The Revista Argentina de Musicología –ISSN 1666-1060 (impreso) - ISSN 2618-3072 (en línea)– is the official journal of the Asociación Argentina de Musicología. This is an open access journal, which means that all content is freely available and at no cost to the user or their institution. Users may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without seeking prior authorization from the editor or author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access. The RAM began publication in 1996 in print and, in 2017, moved to the online platform using OJS to offer open and free access to all its content. It was mostly published annually, and since 2020, it has been published semi-annually. Since 2012, the RAM includes a thematic dossier whose participants are invited by the designated editor or coordinator. The RAM integrates the AAM Publications Portal.
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Introduction to the Dossier “Music and periodical press in Latin America: Cultural Processes and Interdisciplinarity”
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Alice Volpe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Dra. Fátima Graciela Musri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Rollos de tango. La era de las pianolas en Argentina y las interpretaciones de Agustín Bardi para autopianos
Rollos de Tango. La era de las pianolas en Argentina y las interpretaciones de Agustín Bardi para autopianos, by Horacio Asborno and Omar García Brunelli, represents a highly interesting introductory work concerning sound heritage, opening a field of research that encompasses various musicological and organological aspects.
Copyright (c) 2025 Carolina Ovejero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Politics to the Rhythm of the Peñas: The Articulation of a Youth Political Identity in Rosario's Folk Music Gatherings (1959-1976)
This article is the result of research that explored the infinite relationship between politics and music. Its objective is to elucidate and analyze the ways in which a youthful political identity was articulated within the spaces of popular folk music in Rosario during the period from 1959 to 1976. The central hypothesis of this study is that, within the framework of the Rosario folk music gatherings (peñas), studied as a ritual, a particular youthful political subjectivity was articulated. This subjectivity was constructed through the overlapping of three dimensions that shape political identity: otherness, representation, and an approach to tradition. The methodology employed is qualitative, including work with secondary sources, specialized literature, popular folk songs, and open-ended interviews with relevant actors, particularly those who attended and participated in folk music gatherings during the period in question.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mauro Dlugovitzky https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Fátima Graciela Musri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Semiotics of Music and Problems of Musical Meaning. Introduction to the dossier
Introducción al dosier "Semiótica de la Música y problemáticas de la significación musical", Vol. 25, Nro. 2, Diciembre de 2024.
Copyright (c) 2024 Federico Buján https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The bats’i as a supposed semiotic: intersubjective creations in Chiapas indigenous rock
Some indigenous communities in Latin America have presented new musical creations based on popular genres such as rock and hip-hop. The case of rock in the Tsotsil language or bats'i rock (true rock) is particularly significant because it incorporates cultural elements such as the language, clothing, musical instruments, etc., as well as others from the global rock culture such as the song format and participation in music festivals. However, more than showing reminiscences of the traditional in the rock they produce, I am interested above all in evidencing the processes of intersubjective meaning that configure this youth music scene. This article seeks to demonstrate that the notion of “bats’i”, as a central category in the process of semiosis, evidences a new platform of enunciation in different contexts thanks to the creation of a new semiotic text materialized as bats’i rock.
Copyright (c) 2024 José Humberto Sánchez Garza https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The double project of Folklore magazine in its beginnings (1961-1965).
The 1960s in Argentina were marked by the so-called folklore boom, a phenomenon of great relevance that promoted the massive commercialisation of popular music with folkloric roots. This process would not have been possible without the support of the cultural industries, especially the publishing market. In this context, the magazine Folklore, founded in 1961, became the main dissemination space for artists, festivals and peñas all over the country. The appearance of this magazine responded to a demand from the reading public, which was looking for both informative and educational content. This need was the driving force that led the editorial management to create the Conciencia Folklórica section, aimed at disseminating scholarly contents in each issue. This paper analyses this section with the aim of identifying the intentions of the editorial management at the time of publishing the magazine. We argue that there was a double project: a constant feedback between the economic interests of the financier and the proposals of the intellectuals, who sought to consolidate certain theoretical lines without losing sight of the economic benefits derived from this alliance.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Julia Carrazana https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
“El Maestro y la Diva”: women jazz musicians who subvert the jazz canon in Bogotá
Although the Bogotá jazz canon has been cited as one of the styles that has most successfully broken down class, race, and gender stereotypes, as in other musical scenes, it continues to reproduce models and stereotypes that accentuate the historical violence inflicted on women in the musical sphere in Western societies. The Diva and the Maestro emerge as archetypal images of the exclusionary precepts with which this musical genre has been canonized in Bogotá. Based on qualitative analyses, this article explores the challenges and struggles currently faced by women within this musical context and the impacts that the canonization of jazz has had on them in terms of inequality and exclusion.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniela González Ramos, Ana Lucía Hurtado Ocampo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Discourses of Women Music Critics and Modern Brazil: Apology for Classical Music
This article analyzes and contrasts the discourses —during the first half of the 20th century— of the Brazilian music critics Lúcia Branco, Beatriz Leal Guimarães, Ondina Portella Ribeiro Dantas, and Magdala da Gama Oliveira regarding classical music repertoires and performers, both foreign and local, as well as male and female. Furthermore, it highlights the elitist judgments and the denigration of samba, coinciding with the period of its nationalization and export. Advocates of written tradition music, these women engaged in debates over who embodied the Brazilian identity. For these music critics from the Carioca aristocracy, the Brazilian identity had to be purified by eliminating African traces. The struggle between the learned and the popular —the harmless versus the harmful— is also evidence of the racism and classism propagated by the media, and also by women. Keywords: female music criticism, Brazilian music criticism, classical music, popular music, samba.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nayive Ananías https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Iconicity and indexicality in sounds and music
This article aims to analyze indexicality and iconicity in sounds and music from a socio-semiotic perspective. The proposed level of inquiry is the pre-semiological one, which focuses, among others, on the substances of expression. In order to understand the physical nature of these substances, the device through which each of them has been generated should be considered; this device will in turn determine its semiotic status, in terms of the categories of Peirce's second trichotomy (icons, indexes and symbols). Among the different types of sounds, the work addresses direct natural sounds, mediatized sounds, synthesis sounds and sampled sounds, as they work on electronic instruments. Towards the end, some examples are presented, in order to show the kind of analysis that could be made about musical works adopting an approach such as the one proposed.
Copyright (c) 2024 Mariano Zelcer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Cuartetero and Cordoban, or Cordoban and cuartetero? Variations in the musical identity discourses of the Cordoban quartet in the nineties.
In this work we start from the idea that the meaning, specifically of popular music, cannot be considered fixed or immanent. In the same way, we understand that music can produce different effects, but not just any, and some interpretations, taking into account the interpretative rules of a society at a given time, are presented as preferable, so that they condition the interaction of users with them. This conditioning is what makes certain music better serve the identity constructions of certain users at a particular historical moment. Taking this approach into account, we address the construction of two identity discourses in the Córdoba quartet, a popular music from the Argentine interior, during the 1990s: on the one hand, a quartet identity in the proposal of Carlos “La Mona” Jiménez and, on the other, a Cordoba identity, in Rodrigo's proposal. The illustration of our conclusions focuses on the analysis of lyrics and music of two songs released between the mid and late 1990s: “Cuarte Conga” and “Soy Cordobés”.
Copyright (c) 2024 María de los Angeles Montes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Epistemological foundations for the study of musical signification: conceptual contributions from the theory of Charles S. Peirce
Musical signification constitutes an emerging phenomenon that is based on complex, dynamic semiotic processes far from equilibrium, through which musical discourses are invested with meaning. It involves the shaping of multiple relationships between the discursive entities given to perception (configurations of significant matter of a sonorous-musical nature) and specific meaning production processes, developed through highly specialized semiotic operations carried out by social actors, giving rise to the generation of particular interpretants on the basis of triadic relations. These relationships make possible the deployment of musical semiosis, activating and weaving a complex network of meaning operations; we find here the hard core in which musical signification is constituted and emerges. In this paper we will discuss some basic semiotic foundations based on various conceptual contributions from the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, in order to ponder their scope and potential for the study of the processes of musical signification, as that, from this perspective, solid epistemological bases can be built to address the production of meaning in the musical field.
The narrativity of Soliloquio. Integration of formalist and narrative analysis in a work by Gerardo Gandini
This paper proposes musical narrative analysis as a significant strategy to complement other analytical perspectives in exploring the particular expressive meanings of the work Soliloquio for oboe, by Argentine composer Gerardo Gandini. The text is organized into three parts: the first part briefly discusses the traditional categories of author, work, text, performer, and performance, and provides a formal, motivic, and pitch-class set analysis; the second part reviews perspectives and proposals for the analysis of musical narrativity; and the third part offers a narrative analysis of the work following Almén's (2017) approach.
Copyright (c) 2024 Leandro Doñate https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
La entrevista imposible. Una tarde con Serú Girán. 9 de marzo de 1988
Copyright (c) 2024 Luis Ramón Pérez Valero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Revista Argentina de Musicología https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Operations of transformation and narrativity in the first movement of the Sonata op 10 no. 1 by Ludwig van Beethoven
In this article we present a paradigmatic analysis of the first Movement of the Sonata op. 10 no. 1 by Ludwig van Beethoven. We intend to relate the multiple transformations of the musical material that we have systematically described with the narrative potential that the piece reveals in its temporal development. The first 8 bars of the work respond to the classic period phrase, however, the neutral level analysis reveals how problematic it is to segment this group into smaller units. To afford this problem we have developed two hypotheses for the articulation of the first 8 bars and five hypotheses for the internal segmentation of the first 4 bars and we verified that all of them coexist at different moments of the piece, being the most evident and perceptually relevant, the least repeated and, paradoxically, the less intuitive and perceptually less relevant segmentations have given rise to the generative events with more explanatory power and therefore those with more narrative power. At the end we propose an interpretation of the formal processes described exhaustively within the framework of Eero Tarasti's existential semiotics.
Copyright (c) 2024 Jorge Sad Levi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Sonografía de la pampa. Música argentina durante el primer peronismo (1945-1955)
“Universality plus difference"? Notes on cosmopolitanism and music
In recent decades, the concept of cosmopolitanism has acquired considerable relevance in different areas of knowledge, which is reflected in a profuse multidisciplinary bibliography. In the theoretical discussion, this notion is far from a consensus, partly due to the different ideological and disciplinary perspectives at play. The aim here is to explore some of these perspectives in order to reflect on a significant repertoire of situations in twentieth-century Latin American classical music, in which the tensions between belonging and exclusion are manifested, in relation both to local traditions and to international languages.
Andean Rhapsody: Notes of a Cosmopolitan Listener
This text aims to explore cosmopolitan representations present in ‘Andean music’, a galaxy of different musical scenes characterised by aspects of transnationality and transculturality. Its intense dialectic between the global and the local makes Andean music fertile ground for cosmopolitan readings. The author imagines a European listener on his journey through the various kinds of Andean music that flourished in his environment from the 1960s onwards. In doing so, he outlines both the dynamics inherent in this listening, often marked by exoticism, and critical interpretations of the phenomenon by popular music scholars and ethnomusicologists. Furthermore, he notes that cosmopolitan perspectives also operate from within the Andean musical space, as expressions of local socio-cultural instances. Finally, he relates the concept of Andean musical cosmopolitanism to the interpretative conflicts surrounding the ‘modernisation’ of folklore and tradition.
Italianness, Creoleness and Tango in the 1905 Armonía Magazine
This article aims to provide an initial analytical exploration of Armonía, a magazine mainly dedicated to distributing scores for mandolin or violin with guitar accompaniment in Buenos Aires in 1905. Its circulation context is marked, on the one hand, by strong identity debates —both political and artistic— between the criollo (native-born Argentine) and Italian leadership in the Río de la Plata region; and on the other hand, by the burgeoning mass culture of Buenos Aires, determined by both criollo aesthetics and the prominence of immigrants. Armonía was directed by the Italo-Argentine mandolinist and tango composer Próspero Cimaglia (1876-1933) and brought together a diverse audience distributed across the national territory. In the reading proposed here, supported by the analysis of editorial discourse, the represented musical genres, and Cimaglia's trajectory, this study reveals the magazine's link with identity tensions. It aligned in certain aspects with Italianità, sharing certain values with this program and promoting a canon of Italian-Argentine masters. While at the same time maintaining links with more syncretic interaction models, characteristic of popular art. From the contextualized study of the magazine, the importance of the mandolin in these debates emerges as a symbol of Italian cultural capital.
The King of the tango beat and his enthourage: Juan D’Arienzo and the traditionalist style of the typical orchestras in the sixties
In this article, I explore the typical tango orchestras of the traditional style during the sixties in Argentina. I have selected five orchestras of this period: Juan D’Arienzo, Francisco Canaro, Fulvio Salamanca, Héctor Varela and Alfredo De Angelis. First of all, I analyze the progress of the orchestra style of Juan D’Arienzo beetwen the decades 1950 and 1960. This aspect is not frequently adressed in most musicological studies of this orchestra. Then, I explore the recordings of the other orchestras, to identify the role of each one within the traditional esthetic, that is to say, whether they adhere or not to the style of D’Arienzo.
Satisfaction en la ESMA. Música y sonido durante la dictadura (1976-1983)
Copyright (c) 2023 Revista Argentina de Musicología https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Towards other histories of popular music: Multiple temporalities, discontinuities and experience
In the last decade, the study of popular music has shifted significantly to explore the relevance of its genesis, networks, and mediations. However, this interest in a relational ontology has not entailed an analysis of the temporal interconnections that have shaped the everyday musical experience. It seems that popular music studies have naturalized the modern concept of time as incontrovertible. This article suggests that an ontological turn in music histories should question single and linear temporalities, which can operate as forms of epistemic hegemony. To this end, it proposes to transfer to the history of popular music a way of thinking about time that is characteristic of recent anthropology and that challenges traditional narratives about the past, conceiving musical experience from multitemporality and discontinuity. The aim is to build bridges between ontology and epistemology in the studies of our musical pasts, with historiographical and ethical implications.
Other histories. New historical approaches in ethnomusicology
Towards the end of the 1970s, Zofia Lissa wrote that historical musicology left the study of the living cultures of the world to ethnomusicology. The Polish musicologist maintained that the price paid for this was the acceptance of an ahistorical view, limited to exposing the current state of the culture studied without delving into its development processes. Although the criticism seems justified at first glance, a deeper analysis suggests that the historical concern on the part of those who practiced ethnomusicology was no less than that of colleagues in the field of music history. Both topics such as the origin of music and the migratory routes of musical techniques and instruments—so central to early comparative musicology—were based on concerns of a historical nature and, even in the seventies, a prestigious ethnomusicologist like Klaus Wachsmann had stated that The present that the ethnomusicologist found in the fieldwork encompassed parts of the past because it contained the personal memories of the informants, the collective memory of the group and material remains such as instruments, recordings, musical paraphernalia or written sources. It was only as a result of the so-called historical turn in Anglo-Saxon ethnomusicology that, in Latin America, we began to systematically reﬂect on how history had been written and on how we were writing or rewriting history. Becoming aware of the conﬂuence of these two traditions was what led me to devise the dossier on ethnomusicology and history that I now present.
“I Must Cite Some Examples of Their Full Capacity for Expression”: Thoughts toward the History of Ethnomusicology
In this article Philip V. Bohman reviews the history of the approaches to so-called exotic musical cultures that gave birth to ethnomusicology. Reviewing the literature from the earliest descriptions of the music of the Other at the dawn of modernity, Bohlman discusses the forms of representation of what he calls an incipient ethnomusicology and asks how those descriptions gained more and more a scientific dimension in the discipline. Without downplaying the colonialist or Eurocentric implications of early ethnomusicological practices, Bohlman invites us to delineate, through a critical reading of the discipline’s past, the elements that should nurture our practices when we investigate or transmit the music of other cultures in current times.
Views on Change and the Past of Music in Uganda. An Analysis of Coloniality in Music Research
This essay, developed from research for the author’s master’s thesis, aims to investigate the presence of issues of the past and historical change in musicological literature on Uganda from the British colonial era. Theoretically grounded in postcolonial discussions of knowledge, power and coloniality, it examines regional manifestations of views on African music that have been developed in Eurocentric knowledge perspectives. For this purpose, a body of mainly textual sources (research publications, reports, newsletters, and other documents) has been analysed and interpreted regarding terminology, concepts, attitudes, and narratives. A special focus is thereby set on the activities and contributions of Klaus Wachsmann from the 1930s to the 1960s. The parts of the investigation’s results that are presented here concern two aspects: on the one hand perspectives on the past of musical phenomena in Uganda and its interpretation through diffusionistic and other narratives; on the other hand, voiced concerns about changes in African musical cultures and supposed loss of traditions or authenticity. In both tendencies, imaginations of humans and music in Africa as fundamental Others to those in Europe become evident, as well as essentialist conceptions of social or ‘ethnic’ affiliation and tradition.
Beyond the Self and the Other: Appropriating and Resignifying Practices in Marimba Music in Chiapas
Marimbists in Chiapas have developed a dynamic conception of their auditory identity, turning the adaptation and resignificance of music with heterogeneous origins into common practice of this musical tradition. This article seeks, through a journey through the history of the marimba world in Chiapas, to make visible the processes that made possible the negotiation of a praxis of appropriation and resignificance of music and forms of execution during the development of the marimba in Chiapas, and which would allow the appropriation of the other to become the basis of one’s own auditory knowledge.
To dance or not to dance for the country: the paradox of (in)decent dances at the dawn of the Republic (Peru, 1825-1860)
Carlos Vega and Isabel Aretz carefully studied the Peruvian origin of some dances from the time of Independence and that survived in Argentine territory in the ﬁrst half of the 20th century such as El Cuándo, El Chocolate, El Mismis and La Mariquita. However, very little is known about examples and uses of these dances in Peruvian territory. The boom that these dances experienced among the elites of the Peruvian viceroyalty and that later motivated their fast displacement towards neighboring countries speaks of preferences for certain repertoires with certain textual, sound, and choreographic characteristics that positioned them as sound representations of Americanity and therefore carriers of meaning around the construction of alternative identities to the Hispanic one. However, within a period of thirty years, such dances gave way to others of European or national origin and lost preponderance in Lima’s salons as they were considered incompatible with the notions of decency and modernity to which the ruling classes of the young republic they wanted to join. Through the study of musical examples from the Kestner collection of the Hannover Library and primary sources of the time, this work seeks to establish links between these dances and the discourses and imaginaries associated with their permanence and oblivion in Peruvian society of the ﬁrst half of the tenth century.