Sounding Latin Music Hearing The Americas

"Sounding Latin America studies popular music making by immigrants from Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean in the United States. It focuses on the points of contact and divergence in music making that result from competing values informed by how modernity is experienced across the Americas: the relation of language to letters; cosmopolitanism; racial categories and adjacent traditions and notions of the past; citizenship and migrancy; globalization and belonging. First study of the intra-hemispheric, linked but divergent relations of "Latin" music to the US and Latin America Proposes a comparative method for understanding the relations of immigrants to minority groups in the US with music making as the center Book places aurality ("intersensory, affective, cognitive, discursive, material, perceptual, and rhetorical network") as central operation in the constitution of "music.""--

How is Latin American music heard, by whom, and why? Many in the United States believe Latin American musicians make “Latin music”—which carries with it a whole host of assumptions, definitions, and contradictions. In their own countries, these expatriate musicians might generate immense national pride or trigger suspicions of “national betrayals.” The making, sounding, and hearing of “Latin music” brings into being the complex array of concepts that constitute “Latin Americanism”—its fissures and paradoxes, but also its universal aspirations. Taking as its center musicians from or with declared roots in Latin America, Jairo Moreno presents us with an innovative analysis of how and why music emerges as a necessary but insufficient shorthand for defining and understanding Latin American, Latinx, and American experiences of modernity. This close look at the growth of music-making by Latin American and Spanish-speaking musicians in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century reveals diverging understandings of music’s social and political possibilities for participation and belonging. Through the stories of musicians—Rubén Blades, Shakira, Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and Miguel Zenón—Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas traces how artists use music to produce worlds and senses of the world at the ever-transforming conjunction of Latin America and the United States.

Audisee® eBooks with Audio combine professional narration and sentence highlighting to engage reluctant readers! The crowd sways to the melodic strumming of a bossa nova guitarist. A vocalist belts out lyrics that blend English and Spanish. Couples dance to salsa's syncopated rhythms. These are the sounds of Latin music. Before Latin music exploded into the mainstream in the 1990s, it was on the sidelines of American pop. Ritchie Valens fused Latin dance music with rock. Julio Iglesias popularized Latin ballads in the United States. And Gloria Estefan was the first crossover artist. But after Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca" exploded onto the pop scene in 1999, Latin music took center stage. Follow the evolution of Latin music through the decades. Learn how its distinct sounds and catchy rhythms have been integrated into American pop. Discover how it is used for political expression. And read more about stars such as Victor Jara, Selena, and Shakira.

Just as people are shaped by the time and place they come from, so is music. Readers are invited to explore music that was born from Latin America and to trace its rise to a position of global popularity. They learn about the different instruments used in music styles such as Cuban and Caribbean and how this music influences the music of other cultures. Also featured is an extensive list of recommended Latin music albums, vibrant photographs of Latin music stars such as Gloria Estefan and Daddy Yankee, and annotated quotes from writers and musicians.

Outside of music, the importance of sound and listening have been greatly overlooked in Latin American history. Visual media has dominated cultural studies, affording an incomplete record of the modern era. This edited volume presents an original analysis of the role of sound in Latin American and Caribbean societies, from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors examine the importance of sound in the purveyance of power, gender roles, race, community, religion, and populism. They also demonstrate how sound is essential to the formation of citizenship and nationalism. Sonic media, and radio in particular, have become primary tools for contesting political issues. In that vein, the contributors view the control of radio transmission and those who manipulate its content for political gain. Conversely, they show how, in neoliberal climates, radio programs have exposed corruption and provided a voice for activism. The chapters address sonic production in a variety of media: radio, Internet, digital recordings, phonographs, speeches, carnival performances, fireworks festivals, and the reinterpretation of sound in literature. They examine the embodied experience of listening and its importance to memory coding and identity formation. This collection looks to sonic media as an essential vehicle for transmitting ideologies, imagined communities, and culture. As the contributors discern, sound is ubiquitous, and its study is therefore crucial to understanding the flow of information and influence in Latin America and globally.

This ethnographic journey into the New York salsa scene of the 1990s is the first of its kind. Written by a musical insider and from the perspective of salsa musicians, Sounding Salsa is a pioneering study that offers detailed accounts of these musicians grappling with intercultural tensions and commercial pressures. Christopher Washburne, himself an accomplished salsa musician, examines the organizational structures, recording processes, rehearsing, and gigging of salsa bands, paying particular attention to how they created a sense of community, privileged "the people" over artistic and commercial concerns, and incited cultural pride during performances.Sounding Salsa addresses a range of issues, musical and social. Musically, Washburne examines sound structure, salsa aesthetics, and performance practice, along with the influences of Puerto Rican music. Socially, he considers the roles of the illicit drug trade, gender, and violence in shaping the salsa experience. Highly readable, Sounding Salsa offers a behind-the-scenes perspective on a musical movement that became a social phenomenon.

Audible Geographies in Latin America examines the audibility of place as a racialized phenomenon. It argues that place is not just a geographical or political notion, but also a sensorial one, shaped by the specific profile of the senses engaged through different media. Through a series of cases, the book examines racialized listening criteria and practices in the formation of ideas about place at exemplary moments between the 1890s and the 1960s. Through a discussion of Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s last concerts in Rio de Janeiro, and a contemporary sound installation involving telegraphs by Otávio Schipper and Sérgio Krakowski, Chapter 1 proposes a link between a sensorial economy and a political economy for which the racialized and commodified body serves as an essential feature of its operation. Chapter 2 analyzes resonance as a racialized concept through an examination of phonograph demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro and research on dancing manias and hypnosis in Salvador da Bahia in the 1890s. Chapter 3 studies voice and speech as racialized movements, informed by criminology and the proscriptive norms defining “white” Spanish in Cuba. Chapter 4 unpacks conflicting listening criteria for an optics of blackness in “national” sounds, developed according to a gendered set of premises that moved freely between diaspora and empire, national territory and the fraught politics of recorded versus performed music in the early 1930s. Chapter 5, in the context of Cuban Revolutionary cinema of the 1960s, explores the different facets of noise—both as a racialized and socially relevant sense of sound and as a feature and consequence of different reproduction and transmission technologies. Overall, the book argues that these and related instances reveal how sound and listening have played more prominent roles than previously acknowledged in place-making in the specific multi-ethnic, colonial contexts characterized by diasporic populations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This book covers the history of the music of Latin America. Individual chapters focus on the sounds of the Caribbean, Brazil, South America, and Mexico. Author Stuart A. Kallen includes informative sidebars and numerous quotations from authoritative sources. Students will enjoy this volume for leisure reading and it's an excellent research tool for reports.

Tracing musicology in Latin American during the twentieth century, this book presents case studies to illustrate how Latin American music has interacted with social and global processes. The book addresses such topics as popular music, post-colonialism, women in Latin American music, tradition and modernity, musical counterculture, globalization, and identity construction through music. It contributes to the development of paradigms of cultural analysis that originated outside of Latin America by testing them in the Latin American musical context, while also exploring how specifically Latin American models can contribute to broader cultural analysis.

A behind the scenes look at the music that is currently the soundtrack of the globe, reported on and written by Leila Cobo, Billboard's VP of Latin Music and the world's ultimate authority on popular Latin music. Decoding "Despacito" tracks the stories behind the biggest Latin hits of the past fifty years. From the salsa born and bred in the streets of New York City, to Puerto Rican reggaetón and bilingual chart-toppers, this rich oral history is a veritable treasure trove of never-before heard anecdotes and insight from a who's who of Latin music artists, executives, observers, and players. Their stories, told in their own words, take you inside the hits, to the inner sanctum of the creative minds behind the tracks that have defined eras and become hallmarks of history. FEATURING THE STORIES BEHIND SONGS BY: José Feliciano • Los Tigres Del Norte • Julio Iglesias • Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine • Willie Colón • Juan Luis Guerra • Selena • Los Del Río • Carlos Vives • Elvis Crespo • Ricky Martin • Santana • Shakira • Daddy Yankee • Marc Anthony • Enrique Iglesias with Descemer Bueno and Gente De Zona • Luis Fonsi with Daddy Yankee • J Balvin with Willy William • Rosalía