Conference Agenda

Throughout the twentieth century, successive Argentine military dictatorships implemented censorship strategies aimed at preserving a moral, nationalist ideal, with music being one of their central targets. This paper examines how during this period, censorship shaped and reconfigured musical expression in Argentina, arguing that repression operated both through explicit prohibition and through a more pervasive symbolic logic aimed at silencing the human voice itself. Drawing on scholarship by Mara Favoretto and Timothy Wilson, Pablo Vila, Juan Carlos Biglia and David Lifschitz, Ángel Cabaña, among others, I explore the often-elusive rationale underpinning structures of musical repression and their ideological foundations.

Through a comparative case study, I analyze the banning of Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” (1977); Alberto Ginastera’s opera Bomarzo (1967); María Elena Walsh’s children’s song “El twist del Mono Liso” (1963); and Manuel Ortiz Ayala’s cueca “Pa’l Comisario” (ca. 1970). While some prohibitions appear self-evident—such as the censorship of “Pa’l Comisario” (For the Police Commissioner), which openly ridicules authority and social hierarchies—others reveal subtler anxieties. The banning of Walsh’s seemingly innocuous children’s song in a twist style exposes concerns surrounding foreign cultural influence and youth education, while Bomarzo and “Cocaine” were condemned for their representations of decadence and moral ambiguity, deemed incompatible with the regime’s ultraconservative worldview.

A government document listing several of these censored works refers to them as cantables (“singables”) rather than canciones (“songs”). This paper argues that this linguistic substitution constitutes a symbolic act of ontological silencing: the containment of vocality itself as a perceived threat to moral order, rather than a mere regulation of sound or text. In this sense, censorship functioned as a technology for disciplining bodies and voices, as well as repertoires.

Situating these examples within broader frameworks of cultural policing and self-censorship, I claim that musical control in Argentina was constitutive of the state’s ideological project. Cases such as Ginastera’s self-exile reveal how silencing mechanisms were internalized by artists, shaping creative decisions and trajectories. By foregrounding both overt bans and implicit constraints, this study highlights the negotiations between repression and creativity, and the centrality of the voice as a site of political anxiety under authoritarian rule.