Books, 2007.

24 Here the MD continued a trend of library accumulation on Latin American collections, which stemmed from multiple private, philanthropic, and university initiatives, and had a hemispheric dimension, as suggested by the 1934 Inter-American Conference on Bibliography celebrated in Havana. Cf. Salvatore, Ricardo, “Library Accumulation and the Emergence of Latin American Studies”, Comparative American Studies, 3:4, 2005, p. 415-436.

25 Pan American Union, Informe Anual del Director General de la Unión Panamericana, Washington, 1941-1942, p. 99.

26 The number of bands is an estimate by the National Federation of Musical Clubs in the United States. See “The National Federation of Musical Clubs in the United States”, Boletín Latino Americano de Música, Lima, 1936.

27 Such as Filomena Salas (Fine Arts, University of Chile), Juan Bautista Plaza (music professor in Venezuela), Luis Sandi (Mexico, Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico), Domingo Santa Cruz (composer and Fine Arts Dean, University of Chile), Antonio Sa Pereira (director, National School of Music, Rio de Janeiro), and several others. These educators visited musical centers of Des Moines, Kansas City, Chicago, Joliet, Cleveland, Rochester, Boston, New Haven, and New York.

28 Seeger, Charles, “Review of Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music, 1940-1943”, s/f. [c.1944], Archive OAS, p. 2.

29 Seeger, Charles, “Brief History of the Music Division of the Pan American Union”, 6/9/1947a, Archive OAS, p. 3.

30 Idem, p. 3-4.

31 National Music Council, Bulletin 1: 3, New York, National Music Council, March 1941, p. 6.

32 Idem, p. 7.

33 Pan American Union, Informe Anual del Director General de la Unión Panamericana, Washington, 1942-1943, p. 117-118.

34 Seeger, Charles, “Musicology and the Music Industry”, paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the National Music Council, May 10, 1945, in National Music Council, Bulletin, 5:3, May 1945.

35 Seeger, Charles, “Brief History…”, op. cit.

36 Cartés, Brunilda, “Informe de la Secretaria del Comité Consejero en Educación Musical para las Repúblicas Latinoamericanas (ALADEM) de la Confederación Nacional de Educadores en Música de los Estados Unidos”, Oficina de Música, Pan American Union, 1946.

37 Idem, p. 5-8.

38 Cartés, Brunilda, “Music Education in Latin America”, Doctoral Dissertation, Northwestern University, 1946a, Preface.

39 Cartés, Brunilda, “Informe…”, op. cit., p. 13.

40 Sprague Smith, Carleton, Musical Tour…, op. cit., p. 283-284.

41 Roberts, John Storm, The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States, 2nd ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 1999, chap. 5.

42 “Con el Fox Trot y con el Tango hemos pagado a Europa el Descubrimiento de América, dice P. Whiteman, el Rey del Jazz”, Crítica, 7/6/1929. I thank Martín Bergel for this reference.

43 Pan American Union, “Resolución sobre el folklore, entre las aprobadas por la junta de ministros y directores de educación de las repúblicas americanas, reunida en Panamá, 27 de septiembre a 4 de octubre de 1943”, in Ralph Steele Boggs, “El folklore en la escuela”, in Folklore Americas, 6: 1/2, 1946, p. 11-12.

44 Azevedo, Luiz H. Corrêa de, A Escola Nacional de Música e as pesquisas de folclore musical no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Centro de Pesquisas Folclóricas - Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 1944.

45 In Chile, for instance, the emergence of folk items from the country’s central valley as symbols of chilenidad was influenced by Pan American initiatives. See Pernet, op. cit.

46 “Music Speaks to the Hearts of All Men: The International Movement in American Music Education: 1930-1954”, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 133, 1997, p. 143-152.

47 After the war, the internationalism of music educators gave impulse to the foundation in 1953 of the International Society for Music Education (ISME).

48 MENC directive Leon Roddick argued that despite differences such as the fact that US music “is more highly developed, that there is more widespread use of music in the United States, that public school music as we know it is not prevalent in South America, that some efforts of Latin American composers seem very simple and direct”, music is still “the expression of a people or the voice of art in neighboring republics, each another of the Americas”, and therefore something to be valued and shared across the hemisphere. Ruddick, Leon, “Music for Uniting the Americas”, Music Educators Journal, 28:3, January 1942, p. 10-11.

49 Beattie, John, Curtis, Louis Woodson, “South American Music Pilgrimage II: Ecuador and Peru”, Music Educators Journal, 28:3, 1942, p. 12-18.

50 Santa Cruz, Domingo, “On Hemispherical Unity”, Music Educators Journal, 28: 6, 1942, p. 13.

51 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, “Hands Across the Air”, Music Educators Journal, 28:6, 1942, p. 14. Leading Mexican musicologists Luis Sandi and Baqueiro Foster were also attentive to the connections between Mexican folklore, African music (“La Bamba” was for Sandi a “Nigro tang”), and also ancient Greek music, an argument that gave Mexican folk a universal dimension. Cohen, Ted, “Among Races, Nations, and Diasporas: Genealogies of ‘La Bamba’ in Mexico and the United States”, Studies in Latin American Popular Music, Forthcoming 2017.

52 Seeger, Charles, “Brief History…”, op. cit.

53 Idem.

54 Idem, p. 7.

55 “L’Unesco et la musique populaire”, Journal of the International Folk Music Council 1, 1949, p. 19-21 (my translation).

56 Seeger, Charles, “UNESCO, February 1948”, Notes, 1948, p. 165-168.

57 Weimar Germany’s cultural policy over Latin America suffered from a similar weakness: the assumption of the malleability of the region’s cultural élites. Cf. Goebel, Michael, “Decentering the German Spirit: The Weimar Republic’s Cultural Relations with Latin America”, Journal of Contemporary History, 44:2, 2009, p. 226.

58 Pan American exchanges also shaped the careers of major Latin American composers like Villa-Lobos, Carlos Chavez and Alberto Ginastera, as analyzed in Hess, Carol, Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream, New York, Oxford University Press, 2013.

59 Fléchet, Anaïs, “Le Conseil international de la Musique et la politique musicale de l’Unesco”, Relations internationales, n° 155, 2014/1, p. 53-71.

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Pablo Palomino, « Nationalist, Hemispheric, and Global: “Latin American Music” and the Music Division of the Pan American Union, 1939-1947 »Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [En ligne], Images, mémoires et sons, mis en ligne le 11 juin 2015, consulté le 17 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/68062 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.68062

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Auteur

Pablo Palomino

University of California, Berkeley
Pablo Palomino a étudié et enseigné histoire à l’Université de Buenos Aires (Argentina) et à l’Université de Californie à Berkeley. Sa thèse de doctorat (Transnational Musical Networks in Latin America, 1910-1950, Berkeley, 2014), dont un chapitre fournit la base de cet article, analyse une série de réseaux musicaux transnationaux qui ont coexisté avec l’essor des nationalismes culturels latino-américains, afin de montrer la dimension intrinsèquement globale de la vie musicale du sous continent. Il a publié un article sur les origines modernistes de la revue argentine El Gráfico (Prismas, en collaboration avec Martín Bergel), un essai de comparaison entre le tango argentin et le samba brésilien (Apuntes del CeCyP), et une étude des réseaux musicaux juifs à Buenos Aires dans l’ouvrage collectif Mazal Tov Amigos! Jews and Popular Music in the Americas (Brill, à paraître en 2015).
pablomin@berkeley.edu

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