Music, State Populism, and Affective Nationalism in Early 20th-Century Latin America
Chair(s): Ana Paola Sánchez-Rojo (Tulane University,)
Discussant(s): Jacqueline Avila (University of Texas at Austin)
Many Latin American states turned to music as a tool for social reform beginning in the 1920s. Under the purview of what Pablo Palomino (2020) has recently called “State Musical Populisms,” elected officials aimed to shape national culture through communal musicking, such as workers’ orfeones (choirs) and children’s songs based on what these officials categorized as “folkloric” or “popular” music. The massive scale of some of these projects afforded audibility to the state apparatus.
As William Mazzarella (2019) has recently studied, populism rests on a political ambiguity: it emerges between the authorized representation of institutions and the unmediated enactment of explosive popular power. Populism gains affective intensity when it represents “the people” as the underdog. Nationalism aims to create mechanisms of identification with a larger imagined political community (Anderson 1983) but is not necessarily concerned with mobilizing the relation between “the people” and an elite that perennially oppresses them (Laclau 2005). What happens when the state ventriloquizes the voice of “the people”?
Looking at case studies from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, the papers in this session disentangle the populist thread from the broader concept of nationalism. Anglophone histories of Latin American musical nationalisms have heavily relied on studying the music for concert halls and state-sponsored composers. Instead, we turn our ears to the archives of other state-sponsored practices such as civic choirs, orquesta típica ensembles, and school festivals, all of which reveal new avenues for research on musical populism(s) and nationalism(s). By probing the theoretical overlap between populism and nationalism, each paper touches on race, labor, pedagogy, and national politics of belonging.
Presentations of the Symposium
Heitor Villa-Lobos and Political Opportunism in Music Education
Chelsea Burns
University of Texas at Austin
When Heitor Villa-Lobos took the helm of Brazil’s newly created Department of Artistic and Musical Education in 1932, he assumed the task of developing a national music education program. Given the Vargas administration’s emphasis on centralized national institutions, Villa-Lobos’s work was both musical and political in nature. Calling the program “collective,” he put the curriculum in terms of a “Brazilian musical conscience” (n.d., between 1940 and 1942). And while Villa-Lobos’s curricular work might be construed as labor in service of the national government, it was clearly more mutually beneficial than that—his curriculum served not only administrative goals, but also personal ones.
Villa-Lobos’s curriculum centered on canto orfeônico, a singing practice that was both pedagogical and performative. As part of this practice, he took massive choirs of children—sometimes as large as one thousand—to perform across the country and abroad. With this program, Villa-Lobos positioned himself at the center of national musical identity, while also demonstrating close ties to centers of power in the federal government. He characterized the choral performances as a direct mapping between children and the land, describing the sound of the concerts as hearing deserts, forests, and rivers.
What comprised canto orfeônico? Published volumes from the curriculum include folk songs, Indigenous melodies, and original compositions elevating workers and the government—songs of the blacksmith or the washer, and titles like “Rio de Janeiro Civic Song” or “Greetings to Getúlio Vargas.” Musically, there is little consideration of pedagogy or children’s vocal capacities: many songs include complicated a cappella arrangements, bass and baritone lines, and division into up to six parts. The songs seem less sensitive to pedagogical boundaries than political aims.
For the Vargas administration, canto orfeônico served a two-pronged purpose. It provided a centralized program that could strengthen the national reach of the government. It also functioned as a vehicle for international spectacle and a broadcast of educational infrastructure. While Villa-Lobos’s work laid claim to national pedagogy, it was also motivated by other priorities—both transmitting the Vargas administration’s populist messaging and centering himself as an essential part of Brazil’s musical character, an intertwined personal and political endeavor.
Workers’ Choirs, Eugenics, and Cultural Intimacy in 1930s Colombia
Daniel Castro Pantoja
University of North Carolina-Greensboro
In early 1936, working-class Colombians were called to sing the nation-state (Butler and Spivak 2007). Orfeones obreros (workers’ choirs) were soon formed all over the country, an initiative managed by the National Directorate of Fine Arts (DNBA), then in the hands of Liberal elites. Among the many requirements instituted by the DNBA, orfeonistas were mandated to enroll in music literacy classes, taught exclusively after six in the afternoon so that they would interfere with regular working hours. The DNBA also limited the orphéonic repertoire to choral arrangements of Andean mestizo (racially-mixed) popular music genres like the bambuco, presumed to be resolutely local. Meanwhile, Cuban rumbas and Mexican corridos, favored among the working classes, were eschewed, deemed by state officials as potentially unhealthy for Colombian ears. Years later, this apparent representational gap between “the people'' and the state would be efficiently captured by non-partisan populist movements, who not only questioned the capacity of partisan elites to rule democratically, but also casted doubt on music's putative (orphic) powers to appease the masses.
Expanding on recent work on Colombian soft eugenics (Muñoz 2022), in this paper, I present a micro-genealogy of the Liberal state's (mis)handling of these orfeones during their first year of existence. I argue that populism's hunger for political immediacy (Mazzarella 2019) pushed state bureaucrats to produce documents that reveal moments of what Michael Herzfeld (2016) calls cultural intimacy. By this, I mean those aspects of national identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment, but which are integral to creating a sense of communitas in a large socio-political space like the nation-state. In examining the Colombian state’s mediation of musical populism, I demonstrate that listening for cultural intimacy can help scholars distinguish nationalism from populism, an overlap common in academic and public debates that has made the architectonics of populism hard to grasp (De Cleen & Stavrakakis 2017). Finally, using an ideational approach to populism (Hawkins & Rovira-Kaltwasse 2017), I reflect on the historiographical implications of the perceived historical failure of the Colombian state to give a voice to “the people.”
Music and Populism in Mexican Post-Revolutionary Education
Ana P Sánchez-Rojo
Tulane University
This paper examines the state ideology regarding music's role in national education in post-revolutionary Mexico during the tenure of José Vasconcelos as Secretary of Public Education (1921–24). In line with Vasconcelos's racial ideas about mestizaje (the mixing of the Indigenous and Spanish races), early post-revolutionary Secretariat of Public Education discourse advanced music education to invigorate the Mestizo and Indigenous races. A free, strong Mestizo race would equip Mexico to compete culturally, politically, and economically on the international scene. Post-revolutionary racial-cultural discourse affirmed that Mexican popular music eclipsed Western European art music like the mestizo race exceeded the white one.
The state personnel working with Vasconcelos saw Mexican popular music as the raw expression of the people, in contrast with Western European music, which stifled expressivity through strict methods and canons. According to this philosophy, teaching music in schools and centers for adult education spiritually fortified Mexicans through a cathartic liberation from imposed musical practices, parallel to how physical education fortified the body. The Secretariat of Public Education hoped to create spaces where the working classes would socialize productively through music lessons, factory workers' choirs (orfeones), bands, and orquesta típica ensembles. Among the arts, music and choral singing were considered particularly suited to molding minds because they were seen as reaching people's souls. At the same time, training workers to sing and play music would solidify a core repertory of Mexican music collectively sourced and available to all, unlike concerts and operas offered in the theaters of major urban centers. The idea of positioning common citizens as leading music producers and consumers in the post-revolutionary nation found resistance among conservative middle and upper classes.
The crusade for popular music endured into the 1930s through institutions such as the orfeones and Mexico City's Escuela Popular de Música, even though the repertory embraced by public education officials ended up including pieces from the Western European tradition next to traditional ones. Official educational discourse glorifying popular music contributed to the consolidation of a core nationalist repertory taught in schools and cultural associations to this day.
