Books in the Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music series

In Africanness in Action, author Juan Diego Diaz examines musicians' agency, constructions of blackness and Africanness, musical structure, performance practices, and rhetoric in Brazil, and provides a model for the study of African-derived music in other diasporic locales.

Panpipes and Ponchos offers the first detailed historical study of the Bolivian folkloric music movement, showing how musical practices developed by the politically dominant, nonindigenous residents of twentieth-century La Paz city came to be misrepresented as pre-Columbian, indigenous folk music.

Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz uncovers Latin jazz's rich intercultural heritage, exploring its Caribbean and Latin American musical roots, its ability to transcend genre boundaries, and its inseparability from issues of ethnicity and nation.

The Invention of Latin American Music reconstructs the history of Latin American music as a genre, focusing on the intellectual, musicological, and diplomatic forces that shaped its spread and success across the globe in the 20th century.

Offering rich ethnography and a deep historical perspective, After the Dance, the Drums are Heavy is about carnival, politics, and the musical engagement of ordinary citizens and celebrity musicians in contemporary Haiti.

Bossa Mundo chronicles how Brazilian music has been central to Brazil's national brand in the U.S. and U.K. since the early-1960s. Through in-depth historical and ethnographic analyses of watershed moments of musical breakthrough, it explores not just what the music may have represented at that moment, but details its deeper cultural impact.

"Cardoso presents Sound-Politics in Saao Paulo as the first book-length treatment on controversies surrounding noise control in Latin America"--

In Sonidos Negros, readers learn how Flamenco's sensuality, quixotic idealism, and fierce soulfulness echo with contests that trace the rise and fall of the Spanish empire. From Inquisitional certifications of blood purity to Christmas pageants staged throughout the Americas, flamenco's Janus-faced stage Gypsy walks a knife's edge between Blackness and Whiteness.

Rites, Rights & Rhythms traces traditional Afro-Colombian currulao music from colonial slavery to today's black social movement. The book illuminates a history of struggles over the music's meanings, portraying one of the hemisphere's most important black cultures, and offering a theory of history traced through the performative practice of currulao.

Tracing Tangueros offers an inside view of Argentine tango music in the context of the growth and development of the art form's instrumental and stylistic innovations. It first establishes parameters for tango scholarship and then offers ten in-depth profiles of representative tangueros within the genre's historical and stylistic trajectory.

Opera in the Tropics is an engaging exploration of theater with music in Brazil from early colonial times to the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Georges Bizet's Carmen and its staging of an exoticized Spain was progressively reimagined between its 1875 Paris premiere and 1915. This book explores Carmen's dynamic interaction with Spanishness in this cosmopolitan age of spectacle, across operatic productions, parodies, and theatrical adaptations from Spain to Paris, London, and New York.

Based on a study of Madrid (1850-1930), Discordant Notes argues that sound, noise, street music and flamenco have played a key role in structuring the transition to modernity by helping to negotiate social attitudes and legal responses to fundamental problems such as poverty, insalubrity, and crime.

This book examines the ways in which music is used to advance identity claims in several Latin American countries and among Latinos in the US. Drawing on a vast array of fields including popular music studies, ethnomusicology, sociology, and history it sheds new light on the complex ways in which music provides people from different countries and social sectors with both enjoyment and tools for understanding who they are in terms of nationality, region, race,ethnicity, class, gender, and migration status.

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.

In this book, Llano analyzes the socio-political discourses underpinning critical and musicological descriptions of 'Spanish music' at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the discourse's connection with French politics and culture of the era. Llano studies operas and other musical works for the stage as privileged sites for the production of Spanish musical identities, and ultimately demonstrates that definitions of 'French' and 'Spanish' music during thisperiod were to some extent interdependent.

This book shows the influence of medieval musical manuscripts on the articulation of national identity in Enlightenment Spain.

Few Mexican musicians in the twentieth century achieved as much notoriety or had such an international impact as the popular singer and songwriter Agustin Lara (1897-1970). With close musicological focus and in-depth cultural analysis riding alongside the biographical narrative, Agustin Lara: A Cultural Biography is a welcome read to aficionados and performers of Latin American musics.