Criticismo e instituciones en los estudios de música popular de Argentina

GARCÍA, MIGUEL ANGEL

México DF

Congreso; Society for Ethnomusicology, 54th Annual Meeting. Borderless Ethnomusicologies; 2009

Society for Ethnomusicology, UNAM

Scholarly studies on the popular music genres of Argentina have lacked continuity, undergone theoretical paradigm shifts and adopted different strategies to validate knowledge along time. Changes in the political and economic scenario, the ups and downs of institutions and individual dispositions have been the main influencing factors on the winding and unstable history of the discipline. A survey of the work done in the field reveals that tango and rock music have been the genres most studied. The Antología del tango rioplatense, published by the National Institute of Musicology in 1980, became the earliest attempt to produce a "scientific" approach to that genre. In the case of rock music, the bibliography expanded significantly from the late 1980s. A reading of those papers reveals that the selection of topics and their problems has depended in some cases on a moderate criticism and in others just on the musical taste of the researchers. This situation gave rise to two kinds of narratives: one which attempts to remove the object from the esthetic inclination of the observer and another built around its celebration. The aim of this work is to present an overview of the most relevant investigations in order to disclose the epistemological approaches on which they were based.