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.

This paper investigates the foundation (1870) and reopening (1900) of Ecuador’s National Conservatoire, with an emphasis on the social and political role of Western art music in Quito during the late nineteenth century. It challenges the notion that these institutions were derivative attempts at emulating European models, and instead suggests that Ecuador’s Conservatories reflected a distinctive understanding of the social role of music.

Through a combination of archival research and secondary literature, this paper argues that, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western art music in Ecuador became a site to formulate and advance complex narratives around progress, crisis and cultural decay, culminating in the foundation of the National Conservatoire. Archival material is used to show that the figures behind these pedagogical initiatives were less concerned with cultivating international prestige or producing orchestral musicians than with addressing the perceived threat of moral and cultural degeneration in the country. Reconsidering the motivations behind these institutions, in turn, helps account for their admissions policies and teaching practices, as well as for the preference given to candidates from rural backgrounds, while also challenging the long-standing characterisation of such conservatoires as “failures” on the basis that they did not reach the same milestones as their European counterparts. This paper examines how music was mobilised as a tool to stop vice, prevent moral decadence and provide ethical guidance to the population, and the extent to which the state’s treatment of music education was in direct dialogue with European fin-de-siècle discourse around ‘decaying empires’ and a changing world order. In doing so, it situates the tendency towards the institutionalisation and proliferation of Western art music in Ecuador within the broader intellectual climate of the time, while also emphasising the aspirational role that development, as an idea, went on to assume in Latin America during this time.

The second half of the paper compares Ecuador’s Conservatories to those of Chile and Argentina to argue that public investment in music education in these nations reflected a similar view of the demands and opportunities at the turn of the century.

Manuel M. Ponce (1882–1948), a leading 20^th-century Mexican composer, conceived of Mexican song as a melodious expression of the nation’s soul and essence. For Ponce, popular music was not a fusion of mixed cultural and ethnic heritages but a transculturation of European music in Mexico. In 1925, Ponce traveled to Paris to update his musical language and to delve into the latest trends in European culture and art. Enrolling in Paul Dukas’ composition course at the École Normale de Musique fundamentally altered Ponce’s musical aesthetics.

During this period, Ponce produced distinctive solo-vocal works, including his eight Ciclos (Cycles), which I assert are closely linked to Latin American Modernismo, a pre-revolutionary literary movement in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries with orientalist and exotic attributes.

In this proposal, I contend that these important yet largely neglected songs constitute a giant leap forward in his compositional style and technique. After arriving in Paris, Ponce finished the second cycle for voice and piano, Tres poemas on verses by the Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov. Although the texts that Ponce chose as the basis for the composition of six of his eight cycles belong to poets influenced by the Modernismo movement, the music written for them corresponds precisely to this artistic trend. At the end of 1931, he wrote Granada, using a poem by Mariano Brull. Ponce also began the Five Poésies chinoises and Poemas Melancólicos. He concluded this series in Mexico, where he wrote Cuatro poemas by Icaza in 1936; Seis poemas arcaicos in 1938; and Tres poemas by González Martínez, two of them in 1939 and the last in 1940.

In my work, I will examine and contextualize these pieces, considering historical and interdisciplinary aesthetic tendencies through the lenses of Latin American Modernismo, Orientalism, Exoticism, Transculturation, and Paul Dukas’ musical style. This highly diverse collection reveals an eclectic composer who diverged from an evolutionary and teleological creative process. I argue that by studying Ponce’s transcultural influences, we can observe broader trends of orientalism and exoticism in 20^th-century Mexican music, which remain understudied in musicology.