Canonical (ethno)musicology and the reconstruction of the history of music in Argentina. The case of Lehmann-Nitsche recordings

GARCÍA, MIGUEL ANGEL

Berlín

Congreso; Meeting of the Group of Historical Sound Sources; 2006

Group of Historical Sound Sources (International Council for Traditional Music)

In Argentina, there have been scholarly studies on aboriginal and popular musics -both rural and urban- for a century now. A close look at the ways researchers have tried to define our field and validate forms of knowledge reveals that we have taken up four different perspectives which in turn have implied the use of different, though not exclusive, methods. Each of them is related to some development the studies on the subject had in European and/or North American academic centers. It is also evident that they had -or have- their halcyon days, and yet, one way or another, all have managed to keep a degree of influence in the present. They could be named with the following two-word terms: music-object, music-culture, music-discourse and music-action. The earliest large collection and research of aboriginal and popular musical expressions in the country -considering music as a storable and classifiable object- was carried out by German researcher Robert Lehmann-Nitsche between 1905 and 1909. This scholar, true representative of the Positivist paradigm, recorded music, lexicons and narratives in 242 wax cylinders currently part of the collection of the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin. His work was based on the idea that Argentine music was so very exotic that it was imperative to preserve it from the threat of advancing urbanization and industrialization. Lehmann-Nitsche´s work left its mark on Argentine ethnomusicology, and a systematic analysis may throw light on to what extent his epistemology influenced the local canon, leading many later investigations, consciously or unconsciously,to follow the same premises this German researcher applied.