A chat with the past. What historical sources can tell us about Argentine popular music in the early 20th century

GARCÍA, MIGUEL ANGEL

Viena, Austria

Congreso; 39th ICTM World Conference; 2007

International Council for Traditional Music

In 1905 the German polygrapher Robert Lehmann-Nitsche recorded several musical genres of popular music with a phonograph and around 125 wax cylinders in La Plata, Argentina. It was the first popular music collection recorded with scientific aims in this country, and brings to us the flavor of those early sounds. According to the collector´s own generic classification, it contains: 62 "estilos", 29 "canciones", 15 "milongas", 6 "cifras", 4 "huellas", 4 "tangos", 2 "vidalitas", 2 "gatos", 2 "zambas", 1 "aire", 2 "danzas". To accompany the recordings, Lehmann-Nitsche composed a 332-page manuscript with the transcription of most lyrics, a short description of the "corpus", an original generic classification and references to authors and performers, as well as some bibliographic sources. Both manuscript and cylinders are nowadays located at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv and a selected edition of the recordings is in progress. The peculiarity of the materials allows to characterize some features of the popular music practices at the beginning of the 20th century before the advancing processes of urbanization and industrialization. This paper presents an analysis of the recordings and manuscript in order to show how musicians put together popular and cultured literature in their repertory, the subject matter of the lyrics, the differences between male and female repertories, the relationship between lyrics and musical genres, and the social and cultural belonging of the musicians.