Discussion Questions
Digital Resources
Discussion Questions
- How might an analysis of compositions and contemporary reactions to/thoughts on live performances of music in Latin and the United States, not having the intermediary of the recording industry, demonstrate musical relationships differently?
- What does the early recording industry’s less-then-perfect record-keeping (of performers’ names, recording dates/locations, etc.) say about executives’ attitudes towards the recording artists and their music?
- What might be some of the implications of such a lack of good documentation for contemporary record consumers, later consumers, and researchers?
- Why do you think some records appear to have multiple, potentially conflicting intended audiences?
- This project looks primarily at popular and dance music–How might Latin American-U.S. relations appear different in terms of a musical genre with a potentially narrower audience?
- Music rarely exists as an isolated phenomenon; how might one’s interpretation of a U.S. influence in Latin American music (or vice versa) change depending on the music’s social context?
- Jazz is one of the major musical styles that flowed back and forth between the United States and Latin America in the early part of the twentieth century, but to a certain extent, it was part of a worldwide jazz craze–Do you think jazz spread so readily after World War I because of its own musical character; or could it have been partly due to U.S. imperialism incidentally taking the new music with it?
- What does Sousa’s positive comparison of his tour to the Monroe Doctrine say about U.S. attitudes towards the music of cultures whose music was influenced by the U.S. and Europe?
- How does this fit with (a) his statement that Latin America had its own high-caliber bands, and (b) his claim that these bands had become well-known in parts of the Anglo-Saxon world?
- How might Sause’s reference to the standard music other countries reflect his own or U.S. perspectives on the nature of music as related culture, and how might this affect his or the United States’ musical interactions with peoples of other countries?
Digital Resources
- Borge, Jason. “La Civilizada Selva: Jazz and Latin American Avant-Garde Intellectuals.” Chasqui 37, no. 1 (2008): 105–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29742237.
– This source provides a fascinating discussion of Latin American attitudes towards jazz roughly the mid-twentieth century. - De Menezes Bastos, Rafael Jose. “Brazil in France, 1922: An Anthropological Study of the Congenital International Nexus of Popular Music.” Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana 29, no. 1 (2008): 1–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29739142.
– De Menezes Bastos provides a deeper look at Oito Batutas’ 1922 Paris tour. - Giorgio Nikola Rigas Nenadev, “1920s Jazz from other countries” YouTube playlist, 180 videos, 18 July 2022. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiYGj-YN1hNIodn6YoeYBTGtAUf4o_PzE
– This is a rather lengthy YouTube playlist of non-U.S. jazz and jazz-inspired dance music, mostly from the 1920s; included are a fairly large number of examples from Latin America. The quality of some of the videos is rather horrible, largely due to the poor conditions of the records; however, as many of them are quite rare, poor quality is better than nothing, and they provide an interesting selection of records showing the varying degrees to which U.S. jazz and dance music influenced Latin American dance bands. - “Nathan Glantz Orchestra 78rpm Collection.” Internet Archive, 2014. https://archive.org/details/NathanGlantzOrchestra78rpmCollection/01+I’m+Satisfied%2C+Beside+That+Sweetie+O’+Mine.m4a
– Nathan Glantz’s Orchestra is fairly typical of mid-1920s U.S. dance bands; this collection provides a useful comparison for the records by Adolfo Carabelli’s and Elio Rietti’s Jazz Bands. - Putnam, Lara. “The Weekly Regge: Cosmopolitan Music and Race-Conscious Moves in a ‘World a Jazz,’ 1910s–1930s.” In Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, 153–95. University of North Carolina Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807838136_putnam.10.
– Putnam’s work is one of many that looks at the roles of and attitudes towards jazz in the Caribbean in the first half of the twentieth century; her discussion is of particular interest for its inclusion of social implications.