Works-in-Progress session: “Lyric Comedy in the Iberian-American Atlantic”

Given by Elisabeth Le Guin (Professor of Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles) and Alejandro García Sudo (Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles)

This session presents an overview of Le Guin’s and Garcia Sudo’s recent explorations of the tonadilla, a type of satirical musical comedy that enjoyed outstanding popularity in Madrid, Spain, and reached numerous North and South American stages between about 1760 and 1820 (Le Guin, 2014). The researchers welcome feedback on a book proposal and an article proposal; both documents will be circulated before their session.

Tonadillas Americanas will be a co-authored book with two parallel lines of argumentation. First, the authors will present historical case studies of musical performance in circum-Caribbean stages—Veracruz, La Habana, New Orléans—making the case that the tonadilla can be conceptualized as a performative complex with numerous embodiments across Hispanic-American domains. Additionally, the authors will interweave chapter-long historiographic meditations about the nature and scattered location of some of the sources relevant to this transnational research, arguing that musical genres and performing traditions that are often imagined as coherent prove to be fluid and unstable when examined from multiple positionalities and ideologies (colonial, nationalist, imperial, and postcolonial).

“The Transatlantic Tonadilla,” a companion piece to Tonadillas Americanas, will dive into the prevailing theoretical underpinnings of transatlantic music studies, contending that music and the performing arts should hold a more visible place in world historical research, and that Hispanic-American early music histories might shed new light on Atlantic Studies as conceived by U.S.-American and English musicological circles (Roach, 1998; Madrid, 2011; Goodman, 2012; Madrid and Moore, 2013; Jones, 2014; Miller, 2015; Goodman, 2015). The authors would like help evaluating different ways of presenting and expanding the main ideas of this upcoming article.

Further details…