Aurality: listening and knowledge in nineteenth-century Colombia PDF
Preview Aurality: listening and knowledge in nineteenth-century Colombia
AurAlity AnA MAríA OchOA GAutier SiGn, StOrAGe, trAnSMiSSiOn • A series edited by Jonathan Sterne and Lisa Gitelman AurAlity Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth- Century Colombia Duke University Press • Durham and London • 2014 © 2014 Duke univerSity PreSS. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper o Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker Typeset in Arno Pro and Trade Gothic by Graphic Composition, Inc., Bogart, GA Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. Aurality : listening and knowledge in nineteenth- century Colombia / Ana María Ochoa Gautier. pages cm—(Sign, storage, transmission) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978- 0- 8223- 5736- 0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978- 0- 8223- 5751- 3 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Oral communication—Colombia—History—19th century. 2. Listening—Social aspects—Colombia—History—19th century. 3. Voice—Social aspects—Colombia—History—19th century. 4. Sound—Social aspects—Colombia—History—19th century. i. Title. ii. Series: Sign, storage, transmission. p95.43.c7024 2014 302.2′24209861—dc23 2014006960 Cover art: Olga de Amaral, Entre rios I, 2010. Linen, gesso, acrylic, and gold leaf. 185 × 170 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph © Diego Amaral. A María Eugenia Londoño y Jesús Martín- Barbero, A Richard Bauman y Beverly Stoeltje • Para Alina y Bernardo cOntentS Preface and Acknowledgments • ix Introduction The Ear and the Voice in the Lettered City’s Geophysical History • 1 1. On Howls and Pitches • 31 2. On Popular Song • 77 3. On the Ethnographic Ear • 123 4. On Vocal Immunity • 165 Epilogue The Oral in the Aural • 207 Notes • 215 References • 231 Index • 252 PrefAce AnD AcknOwleDGMentS This book was not initially about listening, the voice, or the nineteenth cen- tury. The original project for the book was an inquiry into the intellectual history of studies of popular music in Colombia from the 1930s to the 1970s. I was especially interested in the correlation between music and the literary, since the entanglement of the sonorous in different forms of narrative has been central to Latin American musical thought, and many of its foundational figures have been more widely recognized as writers than as music scholars. Also, the field of folkloristics was historically shaped in such a way that the study of the musical in the popular was often undertaken as an intellectual and political endeavor that crossed the anthropological, the musical, and the literary with multiple practices of cultural policy. But when I went to the archives of the National Radio in Colombia (Radio Nacional de Colombia) in 2008 to listen to the radio programs Colombian folklorists had done throughout their career, I realized that programs on folk- lore from the 1940s to the 1980s used what was initially a vanguard technol- ogy, the radio, to promote a conservative listening pedagogy that constantly cited nineteenth century Colombian sources. I then turned to the nineteenth century archive to begin an initial exploration of the question of why such a listening pedagogy had been so persistent, shaping many of the ideas about the notions of música popular. To my surprise, I found an archive full of lis- tening practices. As I found and read dispersed materials on such listening practices in the nineteenth century, a sonorous written archive I had never suspected was there began to take shape. As that archive took form, the topic of this book gradually changed from the intellectual history of twentieth cen- tury folklorists to the role of listening to different sounds considered “voices” in shaping the notions of nature and culture, so central to understandings of personhood and alterity that imbue the popular in Latin America. This book took shape in the midst of conversations on popular music go- ing back and forth between colleagues in Colombia, the United States and other Latin American countries, particularly Brazil and Argentina. I am deeply indebted to the possibility of such conversations across different places and
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