Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas - (Big Issues in Music) by Jairo Moreno (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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.""--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Moreno's expansive work will be of particular interest to many in the Latin American and Caribbean music communities, jazz musicologists, global music historians, and many others in the field. His contributions as a musician and scholar are a meaningful addition for those of us who value street-level subjectivity, music industry relevance, and keen theoretical application."-- "Latin American Music Review"

"This work will be of great interest to scholars whose research intersects with Latin American cultural studies, Latino studies, American studies, and ethnomusicology/musicology studies--especially those invested in semiology, musical and extramusical topoi, and interdisciplinary approaches to these Latin American repertories. . . . Moreno engages relevant social and cultural theorists and clearly articulates theory to make lucid and novel observations. . . . [a] highly recommended book."-- "Notes"

"Jairo Moreno's Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas is a theoretically rich, geographically dispersed study that investigates the transnational, temporal, and sociopolitical resonances of Latinx and Latin American musics and musicians in migration. At the crossroads between the two concurrent sonic processes that anchor the book's title--sounding and hearing--is listening, a central method to which Moreno frequently returns to understand how music mediates the(re)creation of meanings, relationships, and ways of knowing inherent to migratory musicking. The text thus lends a sustained listening ear to musics and music makers across the Americas--from Panama to the United States to Costa Rica, from Cuba to Puerto Rico, from Colombia to the world--to chart new histories based on the distinct senses of time and space that result from these circulations."-- "Journal of the American Musicological Society"

"Jairo Moreno's wide-reaching new book, Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas, is a tour de force that defines 'Latin music' through the stories of twentieth-century musicians (Rubén Blades, Shakira, Arturo O'Farrill, and Miguel Zenón) and connections to and expansions of critical frameworks across the academic landscape. . . . a significant contribution to both musicology and cultural studies, challenging readers to reconsider notions of identity, belonging, and cultural exchange."-- "Music & Letters"

"Original and insightful, Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas is carefully researched in terms of historical framework, painstakingly structured and argued, and well written. Though the author's expertise is primarily musicological, his erudition spans several fields, and allows him to cover theoretical, historical, and disciplinary terrain that most scholars would be well advised not to attempt. In short, no one else could have written this tour de force."-- "Jason R. Borge, University of Texas at Austin"

"This is a powerful, insightful, and enlightening book by a major thinker in his field with an impressive command of the literature and musical repertoire of Latin America as well as Latinos in the United States. Moreno writes consciously as an intellectual 'migrant' at the crossroads of music studies, Latin American studies, cultural studies, and American studies. The theoretical contributions of this book are palpable, and it is humanized by the author being so conversant in popular music for mass audiences."-- "Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota"

About the Author

Jairo Moreno is associate professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects and coeditor of Econophonia: Music, Value, and the Forms of Life.