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Venezuelan music has remained largely unnoticed in the academic English literature. Boasting a tremendous wealth of traditions, it displays influences from the Spanish, indigenous, and enslaved African communities that populated the territory from the “conquest” on and offers a tremendous diversity of genres and styles that vary by region, occasion, time, and sometimes ethnic influences. This book presents critical discussions of some of these traditions in connection with the issue of identity. The discussions capture country and city life, illustrate foundational myths, bring secular traditions closer to Christianity, explore surviving cultural strategies, et cetera. They also analyze the interface between Venezuelan identity and European classical music. The book displays diversity of perspectives in terms of (a) subject matter, as it includes traditional and concert musics; (b) disciplines on which the inquiries are grounded, as it includes essays by scholars and artists from musicology, performance, composition, history, cultural history, and education; and (c) epistemological approaches, as it includes critical, historical, and ethnographic research.
The Fundación del Estado para el Sistema Nacional de Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela (FESNOJIV), also known as El Sistema, is an internationally recognized social phenomenon. By promoting social reform and development through music education, El Sistema is enriching the lives of thousands of impoverished youth in Venezuela by providing a nurturing environment for children in government-sponsored orchestras, choirs, and bands. In this thesis, I contend that the relationship between music education and social reform cultivates sociocultural ideas and expectations that are transmitted through FESNOJIV's curriculum to the participating youth and concert attendees. These ideas and El Sistema's live and recorded performances engage both the local Venezuelan community and the world-at-large. Ultimately, I will show that FESNOJIV has been instrumental in creating, promoting, and maintaining a national Venezuelan identity that is associated with pride and musical achievement.
Unlike much of the literature on Venezuela in the Chávez period, this book shifts focus away from 'top down' perspectives to examine how Venezuelan folksinger Alí Primera (1942-1985) became intertwined with Venezuelan politics, both during his lifetime and posthumously. Alí’s ‘Necessary Songs’ offered cultural resources that enabled Chávez to connect with pre-existing patterns of grassroots activism in ways that resonated deeply with the poor and marginalised masses. Official support for Alí’s legacy led the songs to be used in new ways in the Chávez period, as Venezuelans actively engaged with them to redefine themselves in relation to the state and to reach new understandings of their place within a changed society. This book is essential reading not only for those interested in popular music and politics, but for all those seeking to better understand how Chávez was able to successfully identify himself so profoundly with the Venezuelan masses, and they with him.
In Venezuela's El Sistema, music is both a means of government control and a form of emancipation for youth musicians
Do you know where the largest lake in South America is? Venezuela. Readers will be captivated by this vibrant book about the cultural traditions, festivals, music, art, dance, and cuisine of Venezuela. The culture of Venezuela is as multi-faceted as the people living there. The thorough text analyzes how its diverse landscape, with the tallest waterfall in the world, resources like oil, which Venezuela has the largest reserve in the world, and history have shaped the cultural identity of its people. The high-interest subject matter and accessible language help clarify advanced social studies concepts. Stunning photographs enhance each chapter.
Juan Bautista Plaza (1898-1965) was one of the most important musicians in the history of Venezuela. In addition to composing in a variety of genres and styles, he was the leading figure in Venezuelan music education and musicology at a time when his compatriots were seeking to solidify their cultural identity. Plaza's compositions in the emerging nationalist style and his efforts to improve musical institutions in his home country parallel the work of contemporaneous Latin American musicians including Carlos Chávez of Mexico, Amadeo Roldán of Cuba, and Camargo Guarnieri of Brazil. Plaza's life and music are little studied, and Labonville's ambitious book is the first in English to be based on his extensive writings and compositions. As these and other documents show, Plaza filled numerous roles in Venezuela's musical infrastructure including researcher, performer, teacher, composer, promoter, critic, chapel master, and director of national culture. Labonville examines Plaza's many roles in an attempt to assess how the nationalist spirit affected art music culture in Venezuela, and what changes it brought to Venezuela's musical landscape.
This dissertation shows how gaita music articulates regional identity in Maracaibo, in the state of Zulia in Venezuela, based on analysis of lyrics and recordings, interviews, archival work, and participant observation at performance events. Since the 1960s, gaita has become a commercialized folk music that is popular throughout Venezuela during the Christmas holiday season, but in Zulia, where gaita originated, the music serves as a medium through which regional identity is defined, promoted, negotiated, celebrated, and even marketed. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2000-01, 2003, and 2007 among musicians, composers, academics, and gaita fans, this study is structured around five broad vectors of gaita's expression of zulianidad: sound, history, geography, religion and politics. The mere sound of gaita--with its unique beat--is recognized as distinctly Zulian genre, and this distinctiveness contributes to its power in indexing regional identity. Gaita's instruments are seen as Zulian and perceived as representative of the European, African, and indigenous elements of Venezuela's racial mixture and the ideology of racial democracy. Gaita, which originated as orally improvised party music in the nineteenth century, is a prominent feature of local cultural history. Since the early twentieth century, and especially after the advent of recording and the professionalization of gaita groups in the 1960s, skilled composers have crafted song lyrics that chronicle local history. By singing of places and issues of geographical significance, gaiteros produce place in the regional imaginary, help to create a sense of a unified Zulian region, and negotiate issues of regional and national identity. In Maracaibo, religious practice is dominated by devotion to the regional patron saint, La Chinita, and songs dedicated to her promote a particularly regional version of Catholicism and connect religious identity with local sociopolitical regionalism. Political regional identity dates to the years of the Venezuelan independence movement, and protest gaitas continue to articulate Zulians frustrations with centralized governmental control. While gaita serves as holiday season party music, it also functions as an important expression of regional cultural identity in Maracaibo, Zulia.
The music of the peoples of South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean is treated with unprecedented breadth in this multi-volume work. Taking a sociocultural and human-centered approach, Music in Latin America and the Caribbean gathers the best scholarship from writers all over the world to cover in depth the musical legacies of indigenous peoples, creoles, African descendants, Iberian colonizers, and other immigrant groups that met and mixed in the New World. From these texts, music emerges as the powerful tool that negotiates identities, enacts resistance, performs beliefs, and challenges received aesthetics. More than two decades in the making, this work privileges the perspectives of cultural insiders and emphasizes the role that music plays in human life. Volume 2, Performing the Caribbean Experience, focuses on the reconfiguration of this complex soundscape after the Conquest and on the strategies by which groups from distant worlds reconstructed traditions, assigning new meanings to fragments of memory and welding a fascinating variety of unique Creole cultures. Shaped by an enduring African presence and the experience of slavery and colonization by the Spanish, French, British, and Dutch, peoples of the Caribbean islands and circum-Caribbean territories resorted to the power of music to mirror their history, assert identity, gain freedom, and transcend their experience in lasting musical messages. Essays on pan-Caribbean themes, surveys of traditions, and riveting personal accounts capture the essence of pluralistic and spiritualized brands of creativity through the voices of an unprecedented number of Caribbean authors, including a representative contingent of distinguished Cuban scholars whose work is being published in English translation for the first time in this book. Two CDs with 52 recorded examples illustrate the contributions to this volume.