Race(ism) and art music in Argentina: Analyzing Alberto Williams’ ‘La patria y la música’ (1921)

Wolkowicz, V. (2024) Race(ism) and art music in Argentina: Analyzing Alberto Williams’ ‘La patria y la música’ (1921). Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, (doi: 10.1017/rrc.2023.3) (Early Online Publication)

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, numerous Argentine intellectuals embraced positivist thinking in order to claim the ‘superiority’ of the white race and exclude the indigenous and African-descendant population from the foundational mythologies of the Argentinian nation-state. Darwin’s ideas on evolution – especially the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ as filtered through the work of Herbert Spencer – coloured the discourses of a myriad of Argentine intellectuals, including artists. The creation of a nationalist music was a foremost concern among Argentine composers, who, influenced by these ideas, believed an Argentinian ‘high’ art should ‘elevate’ folk music through European techniques. In this paper, I concentrate on composer Alberto Williams to see how his career and relevant position in the musical milieu influenced and shaped the construction of an Argentine musical canon. I particularly focus on Williams’s speech, later published as an article, titled ‘La patria y la música’ (‘Fatherland and music’), to examine how his ideas on ‘music evolution’ and ‘race’, influenced by racial scientific ideas taken from European Positivism and Social Darwinism, shaped the discourses and development of a national (or nationalist) music in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth and through the twentieth centuries.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101028215.
• Status: Early Online Publication
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Wolkowicz, Dr Vera
• Authors: Wolkowicz, V.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Music
• Journal Name: Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• ISSN: 1472-3808
• ISSN (Online): 2167-4027
• Published Online: 11 April 2024
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2024 The Author
• First Published: First published in Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 2024
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License