This book reconstructs the transnational history of the category of Latin American music during the first half of the twentieth century, from a longer perspective that begins in the nineteenth century and extends the narrative until the present. It analyzes intellectual, commercial, state, musicological, and diplomatic actors that created and elaborated this category. It shows music as a key field for the dissemination of a cultural idea of Latin America in the 1930s. It studies multiple music-related actors such as intellectuals, musicologists, policymakers, popular artists, radio operators, and diplomats in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, the United States, and different parts of Europe. It proposes a regionalist approach to Latin American and global history, by showing individual nations as both agents and result of transnational forces—imperial, economic, and ideological. It argues that Latin America is the sedimentation of over two centuries of regionalist projects, and studies the place of music regionalism in that history.

This chapter describes four circuits of musical practice in the 1920s and 1930s, in order to locate the emergence of Latin America as a musical space. It analyzes: (1) the entertainment scene’s repertoire of Manila, Philippines, in the early 1920s; (2) the Latin American repertoire in the career of Russian Jewish singer Isa Kremer, who ended up in Argentina in the 1930s; (3) the copyright strategy of Sociedad Argentina de Autores, Intérpretes y Compositores de Música (SADAIC), the Argentine society for composers of tango and other popular styles, in the late 1920s; and (4) the Mexican broadcasting system XEW, the very first commercial attempt to build a Latin American musical platform. In every case, local, national, and transational dimensions of musical practice are approached in terms of music genres, market structures, and musical ideologies.

This chapter tells the history of the German-born Uruguayan musicologist Francisco Curt Lange and the Latin-American Music Bulletin he created, a musicological project intended as a forum for musicians and music-related figures from all over Latin America, and the United States, interested in creating a regional field of musicological studies and musical promotion. It examines policies about disc collection, score printing and distribution, musical ethnographies, folklore, musical analysis, conferences, concerts, and regional institutions promoted by the Bulletin, and traces relevant aspects of Lange’s professional journey between Germany, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, among other places. The chapter also highlights the changing place of the United States, both as a subject of musicological study and as a site of music-related hemispheric initiatives, in the history of this Latin Americanist project.

The epilogue describes the recent history of political and diplomatic regional projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, which was the context in which the research behind this book took place. It reflects, on the one hand, on the links between contemporary regional formation and the consolidation of Latin American music as a cultural category, and on the links between this category and other geocultural categories in world history, on the other. Finally, it argues in favor of considering Latin America as a project, instead of a given framework, a natural reality, or a historical necessity, and situates the study of Latin American music within a broader reflection on the future possibilities for regionalist projects.

This chapter shows the emergence of a regional sense of Latin America as part of the musical pedagogy of the nationalist states at the peak of the state-building efforts to organize, through a variety of instruments of cultural activism, what at the time were called “the masses.” It analyzes particularly the cases of Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina—the three largest countries of the time in population and economic development—from the 1910s through the 1950s. It proposes a comparative history of Latin American musical populisms, focusing in particular on policies of music education, broadcasting, censorship, and experiences of state-sponsored collective singing.