Representing the Good Neighbor

In this book, Carol A. Hess investigates the reception of Latin American art music in the US during the Pan American movement of the 1930s and 40s. Hess uncovers how and why attitudes towards Latin American music shifted so dramatically during the middle of the twentieth century, and what this tells us about the ways in which the history of American music has been written.

Carol A. Hess is Professor of Musicology at Michigan State University. She is author of Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 1898-1936 (Chicago, 2001, winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and the Robert M. Stevenson prize for outstanding scholarship in Iberian music) and Sacred Passions: The Life and Music of Manuel de Falla (Oxford 2004).

- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Editorial matters
- List of musical examples
- List of figures
- Chapter One. Introduction
- I. Difference and History in the Americas
- II. The Narrative
- Chapter Two: The Roots of Pan Americanism
- I. Historical Premises
- II. Pan Americanism and Music: An Overview
- Chapter Three: Carlos Chávez and Ur-Classicism
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- II. Absolute Mexican Music: "True Classicism" and Universalism in the Americas
- Chapter Four: Carlos Chávez's H.P.: Dialectical Indigenism, Mestizaje, and the Politics of Sameness
- I. To "Suggest Objectively the Life of All America": Chávez and Dialectical Indigenism.
- II. "Find Me a Primitive Man": Premiere and Reception
- Chapter Five: Brazilian Modernism and the Making of "American Rhythm": Villa-Lobos at the 1939 World's Fair
- I. From "Hallucinated City" To Democracity: Villa-Lobos, the Many Faces of Brazilian Modernism, and the Good Neighbor
- II. Caliban Unbound: Villa-Lobos and Unsublimated Primitivism
- Chapter Six: The Golden Age: Pan Americanist Culture, War, and the Triumph of Universalism
- I. Pan Americanist Culture and Music in the United States
- II. Folklore Cults and the "League of Minor Musical Nations"
- III. Nationalism: The "Greatest Foe"
- IV. "The Brazilian Oklahoma! and the Memory of Universalism
- Chapter Seven: Alberto Ginastera's Bomarzo: Sublimation and the Annihilation of Difference
- I. Ginastera in the United States: Becoming a "Musical McNamara"
- II. Bomarzo: Sublimation and the "Strength of the Repressed Urge"
- III. Censorship and the Limits of Aleatory
- Chapter Eight: Memory, Music, and the Latin American Cold War: Frederic Rzewksi's Variations on 'The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
- I. Nueva Canción, Música Nacional, and the Cold War
- II. "The People United Will Never Be Defeated!" and the Rhetoric of Memory
- Chapter Nine: Epilogue. Utopia and Pan Americanism's Legacy
- Bibliography