Conference Agenda

The Spanish composer Federico Moreno Torroba once quipped that the dictator Francisco Franco was a “zero to the left”––a non-entity––on music. This description articulates a key issue in research on music and Francoism: the dictatorship did not espouse a coherent or consistent musical ideology and, as noted by scholars such as Javier Suárez-Pajares, there was a high degree of musical continuity before and after Franco seized power. Accordingly, Torroba’s description represents a wider tendency to understand “Francoist Music” in negative terms as music without top-down aesthetic mandates or clear distinctions from other eras.

In this paper, I develop a contrasting “bottom-up” approach to music under Franco
through a case study of independent cultural diplomacy by the guitarist Andrés Segovia
and his network of collaborators. Drawing on Peter Schmelz’s concept of intimate musical history, I argue that these musicians’ artistic goals and friendships forged personal projects that the dictatorship retrospectively treated as representations of Spain. I thus demonstrate individual agency over music during Franco’s rule by focusing on the private rather than the public. In turn, this perspective reframes the dictatorship’s musical policy from incoherence to pragmatic opportunism that, consequently, transformed individual aesthetics into metonyms for a nation.

Fado, a Portuguese urban folk genre, is often perceived as the Canção de Portugal [the song of Portugal], a symbol of Portuguese identity, the ‘alma’ [soul] of Portugal. However, given its prominence during the Salazar Dictatorship (1933-1974), one does not immediately associate fado with protest music - ‘explicit’ or ‘covert’. There is a lack of research on the subversive use of fado, perhaps due to the prominence of canção de protesto as the obvious musical channel for political protest. Even less studied is the role of Amália Rodrigues, who became the face of fado during the dictatorship and is largely responsible for solidifying fado as a pillar of Portuguese culture and identity. Throughout her career, Amália’s public image adapted to serve social and cultural demands, and as such, she shifted from her position as the ‘Rainha’ [queen] of fado, the face of fado internationally, to the ‘menina do Salazar’ [Salazar’s girl] or ‘Princesa da PIDE’ [the Princess of PIDE – the secret police operating under the dictatorship]. Following her centenary in 2020, new evidence has arisen that rebuts the notion of Amália being an advocate of the regime, and instead demonstrates that her political standing was ambiguous and often aligned with the political resistance movements. The central question of this study is not to clarify Amália’s political leanings – her own claim that she was ‘apolitical’ resonates with the uncertainty of charting a career within a dictatorship while, driven by an acute ‘social conscience’ and innate generosity, providing assistance to oppositionists. The main goal of this work is to discern how this newly revealed subversive facet of Amália is reflected in her musical output, ranging from repertoire to the choice of collaborators and poems, as well as in terms of the development of Amália’s expressive and interpretative range. Given this, I examine ‘Libertação’ as the main case study, supplemented by ‘Abandono’, ‘As Águias’, and ‘Estranha Forma de Vida’ to support this understudied line of enquiry.

The politics of the “drug war” are difficult to grasp in Mexico due to the transnational scale, elusiveness of actors, and the opacity of news coverage. And yet, this “war” is one of the most mediatized aspects of life in Mexico, recently making its way into a constellation of popular media referred to as “bélico” (bellicose).

This talk presents preliminary thoughts on bélico media and the musical genre corrido tumbado as giving rise to what I call the “bellicose ordinary” experienced by residents of insecure regions. Drawing on 2+ years of fieldwork in Michoacán, this ethnographic study illuminates related political/social facets of the drug war: the enduring charisma of drug cartel lifestyle; and the ways local communities make sense of conflict and political turmoil through the circulation/consumption of popular media. I suggest that the massive popularity of corrido tumbado signals a new configuration of power and politics in Latin America and a more intensely mediatized yet less clear-cut era of the drug war. State and criminal power exist within an epistemic murk rendered visible in its everyday dimensions only through mediatized forms. Thus, popular media are at the center of public understandings of insecurity, violence, and the experience of power.

This talk examines the political uses of an aria from the opera Aurora, by Argentine composer Héctor Panizza, premiered in 1908, during the inaugural season of the Teatro Colón. The aria, known as “Alta en el cielo”, “Canción a la bandera” or simply “Aurora”, became a favourite among the Argentine opera-going élite and was (and still is) traditionally encored in every performance of the opera.

In 1945, the Argentine government officially adopted it to the school curriculum as a patriotic. Its performance was mandatory during the daily ritual of raising and lowering of the national flag, thus becoming an integral part of the Argentine construction of national identity. After the restoration of democracy in 1983, it was reinterpreted across several genres, including protest songs, tango, and cumbia. Most significantly, it was adopted by Malvinas [Falklands] War veterans as a funeral dirge and sung on the remembrance ceremonies of April 2^nd. Aurora, I contend, exemplifies the extent to which the construction of meaning in music is intrinsically linked to political acts. From its inception, it has been used to construct differing versions of Argentine national identity, appropriated by different factions, and then re-appropriated by the people to shape collective memory.

This paper examines how musical tertulias shaped the pursuit of democracy in Mexico City during the period 1866–1867. Previous studies show how tertulias played an integral role in the development of national culture, in Mexico (Bitrán 2014; Miranda 2001) and in other Latin American countries (Peñín et al. 2000; Quintana 2010), but these studies have not investigated the relationship between tertulias and political ideology.

This paper examines periodical accounts of tertulias during a two-year period in which Maximilian I’s monarchy crumbled and liberal enthusiasm for democracy surged. First, periodical writers portrayed tertulias as fostering the “spirit of association,” a trait integral to democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville had found lacking in Mexico (Tocqueville 1835). Second, tertulias manifested a symbolic, trans-spatial experience of intimacy. Participants felt connected within the immanent moment to the advancing modernity and civilization of places like Paris. Third, tertulias massaged a feeling of collective racial sophistication, betraying an anxiety that Mexican elites might descend on the pecking order of global cultures. This paper argues that tertulias offered a model for an “intimate” democratic community. The contradictions and exclusions inherent within this intimacy undermined the democratic project in ways that are still instructive for Latin American politics.

In her final year as mayor of València, Spain, Rita Barberá spoke at the opening ceremony of the Falles Festival, a hallmark of València’s festive calendar. As is customary, Barberá delivered her speech in Valencian Catalan, the co-official dialect of the region, but her attempt only demonstrated her elementary grasp of the language. The eloquence that marked the beginning of the mayor’s speech quickly faded into a meandering litany of filler words and false starts, revealing Barberá’s (and, by proxy, Spain’s People’s Party’s) tenuous relationship with Valencian Catalan. Barberá’s linguistic missteps provoked a series of autotuned parodies of the speech on YouTube. These satirical interventions used musical humor to help Barberá’s blunders become a talking point in larger discussions about her inability to represent València politically and culturally. In this presentation, I explore the strategies these creators use to criticize Barberá’s speech from within through direct sonic manipulation, arguing that the parodies generate a political discourse uniquely centered around the nexus of music and language. Through the recontextualization of sound, an “ironic critical distance” (Hutcheon 2000) emerges between the implied meanings of Barberá’s original utterance and the new layers of meaning the parodies create, a distance I term musical implicature.