In Argentina there are notebooks of manuscript paper called Istonio, in which, for more than fifty years, illustrations of ‘great composers’ featured in their covers. Por-traits of, for example, Bach and Boccherini, or Puccini and Gluck, among others, were accompanied by extracts of biographical information. Genius and the ability to transcend time with their works were common to the featured composers. In the manuscript notebooks there was never a portrait nor a biographical review of John Lennon or Atahualpa Yupanqui, or of Rosita Melo or Teresa Carreño. The educa-tional cover portraits sought to distinguish the manuscript notebooks through their depictions of ‘great composers’, exposing the hegemonic character of academic mu-sic as opposed to popular mumu-sic. This division between the popular and academic fields is a constant that is clearly observed in the institutionalised teaching of the history of twentieth-century music in Argentina1 which frequently omits the history of popular music.
Another common and recurrent trait is the assimilation of musical analysis as a corpus of music history and its conversion into a favourite strategy for the didactics of its teaching. Likewise, in Argentina during the twentieth century, the positive and high value placed on European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was manifested both in the content of professional musicians’ education programmes and in the programming of theatres and concert houses.
These facts converge in the shaping of professional musicians, connecting the cul-tural capital of the hegemonic classes with the formation of the taste and values that are attributed to the whole culture, as a form of distinction as described by Pierre Bourdieu in his study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste in 1979.
In professional musicians’ education, the impact of music history is relevant be-cause the musicians communicate and collaborate in the configuration and formula-tion of the ideas about what music and musicians are in the society to which they belong. Music history informs about aesthetics, artistic movements, periodisation, forms of musical production, and applications and diffusion within the framework of culturally situated relationships. In addition, it provides a significant portion of the
1 Silvia Carabetta: Sonidos y silencios en la formación de los docentes de música. Buenos Aires: Maipue, 2008.
conceptual bases from which music is conceived, and how it operates in the reproduc-tion and transformareproduc-tion of the surrounding world.2
This article has researched the education of professional musicians from fourteen universities and seven conservatories,3 their compulsory and elective subjects, semi-nar programmes that integrate such study plans, and the literature used. In the Ar-gentine higher education system, the curricular offerings and student numbers are greater in public institutions, with unrestricted and free access. Private universities are excluded from this examination. The research samples were formed with pro-grammes of universities and conservatories corresponding to twelve of the twenty-four provinces and national territories.4
In some cases, such as in the province of Buenos Aires, programmes from three different national universities (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional de las Artes, and Universidad Nacional de La Plata), and three conservatories of im-portant cities (La Plata, Morón, and Junín) were surveyed; in other provinces profes-sional musical training is offered by a single university or tertiary institution.
The higher education system in Argentina has curricula in which history of music involves at least one or more specific and compulsory subjects in the professional training of musicians. In this corpus, twentieth-century music is contemplated in specific subjects, the duration of which are similar to those that address music history of previous centuries. In the analysed sample, such subjects usually take a year to complete. The duration of these subjects within the curricula does vary in some cas-es, however, only minimally. Another common aspect is the positioning of courses within the study plan; twentieth-century music history is customarily taught in the second or third year of training. In this sense, the history of twentieth-century music becomes available shortly after the point at which the student attrition rate reaches its peak – between the first and second years, both in universities and conservatories.
The content of the study plans for twentieth-century music are largely similar, with central subjects referring to the first European avant-garde, the development of electroacoustic music, and avant-garde music from the post-war period that employs graphic notation. There is also a common lack of intersecting axes of historical musi-cal processes that would afford diverse themes greater cohesion; much of the content is consequently presented as a collection of autonomous and unconnected entities.
2 Gustavo Bueno: ¿Qué es la ciencia? La respuesta de la teoría del cierre categorial. Ciencia y filosofía. Colloto:
Pentalfa Ediciones, 1995.
3 Forty-two music history programmes are reviewed. In some institutions twentieth-century music history involves two subjects.
4 These are Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Mendoza, Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Misiones, San Juan, Tucumán, Salta, Chubut, Tierra del Fuego, and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (capital city).
Specific content about the early twenty-first century is almost non-existent in the formal structure of study plans.
In a first hypothesis we consider that the propensity to a romantic-positivistic mu-sical historiography in the sequencing of content negatively impacts the requisite specificity for understanding sound and musical phenomena from the twenty-first century. This lack of specificity is related to difficulties in transferring the knowledge produced by musicological research to university-level teaching, especially in con-servatories. The main literature dedicated to general and comprehensive study of the twentieth century was produced in Europe and the USA between 1960 and 1990,5 although in the last three decades partial and ultra-specialised musicological studies have grown exponentially. Such studies are frequently inadequate for a music history study plan at the undergraduate level, though, in the sense that they are so specific, usually focalise on partial aspects, and do not provide a general overview. A holistic vision of a determinate process in music history is still important at an undergraduate level. This fact implies both an outdated bibliographic offering – and musicological knowledge in general – as well as a reinforcement of content related to the first six decades of the twentieth century.
Another problematic factor is the omission of popular music from the curricula.
Aspects related to current musical genres (for example, candombe or hip hop) are completely unknown in the programmes studied and in their bibliographical sources.
The centrality of a written music tradition in the teaching of twentieth-century mu-sic history raises important points of contention, such as a widespread disregard of cultural consumption. The exclusive study of the compositional techniques of inte-gral serialism as a feature of post-war musical production in the second half of the twentieth century does not only ignore the emergence of rock and roll and its impact on culture, but also the development of multinational marketing in the recording industry, as in the case of PolyGram6 and the influential importance of television in popular music production7.
In the programmes analysed, some constants were observed in content and se-quencing. Three concepts seem to dominate here: the emphatic emergence of the individual’s role, differentiation through stylistic features, and innovation-oriented
5 María Paula Cannova: “Aquello que una presencia puede ocultar”, in: Revista Clang 2 (2008), pp. 38–44.
6 PolyGram was the first multinational record company. Gerben Bakker studied the relation between the concentrated economy of the record industry and the expansion of music genres. See Gerben Bakker: “The Making of a Music Multinational: PolyGram’s International Businesses, 1945–1998”, in: Business History Review 80 (Spring 2006), pp. 81–123.
7 Simon Frith: “Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television”, in: Popular Music 21/3 (2002), pp. 277–290.
periodisation. In this way, the Western male composer becomes the main subject, synthesising the entirety of compositional activity. In the romantic and positivistic tradition, the musical work is the historiographic subject, and morphologic analysis is the method to gain knowledge of music history.
Innovation has been the predominant feature in the valuation of music from the repertoire of traditional musical historiography. Settling on a change produces an absence of historical perspectives based on longue durée8 process that reinforces the autonomy of the musical work as being more important than the historical facts in which the music circulates. For example, the abandonment of tonality at the begin-ning of the twentieth century by the avant-garde emphasised such innovation as most European composers continued to use the tonal system. Another case is thematic and motivic elaboration as a predominant compositional technique during the 20th cen-tury. In both situations, the emphasis on innovation hides the permanence of music practices and their socio-cultural impact. This can even be observed in music history programmes that expressly seek to depart from a positivistic romantic model, a per-spective that is also consolidated through the use of an anachronistic bibliography.
In most of the analysed programmes, the content derived from the application of the new musicology or articulation with other social sciences is displaced, relegated to a lesser place, or simply non-existent. This situation is accentuated in the teach-ing of music history in conservatoires. For example, a common feature is observable in the bibliography of the first thematic unit of the subject “Evolution of styles IV”
(Evolución de los estilos IV), from the arts career9 of the National University of Buenos Aires. In this first unit there are eight compulsory texts, four of which are titled with the names of composers (Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Eric Satie, and Igor Stravinsky). This exposes the conceptualisation of a musical historiography anchored only in one of the agents of the musical field: the composers.
In the sample, ninety percent of the courses have composers as teaching content.
Satie is one of the most paradigmatic cases because he is included in parity with such concepts as the crisis of tonality, the irruption of the musical avant-garde, imperial-ism and artistic innovation, among others.10 Debussy, though, is presented in associa-tion with quesassocia-tions of style: Debussy and symbolism or impressionism.
8 Ferdinand Braudel: On History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
9 Career, in Argentina, refers to professional knowledge accredited by an official institution which grants an enabling degree with a specific curriculum.
10 In the first unit of “Evolution of styles IV” we find the following content: “c) Claude Debussy’s works. Tectonics and stylistic aspects. His relation to intellectuals and artistic contemporary movements in France: impressionism and symbolism. Erick Satie.” (c) La obra de Claude Debussy.
Aspectos técnicos y estilísticos. Su relación con los movimientos intelectuales y artísticos contemporáneos en Francia: impresionismo y simbolismo. Erik Satie.) Translation by María Paula Cannova, as with all other
The programme of the previously mentioned subject “Evolution of styles IV”
motivated a clarification by Professor Omar Corrado (Universidad de Buenos Aires), who questions the evolution denomination, but not the one of styles:
With regard to the name of the subject, although it is known that it cannot be modified administratively and academically, it requires, in our opinion, to be problematised, not only in its extension – it should include the study of the music produced in the bygone decade of the 21st century – or in the termino-logical imprecision that means the category of impressionism applied to music in light of long-standing studies, but that the use of the term ‘evolution’ im-plies a reference to history, and the history of artistic productions in particular.
The conceptions about a historical event, and even more, one that concerns the artistic facts, no longer support the vectorial, unidirectional criteria implicit in this word.11
Despite the fact that the term style is not reflected and criticised in the same way as the term evolution, lecturers responsible for the subjects have epistemological posi-tions that are not always clearly reflected in the titles of the courses. This also exposes the need for knowing the teaching realities of the classroom because the official do-cuments, such as those for the music history programmes, are not exhaustive sour-ces of information. Omar Corrado’s musicological work is an example of lucidity and musicological renewal. The epistemological assumption of the style concept as a vector for the music history content is observable both in the theoretical frame-work (for example, in María Enriqueta Loyola’s article “Renovación de la música en Argentina”12) and in the sequencing of content itself (for example, in the first unit of
translations in this article. See http://artes.filo.uba.ar/evolución-de-los-estilos-iv-impresionismo-y-siglo-xx-0, and: http://artes.filo.uba.ar/sites/artes.filo.uba.ar/files/Evolucion%20de%20los%20 Estilos%20IV%20.doc, last accessed 3 May 2019.
In the third unit of “History of music III”, from the Universidad del Litoral (Santa Fé) we find this content: “Eric Satie’s piano music from 1890.” (La música para piano de Eric Satie de la década de 1890.) See http://www.ism.unl.edu.ar/programas/img/HISTORIA%20DE%20LA%20MÚSICA%20III%
20PROGRAMA%202017.pdf, last accessed 3 May 2019.
11 Omar Corrado: “Programme of the subject evolución de los estilos IV (Impresionismo, Siglo XX)”, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires.
Available in: repositorio.filo.uba.ar/xmlui/bitstream/handle/filodigital/3613/uba_ffyl_p_2016_
art_Evoluci%c3%b3n%20de%20los%20estilos%20IV%20%28%20Impresionismo%20y%20 Siglo%20XX%29.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y, last accessed 12 December 2017.
12 María Enriqueta Loyola: “Renovación de la música en Argentina. El lenguaje neoclásico de las obras para piano de Luis Gianneo”, in: Huellas 5 (2006), p. 53–66; http://bdigital.uncu.edu.ar/1226, last accessed 31 March 2019.
the music history programme we see: “Vienna school: Schoenberg, Webern, Berg.
Technical and stylistic aspects of its production” (La escuela de Viena: Schoenberg, We-bern, Berg. Aspectos técnicos y estilísticos de su producción). This then implies, that “The concept ‘work’ and not ‘event’ is the cornerstone of music history”.13 The positivistic romantic perspective on the history of music denies the ideological character of the historical narrative. This does not, however, manage to hide the pretension of return-ing hegemony to the history of music that exclusively contains the Western Euro-pean classical tradition,14 the expression of which is the score notation as essentialism of the work.15
There are divergences from what has been said before, for example, in the case of the University of Entre Ríos. The subjects “Social and political history of music”
and “Social and political history of Latin American and Argentine music” are not periodised by centuries or styles but by themes from a historiographic perspective (social history, annals, new history, etc.) orient the thematic grouping of contents. In both subjects the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are addressed in concert music as well as in popular music, but the correlation between historiographical problems and content is exposed even in the titles of each programme’s units, such as in the fourth unit, called “The oligarchies of the Argentine centenary, the cosmopolitan vanguard and the irruption of the popular sectors in the political and cultural scene.
Cultured and popular music in the first half of the 20th century in Argentina and South America”.16 Another example for the adoption of social history in context with the post-war avant-garde is “Music in the welfare state: the institutionalised and integrated avant-garde as state policy”.17
The possibility of incorporating popular music into music history has theoretical difficulties that are not restricted to the musicological field. Ethnomusic, folklore, and popular music studies are some of the fragmentations that postulate specificity on this music that largely prescinds from the pentagram, which is firmly based on so-nority and rhythm rather than on counterpoint or harmony, which is consumed daily with different functions and levels of attention, and which is danced, sung, covered,
13 Carl Dahlhaus: Fundamentos de la historia de la música. Barcelona: Gedisa, 1997, p. 13.
14 Leo Treitler: “Towards a Desegregated Music Historiography”, in: Black Music Research Journal 16/1 (1996), pp. 3–10.
15 Martín Eckmeyer: “Entre la música de las esferas y la sordera del Genio. Sobre la persistencia del modelo historiográfico dominante en Historia de la Música”, in: Ponencia dictada durante las VI Jornadas de Investigación en Disciplinas Artísticas y Proyectuales. La Plata: Facultad de Bellas Artes de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata, www.academia.edu/34292475/Entre_la_m%C3%BAsica_de_las_esferas_y_la_
sordera_del_genio, last accessed 9 December 2017.
16 Ibid., p. 5.
17 Ibid., p. 8.
appropriated, globalised, massified, and standardised. The teaching of twentieth-cen-tury music history in Argentina continues to search for the distinction18 and with it, its close link with the classical music (música culta). Classical music guarantees the good taste of the social group that at the same time legitimises this repertoire. In order to avoid such degradation, popular music is annulled; it is enclosed in the canon and af-firmed in the style prioritising musical analysis over historical interpretation.
Added to that is an overwhelming persistence of European and North American music, compared to the presence of Latin American music, the ignorance of which is concerning. This situation, however, is experiencing a tendency towards change.
The contributions of teaching researchers, such as Omar Corrado, Silvina Mansilla, Leonardo Waisman, Martín Liut, Martín Eckmeyer, among others, are testimony to this. The mixture is part of the Latin American cultural tradition. It is the miscege-national product of the imposition of colonisation, which – with pain – managed to constitute a cultural and sound form of its own, marketed by the cultural industry, although difficult for the academic field to study and teach. In this mixture twenti-eth-century music history teaching in Argentina can find bases to promote in future musicians an updated and situated knowledge of the recent past, indispensable to understanding of the present.
18 Pierre Bourdieu: La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979.
Megan Burslem and Cat Hope