Latin American Musical Experimentalisms in Public Space
Chair(s): Andrew Snyder (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
In contrast to the rarefied performance settings of conventional concert halls, performances of experimental music in public space can intervene directly on local communities and take a stake in their soundscapes. Aiming to provoke unsuspecting crowds and engage them in often subversive and confrontational performances, experimental artists cultivate symbolic and material dialogues with urban sonic and spatial architecture, at times using the opportunity for social and political critique. Though public engagement has long represented a central dimension of musical experimentalism, publicly situated performances have been seldom examined, especially in Latin America, where artists often intervene directly on the distinct postcolonial legacies that structure public urban space. This panel explores three such instances, focusing on Latin American experimental music performance in the public spaces of the largest cities of three countries. Presenter 1 examines the outdoor sonic installations (1960s-1970s) by Juan Blanco in Havana, Cuba, showing how the composer engaged with leftist and anti-colonial values that resonated with the socialist regime’s promotion of el hombre nuevo. Presenter 2 discusses São Paulo’s Bloco Ruído, which makes use of carnival festivities and the bloco parading tradition to foster novel means of critically engaging with the city’s distinct soundscape. Presenter 3 explores Brazilian experimentalism in the historical metropole of Lisbon, Portugal, examining Ernesto Neto’s percussion installation, which, in taking the form of ship, articulated a decolonial critique of Portuguese coloniality in the Belem neighborhood where it was located and where nautical imagery memorializes Portugal’s “Age of Discovery.”
Presentations in the Session
The Revolution Will Be Sonified: Juan Blanco’s Utopic Soundscapes in Revolutionary Cuba
Marysol Quevedo
University of Miami
In 1968, residents and passersby on La Rampa were treated to Ambientación sonora, a 30-days-long 5-track sound installation of electroacoustic music amplified through loudspeakers placed along the urban avenue in the neighborhood of Vedado in Havana, Cuba. This was one of two public, urban sound installations of La Rampa by composer Juan Blanco, the father of Cuban electronic music. As I argue in this presentation, Blanco’s experimental aesthetics and leftist political views fused in his public sound installations and resonated with the Cuban socialist regime’s agenda of cultivating a socially conscious citizen, el hombre nuevo. His utopic designs involved the marriage of architecture or landscape and electroacoustic music through the sonification of public spaces and was frequently in collaboration with visual artists who contributed complimentary fixed media. His electroacoustic works and plans provide a window through which we can examine how a politically engaged artist theorized sound and its role in socialist Revolutionary society. In this presentation I examine the history of sound policing in Havana as a function of state control, and how sound functions as a way of knowing and being in the world for Cuban individuals. I then analyze Blanco’s Quinteto (1956) as an example of his nascent interest in sound spatialization. This leads to a discussion of Blanco’s exploration of electroacoustic composition in the first two decades of the Revolution through his writings, his role within state institutions, his compositions for outdoor spaces, and how these engaged with and contributed to ongoing socialist-revolutionary discourse.
An Experimental Carnival: Material Engagements with Space and Sound in São Paulo, Brazil
James McNally
University of Illinois Chicago
On Ash Wednesday, 2016, a crowd of fifteen people assembled in front of São Paulo’s Biblioteca Mário de Andrade to participate in the annual Bloco Ruído (Noise Bloco, or parading Carnival group). Each participant had spent the previous week constructing instruments from an assortment of household items, used electronics, and commercial kitsch in preparation for an extended parade through the city center. As the group marched through various notable and quotidian markers of the downtown cityscape, their instruments generated an industrial collage of glitches and feedback, garnering looks of bemusement from passers-by. In this presentation, I examine the distinct critical and creative possibilities of public experimental musical performance, focusing on the work of the Bloco Ruído. Drawing from the work of Lambrous Malafouris (2013) and Michel de Certeau (1984), I argue for understanding publicly situated creative initiatives such as the Bloco Ruído as material engagements with city space and sound. For the members of the Bloco Ruído, cultivating a material engagement with São Paulo fostered more direct and transformative engagements with urban space and sound than in conventional performance environments. In so doing, the bloco cultivated new interpersonal relationships across disparate social boundaries, in collaborative and sometimes confrontational ways. The presentation concludes with a consideration of the distinct context of the Brazilian Carnival, concentrating on the ways in which the Bloco Ruído inverted Carnival norms and opened new avenues of engagement with city space and sound not present in conventional Carnival contexts.
Our Ship Drum Earth: Decolonial Musicking in Ernesto Neto’s Percussion Installation in Lisbon
Andrew Snyder
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Brazilian sculptor Ernesto Neto’s gigantic artwork, “Our Ship Drum Earth,” was featured in Lisbon for five months in 2024. Taking the form of a ship, the piece played on the hallowed and omnipresent nautical emblem of Lisbon’s iconography, and particularly of the Belem neighborhood where it was situated, which celebrates the “Age of Discovery” as a foundational myth of Portugal. The installation contained percussion instruments from diverse cultures around the world, referencing the musical traditions that came into encounter as a result of colonialism. The ship also represented the earth itself, and Neto questioned in his commentary on the work where we might want to travel in this global vessel, interrogating the possibility for decolonial futures arising from the postcolonial present. Just as performance enacts the future through present action, a ship, Neto claimed, “points towards the future, but navigates in the present.” In this aleatoric, participatory installation, the various acts of musicking in the ship reinforced the futurist and decolonial orientation of the work. In addition to receiving visitors to experiment with the percussion, the ship hosted several performance events, which protagonized Lisbon’s diverse musical communities, featuring immigrant ensembles from ex-colonies of the Portuguese empire, Portuguese groups, and musicians from beyond the Lusophone world. In the final event, the musicians paraded from the museum into Belem’s public spaces, intervening directly on its colonialist mythology. Through performance, the musicians accumulated new meanings to the sculpture, experimentally and collaboratively answering Neto’s question about how to musically construct decolonial futures for themselves.
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