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Digital Humanities and Nineteenth Century Music: Some Perspectives and Examples from Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2020

José Manuel Izquierdo  and
Fernanda Vera
José Manuel Izquierdo
Affiliation:
Pontificia Universidad Católica [email protected]
Fernanda Vera
Affiliation:
Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educació[email protected]
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Extract

The advent of digital resources, the Internet, and an interconnected globe has deeply affected the humanities and its research. Music scholars in Latin America, like everywhere else, have observed this explosion of digital information sharing, but not everyone has been able to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded by this technology. On the one hand, advantages of digitization are slowly becoming recognized as tools to fight the enormous size of the region (Latin America), especially through technology's ability to easily and promptly disperse sources across great distances. In addition, digitization acts as an aid in countering the endemic lack of economic resources, and more broadly offers a path towards making the academic world a more connected and equal place. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the digital revolution has not reached people across the globe equally. Digital segregation is a problem that deeply impacts numerous nations around world; and for Latin America and the Caribbean, it has meant a slower pace of incorporation into the digital era. Key databases like JSTOR and the various READEX products are still largely unavailable to scholars in Latin America, and, given the steep price of such resources, the fight for a world of open-source information is becoming increasingly political.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 18 , Special Issue 1: The Digital Humanities and Nineteenth-Century Music , April 2021 , pp. 121 - 127
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2020

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References

1 Gayol, Víctor and Melo, Jairo Antonio. ‘Presente y perspectivas de las humanidades digitales en América Latina’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velásquez 47/2 (2017): 281–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For a recent survey of colonial music studies, see Waisman, Leonardo, Una historia de la música colonial latinoamericana (Buenos Aires: Gourmet Musical, 2019)Google Scholar. For a recent study of nationalism and modernism in Latin American music of the early twentieth century, see Caicedo, Patricia, The Latin American Art Song: Sounds of the Imagined Nations (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018)Google Scholar.

3 Memoria Chile: www.memoriachilena.gob.cl.

4 Hemeroteca Digital Brasil: http://bndigital.bn.gov.br/hemeroteca-digital/; Hemeroteca Digital México: www.hndm.unam.mx/index.php/es/.

5 Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano: www.iberoamericadigital.net/BDPI.

6 The participants are the National Libraries of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Salvador, Spain, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Dominican Republic and Uruguay, in addition to the library of the Universidad de Chile.

7 The Archivo de Música of the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile has organized several conferences on Music and Sound Archives. RISM is usually present, with Klaus Keil attending the last conference, in March 2018: www.bibliotecanacional.gob.cl/615/w3-article-84523.html.

8 The library is named after the composer Juan Meserón (Caracas, 1779–1842), one of the most prominent musicians in Venezuela at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Meserón also printed the first book on music theory in Venezuela: Explicación y conocimiento de los principios generales de la música (Caracas: Tomás Antero, 1824). A digital copy of the second edition of the book (from 1852) can be found at www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/explicacion-yconocimiento-de-los-principios-generales-de-la-musica-0/.

9 Carballo, Yusneyi and Palacios, Mariantonia, ‘Proyecto Biblioteca Virtual Musicológica Juan Meserón’, in Memorias de la Segunda Conferencia Nacional de Computación, Informática y Sistemas Concisa 2014 (Caracas: Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, 2015): 177–81Google Scholar, www.academia.edu/15475949/Proyecto_Biblioteca_Virtual_Musicol%C3%B3gica_Juan_Meser%C3%B3n.

10 The current political and economic conditions in Venezuela seem to have affected the stability of webpages across the country, including the Biblioteca Virtual Musicológica Juan Meserón, but the library's website can sometimes be accessed at: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XlAToWEWJCIJ:orpheus.ucv.ve/bvmjm.

11 Lanzelotte, Rosana, ‘Por um Acervo Digital de partituras de Música Brasileira’, in Annais do I Congresso Internacional em Humanidades Digitais Rio 2018 (Rio de Janeiro: UNIRIO, 2018): 245–50Google Scholar. See: https://cpdoc.fgv.br/sites/default/files/cpdoc/HDRio2018_Anais2vs.pdf.

12 Musica Brasilis: http://musicabrasilis.org.br/.

13 In March 2019 the number of scores was 1,547.

14 While there is still no website for this recent project, a roundable of August 2018, with a presentation and a technical debate, was filmed. It can be watched in the following YouTube link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2JJmwhe1B8.

15 In general, Mexico, like Argentina, has been slow in joining the world's digital revolution; however, apart from the previously mentioned Hemeroteca Mexicana, there have been several recent projects that are relevant for music research. These include projects such as the digital resources of the INBA (Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes) which includes books, recordings, podcasts and digital historical sources; and MUSICAT: a network of scholars working online to publish resources of Mexican music histories since 2002 INBA Digital: www.inba.gob.mx/digital; MUSICAT: http://musicat.unam.mx/index.php/hallazgos/.

16 Rosana Lanzelotte, Adriana Ballesté and Martha Ulhoa, ‘A Digital Collection of Brazilian Lundus’, see www.academia.edu/18293525/A_DIGITAL_COLLECTION_OF_BRAZILIAN_LUNDUS. Martha Tupinambá de Ulhoa and Luiz Costa-Lima Neto, ‘Memory, History and Cultural Encounters in the Atlantic: The Case of Lundu’, The World of Music 2/2 (2013): 47–72.

17 The project, including a working database, can be accessed through the following link: http://musica-sec-xix.unirio.br/.

18 More recently she has published a handful of papers on early nineteenth-century Brazilian music based on her research. An unpublished conference paper presented in 2014 on ‘Newspapers as Sources for the Study of Entertainment Music in the 19th Century’ can be found on her Academia.edu website: www.academia.edu/34491527/Jornais-como-fonte-no-estudo-da-musica-de-entretenimento-no-seculo-XIX_MODALIDADE_COMUNICACAO.

19 The full paper (‘Música em Periódicos Oitocentistas – Banco de dados’) will be published as part of the Actas of the conference, on the IASPM-AL website: http://iaspmal.com. READEX, a private company, currently has the largest number of digitized Latin American newspapers. The access is extremely expensive for local universities and libraries, however, and it thus seems to be mostly used by scholars in European and Anglophone universities.

20 http://rbm.musica.ufrj.br/.

21 Carredano, Consuelo y Eli, Victoria, La música en Hispanoamérica en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010): 239–40Google Scholar.

22 Merino, Luis, ‘Los inicios de la circulación pública de la creación musical escrita por mujeres en Chile’, Revista musical chilena 213 (2010): 53–76Google Scholar.

23 Izquierdo, José Manuel and Vera, Fernanda, ‘Noticia de investigación: Una perspectiva de Big Data para la música de salón chilena’, Neuma 11/1 (2018): 127–32Google Scholar.

24 Documenting Teresa Carreño: https://documentingcarreno.org/.

25 The proceedings of the conference, including the paper by Sans – who kindly sent me a copy – are to be published.

26 Walton, Benjamin, ‘Quirk Shame’, Representations 132/1 (2015): 121–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.