Latin American Composers
There is a rich history stretching back into the colonial era of classical music in Latin America, one which is often neglected or only known in outline in other parts of the world. Through the Catholic church and its missionaries, many Masses were composed either by European émigré composers or their American-born students; these composers also wrote the first operas and symphonies in the New World. In the 19th and 20th centuries, after most countries had won their independence, composers like Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Alberto Ginastera pursued nationalist expressions in their music while still working within classical genres like the symphony, concerto, and ballet. Modernists like Mauricio Kagel, Julián Carrillo, and Mario Davidovsky as well as Post-Modernists including Osvaldo Golijov, Leo Brouwer, and Tania León have matched local influences with progressive techniques. Explore notable composers, reference entries, recommended books, and score anthologies below to learn more about the classical music of Latin America.
NOTE: For resources about popular and folk music in Latin America, see the page Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Music Research Guide.
Recommended Books
Latin American Classical Composers: A Biographical Dictionary by
Now in its third edition, Latin American Classical Composers: A Biographical Dictionary provides a singular English-language resource for biographical information on hundreds of composers from Central and South America and the Hispanic Caribbean. Painstakingly gathered from a wide variety of sources, the information updates and expands previous editions and fills in the gaps left by the other major English-language music dictionaries and encyclopedias. Entries provide biographical data comprising full names, birth and death dates and locations, background, education, and training, as well as selective works lists more than 2,300 composers. An index of composers by country and women composers of Latin America complement the volume. An essential part of any music library, Latin American Classical Composers is an invaluable reference for librarians, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, researchers, and music students.
Call Number: ML105 .S35 2016 (Music Reference)Publication Date: 2016
Alberto Ginastera: A Research and Information Guide by
Alberto Ginastera: A Research and Information Guide is the first bio-bibliographic study of the composer and the only published book on the subject in English. This work fills a critical gap in contemporary music studies by enriching our knowledge of one of the most compelling creative voices of the Americas. Given the lack of prior systematic attention to Ginastera, this book establishes a firm foundation for future scholarship. It includes a detailed biographical sketch of the composer that quotes extensively from his letters. It summarizes the defining features of his style and encompasses his infrequently explored late works. It offers the most comprehensive catalogue of Ginastera's music to date and provides an annotated list of his published writings.
Call Number: ML134.G43 S38 2010 (Music Reference)Publication Date: 2010
Sounds of the Modern Nation: Music, Culture, and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico by
Sounds of the Modern Nation explores the development of modernist and avant-garde art music styles and aesthetics in Mexico in relation to the social and cultural changes that affected the country after the 1910-1920 revolution. Alejandro Madrid argues that these modernist works provide insight into the construction of individual and collective identities based on new ideas about modernity and nationality. Instead of depicting a dichotomy between modernity and nationalism, Madrid reflects on the multiple intersections between these two ideas and the dialogic ways through which these notions acquired meaning. Madrid challenges the view that Latin American modernist music and other art were mere imitations of European trends, advancing instead the argument that Latin American artists resignified European ideas according to their specific historical and cultural circumstances. His work shows how microtonal and futurist music, modernist and avant-garde aesthetics, as well as indigenist and indianist ideas, entered a process of negotiation that ultimately shaped the ideological framework of twentieth-century Mexico.
Call Number: ML210.5 .M23 2009Publication Date: 2009
Carlos Chávez and His World by
Carlos Chávez (1899-1978) is the central figure in Mexican music of the twentieth century and among the most eminent of all Latin American modernist composers. An enfant terrible in his own country, Chávez was an integral part of the emerging music scene in the United States in the 1920s. His highly individual style--diatonic, dissonant, contrapuntal--addressed both modernity and Mexico's indigenous past. Chávez was also a governmental arts administrator, founder of major Mexican cultural institutions, and conductor and founder of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México. Carlos Chávez and His World brings together an international roster of leading scholars to delve into not only Chávez's music but also the history, art, and politics surrounding his life and work. Contributors explore Chávez's vast body of compositions, including his piano music, symphonies, violin concerto, late compositions, and Indianist music. They look at his connections with such artistic greats as Aaron Copland, Miguel Covarrubias, Henry Cowell, Silvestre Revueltas, and Paul Strand.
Call Number: ML410.C46 C37 2015Publication Date: 2015
Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics by
Between 1941 and 1963, Aaron Copland made four government-sponsored tours of Latin America that drew extensive attention at home and abroad. Interviews with eyewitnesses, previously untapped Latin American press accounts, and Copland's diaries inform Carol A. Hess's in-depth examination of the composer's approach to cultural diplomacy. As Hess shows, Copland's tours facilitated an exchange of music and ideas with Latin American composers while capturing the tenor of United States diplomatic efforts at various points in history. Hess's focus on Latin America's reception of Copland provides a variety of outside perspectives on the composer and his mission. She also teases out the broader meanings behind reviews of Copland and examines his critics in the context of their backgrounds, training, aesthetics, and politics.
Call Number: ML410.C756 H47 2023Publication Date: 2023
Tania León's Stride: A Polyrhythmic Life by
Acclaimed composer, sought-after conductor, esteemed educator, tireless advocate for the arts--Tania León's achievements encompass but also stretch far beyond contemporary classical music. Alejandro L. Madrid draws on oral history, archival work, and ethnography to offer the first in-depth biography of the artist. Breaking from a chronological account, Madrid looks at León through the issues that have informed and defined moments in her life and her professional works. León's words become a starting ground--but also a counterpoint--to the accounts of the people in her orbit. What emerges is more than an extraordinary portrait of an artist's journey. It is a story of how a human being reacts to the challenges thrown at her by history itself, be it the Cuban revolution or the struggle for civil and individual rights. Nuanced and multifaceted, Tania León's Stride looks at the life, legacy, and milieu that created and sustained one of the most important figures in American classical music.
Call Number: ML410.L514 M33 2021Publication Date: 2021
Silvestre Revueltas: Sounds of a Political Passion (Print and eBook) by
Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) has been portrayed as a nationalist artist both at home and beyond Mexico's borders. However, the musicking of a presumed "Mexicanness" was far from Revueltas' mind. In Silvestre Revueltas: Sounds of a Political Passion, author Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus shows how Revueltas, strongly inspired by the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, sought ways to sound the voice of the commoners wandering the Mexican streets, as well as that of gypsy miners in Spain, Black women in the U.S. South, and slaves in Cuba in colonial times. The intent behind this hermeneutic approach is to reveal and inform the political passion expressed in Revueltas's music, interlinked with his writings and political actions. Buried in history for half a century, Revueltas has recently risen to be recognized as one of the most prominent Latin American composers of the twentieth century.
Call Number: ML410.R389 K66 2023 and Oxford Scholarship Online CompletePublication Date: 2023
Villa-Lobos and Modernism: The Apotheosis of Cannibal Music by
In this profound study, Ricardo Averbach elevates Cultural Cannibalism as a major manifestation of the Modernist aesthetics and Villa-Lobos as its top exponent in the music field. Villa-Lobos's anthropophagic appetite for multiple opposing aesthetics enlightens through the juxtaposition of contradictory elements, leaving a legacy of unmatched originality, a glittering kaleidoscope of sounds that draw from the radical power of Josephine Baker to the outrageous extravagance of Carmen Miranda, from Dada to Einstein's counterintuitive scientific findings, from folklorism to atonality. The constructed analyses use the works of Stravinsky as a familiar and popular touchstone for accessing Villa-Lobos as the leading exponent of an aesthetic movement that has been neglected due to a traditional Eurocentric view of Modernism. Averbach opens up new possibilities for the study of twentieth-century music, in general, while unveiling how much our present aesthetics owes to the Modernist ideas introduced by the Brazilian composer.
Call Number: ML410.V76 A94 2022Publication Date: 2022
The Symphony in the Americas (The Symphonic Repertoire, Volume V) by
Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 1700s, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. In his series The Symphonic Repertoire, the late A. Peter Brown explored the symphony in Europe from its origins into the 20th century. In Volume V, Brown's former students and colleagues continue his vision by turning to the symphony in the Western Hemisphere. It examines the work of numerous symphonists active from the early 1800s to the present day and the unique challenges they faced in contributing to the European symphonic tradition. The research adds to an unmatched compendium of knowledge for the student, teacher, performer, and sophisticated amateur. This much-anticipated fifth volume of The Symphonic Repertoire: The Symphony in the Americas offers a user-friendly, comprehensive history of the symphony genre in the United States and Latin America.
Call Number: ML1255 .B87 2002 V.5Publication Date: 2023
Opera in the Tropics: Music and Theater in Early Modern Brazil (Print and eBook) by
Opera in the Tropics is an engaging exploration of theater with music in Brazil from the mid 1500s to the early 1820s. Author Rogério Budasz delves into the practices of the actors, singers, poets, and composers who created and performed Jesuit moral plays, Spanish comedias, and Portuguese vernacular operas and entremezes during the colonial period, as well as the Italian operas that celebrated the new independent nation in 1822. A Brazilian producer claimed in 1825 that the goal of music-theater was to instruct, entertain, and distract the population. Budasz argues that this threefold goal had in fact been present throughout the colonial period, in different combinations and with different purposes, at the hands of missionaries, intellectuals, bureaucrats, political leaders, and cultural producers. While Budasz demonstrates a continuity from Portuguese theatrical practices, primarily through the circulation of artists and repertory, he also examines a number of localized departures from the metropolitan model, particularly in the ethnic and gender profile of theatrical workers, in the modifications determined by local tastes, priorities, and materials, and in the political use of theater as an ideological and civilizing tool within the paradoxical context of a slave society. An eye-opening narrative of the transformations and uses of a colonial art form, Opera in the Tropics will be essential reading for all interested in the music and theater in Iberian and Latin American culture.
Call Number: ML1717.B83 B84 2019 and Oxford Scholarship Online CompletePublication Date: 2019
Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the Transformative Power of Music by
When Gustavo Dudamel, at the age of twenty-eight, ascended the podium at the Hollywood Bowl for his inaugural concert as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he immediately captivated the hearts of his audience, just as he had the minds of music critics who designated him a modern-day Leonard Bernstein. In Changing Lives, the maestro's story becomes the entry point to an equally captivating subject: El Sistema, the music education program that nurtured his musical talent, first as a young violinist and then as a budding conductor under the mentorship of its founder, José Antonio Abreu. What began in Venezuela has now reached children in Los Angeles, New York City, Baltimore, and cities around the world. No matter the location, the overarching goal of El Sistema is unwavering: to rescue children from the depredations of poverty through music. Part history, part reportage, this book reveals that arts education can indeed effect positive social change.
Call Number: MT3.V4 T86 2012Publication Date: 2012
Elite Art Worlds: Philanthropy, Latin Americanism, and Avant-garde Music (Print and eBook) by
The Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) in Buenos Aires operated for less than a decade, but by the time of its closure in 1971 it had become the undeniable epicenter of Latin American avant-garde music. Providing the first in-depth study of CLAEM, author Eduardo Herrera tells the story of the fellowship program - funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Di Tella family - that, by allowing the region's promising young composers to study with a roster of acclaimed faculty, produced some of the most prominent figures within the art world, including Rafael Aponte Ledeé, Coriún Aharonián, and Blas Emilio Atehortúa. Combining oral histories, ethnographic research, and archival sources, Elite Art Worlds explores regional discourses of musical Latin Americanism and the embrace, articulation, and resignification of avant-garde techniques and perspectives during the 1960s. But the story of CLAEM reveals much more: intricate webs of US and Argentine philanthropy, transnational currents of artistic experimentation and innovation, and the role of art in constructing elite identities. By looking at CLAEM as both an artistic and philanthropic project, Herrera illuminates the relationships between foreign policy, corporate interests, and funding for the arts in Latin America and the United States against the backdrop of the Cold War.
Call Number: MT5.B96 C464 2020 and Oxford Scholarship Online CompletePublication Date: 2020
Playing in the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain (eBook) by
In Playing in the Cathedral, author Jesús Ramos-Kittrell explores how liturgical musicians - choristers and instrumentalists, as well as teachers and directors - at Mexico City Cathedral in the mid-eighteenth century navigated changing discourses about social status and racial purity. He argues that criollos cathedral musicians, influenced by Enlightenment values of self-industry and autonomy, fought against the Peninsulare-dominated, racialized casta system. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ramos-Kittrell shows that these musicians held up their musical training and knowledge, as well as their institutional affiliation with the cathedral, as characteristics that legitimized their calidad (an all-encompassing estimation of a person's social status) and aided their social advancement. Ultimately, Ramos-Kittrell argues that music, as a performative and theoretical activity, was a highly dynamic factor in the cultural and religious life of New Spain, and an active agent in the changing discourses of social status and "Spanishness" in colonial America.
Call Number: Oxford Scholarship Online CompletePublication Date: 2016
Score Anthologies
These anthologies each feature the music of several Latin American composers and can be found in the Music Collection. Follow the links below to search their tables of contents online before finding them on library shelves.
Contemporary Brazilian Piano Music by
Includes compositions by Camargo Guarnieri, Osvaldo Lacerda, Francisco Mignone, Marlos Nobre, Almeida Prado, Claudio Santoro, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and others
Call Number: M21 .N438Publication Date: 1978
Latin American Colonial Music Anthology by
This anthology is intended as an enlarged music supplement to Stevenson's Renaissance and baroque musical sources in the Americas. It contains sacred and secular works for various vocal combinations by composers including Juan de Araujo, Manuel Blasco, Roque Ceruti, Gaspar Fernandes, Gutierre Fernández Hidalgo, José Maurício Nunes Garcia, Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, José de Orejón y Aparicio, Domenico Zipoli, and Manuel de Zumaya.
Call Number: M1495 .L35Publication Date: 1975
Latin American and Iberian Art Songs by Women Composers, Volume 1 by
An Anthology of Latin American and Iberian art songs by Women composers including 23 songs in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese by five composers from Argentina, Brazil, Catalunya, Cuba, and Colombia. The book includes a bilingual introductory study presenting the composers and poets, poetry translations, and sheet music.
Call Number: M1619 .L281 2020Publication Date: 2020
Interlibrary Loan
Users are encouraged to search for items beyond University Libraries' catalog via RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and WorldCat. Materials not available in print or online may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Please allow up to seven days for electronic delivery and up to fourteen days for delivery of physical items.