19 - Music

Summary

The first histories of music written by Spanish Americans which include sections on the colonial period are José Sáenz Poggio, Historia de la música guatemalteca (Guatemala, 1878), republished in Anales de la Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, 22/1–2 (1947), 6–54, and Ramón de la Plaza, Ensayos sobre el arte en Venezuela (Caracas, 1883; facsimile reprint, 1977). Serafín Ramírez, La Habana artística (Havana, 1891) and Laureano Fuentes Matons, Las artes en Santiago de Cuba (Santiago, Cuba, 1893), although riddled with errors, contain some still useful information on the early nineteenth century. The historian Gabriel Saldívar y Silva published aged 25 his authoritative Historia de la musica en México (épocas precortesiana y colonial) (Mexico, D.F., 1934); it still remains uniquely valuable. In contrast with earlier Latin American music researchers, Saldívar was a palaeographer who exploited numerous documents in the ecclesiastical and secular archives of Mexico City. To him and his collaborator, his wife Elisa Osorio de Saldívar, belongs the honour of having preceded all other Latin Americans in treating their continent’s musical past dispassionately, and of having placed its study on a sound footing. The next scholar to write a history of his nation’s music was Eugenio Pereira Salas. His Los orígenes del arte musical en Chile (Santiago, Chile, 1941) still remains a model of method even though superseded in some factual aspects by Samuel Claro Valdés, Oyendo a Chile (Santiago, Chile, 1979). Alejo Carpentier, La música en Cuba (Mexico, D.F., 1946) is still quoted, partly because of the author’s fame in other fields.