Experimentalisms in Practice: Musical Perspectives from Latin America. Edited by Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Abstract

In the multi-authored collection Experimentalisms in Practice: Musical Perspectives from Latin America, editors Ana R. Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro L. Madrid boldly claim an unprecedented space for Latin America within musicology by way of a fundamental reinterpretation of experimentalism. This volume serves both as a snapshot of the varied landscape of current musical studies focused on Latin America, penned in English, as well as an innovative theoretical intervention that effectively tears down the borders of disciplinary approaches to experimentation and experimentalism. Understanding this conceptualization is key for engaging the volume’s rich variety of chapters within the four sections. The book’s focus on musical institutions, programs, groups, and genres of the post–World War II era loosely aligns it, chronologically, with the advent of what mainstream music history calls “experimentalism” in the United States. Despite the broad geographic area covered by the collection, there is a strong emphasis on the second half of the twentieth century and on major metropolitan cities known for cultural cosmopolitanism: Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Havana make multiple appearances across chapters. As Benjamin Piekut makes clear in the illuminating afterword to the volume, the elite resistance to European musical models through the 1930s was hemispherical, encompassing the Americas at least insofar as they were represented in the Pan-American Association of Composers. Although Henry Cowell continued to develop taxonomies of experimentalist composers including Latin Americans into the 1950s, other critics and composers established a predominantly Anglocentric (both US and UK) narrative of experimentalism. This volume takes up the challenge of a move towards (or a return to) a more hemispherical historiography of experimentalism. It does so by offering musicological and ethnomusicological perspectives, with many of the authors mixing their approaches. The editors opted for a heterogeneous group of wide-reaching studies for the twelve chapters of this volume, which is split into four sections. Alonso-Minutti, Herrera, and Madrid’s introduction sets the tone for the collection’s conceptualization of experimentalism as “highly localized, historically grounded, fluid, and full of inconsistencies and contradictions” (6). One section in particular, “Centers and Institutions,” is an especially accessible starting point for scholars of experimentalism eager to move beyond the binaries of US/ Europe-Experimentalism/Avant-garde music. Piekut’s work on experimentalism