Abstracts

¿Por qué estudiar la Música? 
Reflexiones de una antropológa desde el campo/

Why study music? 
An anthropologist’s reflections from the field.

Ruth Finnegan

The article arises from reflections on the author´s fieldwork first in West Africa, then in Fiji, and finally in a modern urban setting in Britain. Music has sometimes been considered to lie outside the field of mainstream anthropology, either merely left to members of other disciplines such as musicology, folklore or social history, or else seen as a highly specialist concern rather than part of the overall ethnography of a particular culture or community. This article challenges this view as misleading on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Far from being marginal to anthropology or to society, the study of music relates to established and developing branches of anthropology and leads into fundamental issues about the nature of humanity.

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Niveles de coherencia musical. 
La aportación de la música a la construcción de mundos

Levels of musical coherence. The contribution of music to the making of worlds.

Francisco Cruces. 

The anthropology of music may be understood as the study of the diversity of earing. From such a perspective, the problem of musical coherence becomes particularly relevant. How does music contribute to the making of meaningful worlds? Following the classical passage from text to context, this analysis distinguishes and documents four levels ethnographically: (a) the grammar of the sound system; (b) the musical text; (c) the interactive situation; (d) practical, isomorphical and synesthetic schemata of sociocultural congruence.

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Estéticas de la opacidad y la transparencia. 
Música, mito y ritual en el culto shangó y en la tradición erudita occidental

Aesthetics of opacity and transparency. 
Music, myth and ritual in shangó cult and in the scholary western tradition.

José Jorge de Carvalho. 

The present paper propose, firstly, the interpretation of one of the aspects of ritual songs’ repertory from Recife shangós cults. Based on the analysis of a specific musical tradition, the author try to discuss some more general questions about theory and method related to the musicological activity in general. He pretends to establish some comparisons between an appropriate theoretical approach to make an interpretation of a traditional musical system and discussions about occidental scholar music (mainly after Richard Wagner) in order to understand its exacerbated rationalization on technical and aesthetic procedures for musical composition.

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Los guardianes de la tradición. 
El problema de la ‘autenticidad’ en las recopilaciones de cantos populares

Guardians of tradition. 
The problem of «authenticity» in collecting popular songs.

Luis Diaz Viana

This paper deals with the problem of «authenticity» in the process of collecting popular songs. The main thesis is that are the very collectors who, following a canon culturally constructed during the Romanticism, decide whether something is or not to be considered «popular». In this way they become guardians or guarantors of the «authentic» and «traditional». A text from Menendez Pidal, a pioneer in the study of the Spanish ballad romance,, is chosen to illustrate the role of such a canon in the development of folklore studies. Its analysis suggests that the so frecuently invoked notion of «tradition» or «the traditional» might be a historically recent invention, with deep ideological and political implications.

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Instrumentos de música y religiosidad popular en Cuba: 
los tambores batá 

Musical instruments and popular religion in Cuba: 
the batá drums.

Victoria Eli Rodriguez: 

The Cuban musical instrument -with its several morfological traits, uses and functions- shows cristal clear evidence of the transculturation processes happened in Cuba. Among this musical diversity, the paper focuses on the batá drums -one of the most interesting ensembles- in order to provide the reader a general glance of the organological specificities, social meaning and musical traits of these instruments. It will be underlined its close relationship with the practice of santería, a form of Cuban popular religion to which they appear indissolubly attached.

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«Los cantos inmigrantes se mezclaron...» 
La murga uruguaya: encuentro de orígenes y lenguajes

«The inmigrant songs melted...» 
The Uruguayan murga , an encounter of origins and languages.

Marita Fornaro

The Uruguayan murga is a musical expression of a dramatic, poliphonic and masculine kind. This type of ensemble appeared in Montevidean carnival at the end of the XIX century, rising from several Spanish elements, specifically the murgas from Cádiz. In this paper the sociopolitical context where this genre developed is analyzed, toghether with its position within the Uruguayan popular culture as a whole and some of the various codes used in its performance: verbal language (repertoire, themes, stylistic resources), music (poliphony and instrumental performance), gestuality. It will be noted the particular dynamism of this expression, which makes it capable of representing both the country sociopolitical circumstances and a significant segment of the population.

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El desplazamiento de los espacios de la autenticidad: 
una mirada desde la música

The shift of the spaces of ‘authenticity’: 
A glance from Music

Ana María Ochoa Gautier

Authenticity’ is actually one of the most important values for popular music. This article analyses the transfer of the account of ‘authenticity’ to mass music, like rock and world music. It argues that the way technologies, markets and imaginaries interact in such music genres provides the key to understand the power relations between the new subjectivities and the structures of industry and market.

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Salsa, identidad y globalización. 
Redefiniciones caribeñas a las geografías y el tiempo

Salsa, identity and globalization. 
Caribbean redefinitions of time and geography.

Angel G. Quintero.

Salsa music appears as an expressive movement at the end of the sixties, after an intense caribbean inmmigration to the US. Why is it precisely in those years when some of this young migrants at the very center of global rock’nroll decided to express themselves through another kind of music? This paper deals with some of the reasons which explain the development of salsa as an expression of caribbean identity in the hegemonic context of globalization -in terms of cultural resistance, historical memory and a local remaking of modern time-space.

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Okinawa latina: 
la Orquesta Diamantes y la errante identidad de la emigración nipón-peruana

Okinawa Latina:
Diamantes and the shifting identity of the japonese-peruvian migration.

Shuhei Hosokawa

The paper deals with the double process of reterritorialization and deterritorialization (García Canclini) in Diamantes, an Okinawan-based band led by a Japanese-Peruvian singer. It examines how their songs show the fluctuating identity and experience of two-way migration, one from Okinawa to Peru and the other from Peru to Okinawa, through their bi-lingualism and hybridization of Okinawan, Latinamerican and other elements. The ethnic tension between Okinawa and Japan is focused as well.

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Músicas invisibles: 
la música ambiental como objeto de reflexión

Unseen musics: 
the ambiance music as an object for reflection.

Josep Marti

We all listen music in our daily life in much more ocassions than merely when going to the concert or using the radio. Today, ambiance musics are increasingly entering a number of domaines in quotidian life. The so called musak or functional music developed in the 30s is indeed the departing point for the contemporary phenomena of musical ambientation. But the invisible musics which sweeten our daily life offer now a much more variegated range of possibilities. In this paper, several functional and semantic aspects of ambiance musics are analyzed, stressing the fact that these musical practices -unlike other ones of a different kind- tend to free music from its ritual.

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Cómo modelar la imagen sonora del grupo: 
los eslóganes de manifestación

How to model the sound image of the group:
The demonstration slogans

Jaume Ayats

Demonstration slogans, the marginal and «worthless» speak and sound expressions, are taken by the author as study objets to apply to music some of the basic criteria from pragmatic Linguistic. He tries to overcome the traditional analysis of musical «form», after the observation of elements of the sound modulation related to actors of collective activity. The results try to show how the modulation of slogans are closely linked to the image that the group pretends to offer in order to succesfully reach his aims: the street representation of the group.

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