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Book Review of Deborah Pacini Hernandez’s Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music

January 1999
Popular Music & Society 23(3):105

Authors:

Donna Meryl Goldstein

University of Colorado Boulder

The ethnography titled, Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music (1995) by Deborah Pacini Hernandez is reviewed here. This wonderful ethnography introduces the reader to the beloved musical form known as 'bachata', a genre developed in the midst of massive rural-urban migration during the 1960s and 1970s in the Dominican Republic. The bachata, a guitar-based trio (guitar-bongo-maraca), shares with its audience a raunchy barrio sentimentality marked by bawdy humor that connects eating with sexuality, an aesthetic form celebrating heavy drinking, easily obtained sex, and a macho delight in elaborating upon gendered "inversions" of sexuality, where powerful men are made weak by the sexual prowess of women.

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Article

Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War by Christian McWhirter (review)

September 2013 · The Journal of the Civil War Era

Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment

Civil War music scholars often describe a need to rescue war-era music from obscurity. Christian McWhirter continues this tradition in Battle Hymns by calling for dialogue between historians and musicologists to improve the documentation of nineteenth-century American music. McWhirter describes his primary goal as constructing a social history of Civil War–era music. Two theories in his ... [Show full abstract] introduction frame his approach. First, popularity correlates to historical significance. Second, published period documentation best demonstrates music’s resonance with audiences. McWhirter makes bold claims about the power and prevalence of music, which unlike other nineteenth-century media is described as a universal language that was performed and consumed by Americans of all classes. Evidence from newspapers, diaries, letters, and sheet music leads McWhirter to conclude that music surpassed other forms of written and oral communication in shaping American perceptions about the war. The author does not consider music’s social power unique to this period, but stresses that the mid-nineteenth century was America’s most musical era, and the Civil War was America’s first musical war. Battle Hymns’s thorough bibliography blends historical and musicological sources. McWhirter constructs a detailed narrative about increased music consumerism while skillfully supporting his claims with references to newspapers, manuscripts, and sheet music. According to McWhirter, Civil War music was a memorable and accessible media form and a cultural tool that disseminated political ideas during a time when Americans preferred music to speeches or newspapers. Civil War Americans needed to process war-spawned social disorder, and songs such as “The Bonnie Blue Flag” shaped regional responses to the war. Music functioned differently in civilian and military spheres, but white anxieties about racial difference were expressed through a shared enthusiasm for the music of blackface minstrels. After the war, commemorative songs reflected psychological needs to justify the war. As time passed, Americans refashioned songs to align with war memories. A great achievement of Battle Hymns is its synthesis of data from previous studies. The book is dense yet easily accessible to a wide audience, and in the midst of the sesquicentennial it should attract considerable attention. Although McWhirter documents a substantive Civil War song history, the book leaves some questions unanswered. Somewhat surprising is the author’s heavy reliance on centennial-era sources, which may have led him to characterize popular music as simple, homogenous, and universally intelligible. For instance, McWhirter frequently cites Willard A. Heaps and Porter W. Heaps’s The Singing Sixties (1960) as the best Civil War music source, even though his bibliography attests to the depth and breadth of more recent research (Eric Lott, Eileen Southern, Nicholas Tawa, Richard Crawford, Mark Smith, Steven Cornelius). McWhirter might have critiqued the cultural conditions from which centennial-era research emerged or balanced those references with more contemporary scholarship. McWhirter’s decision to rely on published, commercially available compositions with lyrics that were consumed by white audiences allows him to claim that music steered Civil War discourse, but the argument relies on a narrow definition of what counts as “music.” Specialists will quibble, too, with the author’s blurring “genre” with “theme” when he claims that the most popular music genres were “patriotic” and “sentimental”; both terms describe subcategories of American popular song. The terms “music” and “song” are used interchangeably, too, which unfortunately led McWhirter to exclude other music forms, music produced and performed by ethnic and racial minorities, and music with nontextual characteristics. This exclusion is reinforced by McWhirter’s decision to measure the popularity of period songs by comparing sales reports to repeated mention of song titles in newspapers and other texts. These choices may have resulted in an oversimplification of national aesthetics. In his last three chapters, McWhirter relies on more recent scholarship, and the results are more critical and gripping. In chapter 8, “Veterans, Memorialists, and the King: The Revival and Legacy of Civil War Music,” McWhirter illustrates how United Daughters of the Confederacy memorialists revised Confederate music to endorse Lost Cause ideology. UDC mothers indoctrinated children in Lost Cause ideology by disseminating this music literature, which was performed by Confederate choirs at memorial ceremonies for decades. This history of Civil War musical memory is fresh and fascinating, yet...

Chapter

Bitter Rituals for a Lost Nation: Partch and Bernstein

February 2001

W. Anthony Sheppard

Harry Partch and Leonard Bernstein are divergent in several dimensions, including their marketability. Yet through a juxtaposition of works by these apparent musical antipodes, it is possible to illumine the pervasiveness of certain basic issues in American music theater and to suggest how both Partch's Revelation in the Courthouse Park and Bernstein's Mass reflect several developments in the ... [Show full abstract] social history of the 1960s. This chapter considers three primary topics raised by these two works and concentrates on cultural contextualization rather than on detailed comparison. First, they are concerned with ritual and religious expression—with a critique of established American social and religious rituals and with the creation of a new work of ritualistic or didactic status. Second, this critique and transformation is achieved musically through the use, or perhaps abuse, of American popular music and through radical musical juxtaposition. Finally, Partch and Bernstein employ ritual expression and popular music references for the purposes of parody and social criticism, focusing on the relationship of the individual to society. Created at opposite ends of a turbulent decade, but yoked together by violence, Revelation and Mass arrive at somewhat different conclusions. social history of the 1960s. This chapter considers three primary topics raised by these two works and concentrates on cultural contextualization rather than on detailed comparison. First, they are concerned with ritual and religious expression—with a critique of established American social and religious rituals and with the creation of a new work of ritualistic or didactic status. Second, this critique and transformation is achieved musically through the use, or perhaps abuse, of American popular music and through radical musical juxtaposition. Finally, Partch and Bernstein employ ritual expression and popular music references for the purposes of parody and social criticism, focusing on the relationship of the individual to society. Created at opposite ends of a turbulent decade, but yoked together by violence, Revelation and Mass arrive at somewhat different conclusions.

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Book review: Translation and popular music: transcultural intimacy in Turkish–Greek relations , by Ş...

January 2017 · The Translator

Johan Franzon

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/hXhXgZSsJHjT3gJCEjcK/full

Article

Historia social de la música popular en Chile, 1950–1970 by Juan Pablo González, Oscar Ohlsen, Claud...

January 2014 · Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana

Fernando Rios

With this richly detailed 799-page volume, Juan Pablo González, Oscar Ohlsen, and Claudio Rolle not only make a substantial contribution to the scholarship on popular music in Chile but also complement prior work conducted by faculty of the Universidad Católica de Chile, specifically Historia social de la música popular en Chile, 1890–1950 (Juan Pablo González and Claudio Rolle, 2005) and Música ... [Show full abstract] popular chilena, 20 años, 1970–1990 (Juan Pablo González and Álvaro Godoy, 1995). Latin American music researchers and historians thus have at their disposal a near-comprehensive overview of twentieth-century Chilean popular music trends in this impressive Spanish-language series. The authors of Historia social de la música popular en Chile, 1950–1970, as self-professed académicos-fanáticos of the styles covered in this volume (11), occasionally insert into the text their personal evaluations of the quality of particular compositions and musicians. Overall, this practice does not substantially detract from the book’s historical focus, because the volume relies heavily on primary source materials (newspaper and magazine articles of the era) rather than contemporary assessments of the period’s artistic currents. The main goal of the book is to offer an all-inclusive treatment of the “phenomenon of popular music in Chile” (14), which is why the authors cover a wide variety of topics (e.g., individual chapters on entertainment venues, folklore of the masses, large-scale forms, bolero and balada, youth music) rather than limit their focus to a genre or movement, as researchers who study Chilean popular music of this period usually have done. A common drawback of an exhaustive approach is that depth is sacrificed for breadth, although this is not a significant issue here, because the book’s length enables the authors to devote considerable attention to each major subject. As a result, readers gain an understanding of how particular Chilean musical trends related to many of the other local artistic currents that preceded and/or overlapped with them. Nueva canción, for example, is situated in relation to música típica and neofolklore. In Chile, música típica refers to the ideologically conservative, mass-mediated folkloric tradition that emerged in the 1930s and remained a popular style in the 1950s and 1960s, centered on the huaso (cowboy) and china (the huaso’s romantic partner) figures, and whose emblematic genres were the tonada and cueca. How música típica differs from nueva canción has been frequently addressed in the literature on nueva canción. In contrast, the relationship of neofolklore to nueva canción has received less attention, and for this reason I found the discussion of the interaction between the two movements particularly enlightening. Neofolklore arose in the 1960s and initially was termed “the new wave of folklore” by the press (337). Enlarging the repertoire of Chile’s musical folklorists, neofolklore groups cultivated relatively unknown or archaic local genres, especially the sirilla, refalosa (or resbalosa), and cachimbo. Another hallmark of neofolklore is the use of multipart vocal harmonies, which, along with the bombo legüero’s role as the main percussion instrument, were borrowed from the performance practices of internationally renowned Argentine ensembles such as Los Huanca Huá and Los Trovadores del Norte. Chile’s neofolklore artists, despite their generally apolitical or status quo tendencies, were an important early influence on nueva canción musicians, who adopted similar vocal techniques and further expanded the Chilean folkloric–popular music repertoire through the addition of non-Chilean genres in keeping with the movement’s pan–Latin Americanist ideology. Along with nueva canción musicians’ much greater degree of involvement in the era’s political struggles, the movement’s incorporation of Andean instruments and genres associated with Bolivia and Peru was one way that nueva canción differed from neofolklore (in this respect, the pioneering group Los de Ramón, who introduced Andean music to Chilean audiences more than a decade before the birth of nueva canción, was an important precursor; see pp. 442–443). With respect to the emblematic use of Andean or Andean-inspired musical expressions in nueva canción, I expected the authors to at least...

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