INNOVATION IN LATIN AMERICAN ELECTRO-ACOUSTICAL MUSIC  
by Gordon Mumma (written 1986).

Latin America shares with North America a long history of musical experimentation. Latin American composers include innovators with musical timbre, chromatic and serial syntax, and with microtonal tuning.  Historical figures who worked in this area include Juan Carlos Paz (Argentina), Walter Smetak (Brazil), Acario Cotapos (Chile), Amadeo Roldán (Cuba) and Julián Carrillo, Augusto Novaro, and Silvestre Revuelta (Mexico).

Electo-acoustical music has also flourished in Latin America, in spite of chronic political difficulties, erratic institutional support, and the limited availability of electronic equipment.  One extraordinary center, the Torcuato di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires, was active for nearly a decade – a relatively long span of time.  But many composers have worked in shorter-lived Latin American institutions, or established independent and private facilities (often outside of Latin America)in order to make their electro-acoustic music.  The innovative Latin American composers best known in the Northern Hemisphere are usually émigrés or exiles.

The first important Latin American electro-acoustical music appeared in Chile, at the Catholic University in Santiago, where a studio was established by the Experimental Sound Guild in the late 1950s.  José Vicente Asuar composed his Variaciónes Espectrales (Phantom Variations) there in 1959.  

In 1960 the Studio for Musical Phonology was established at the National University of Buenos Aires; it was adjunct to the study of Architectural Acoustics.  Though very little music was made there, one remarkable work, based on a Tunebo Colombian Indian text, was the evocative Creación de la Tierra  (Creation of the Earth, 1972) by the composer Jacqueleine Nova (Belgium, b.1937, d. Bogotá 1975).  

Other early Latin American institutional studios were established in Argentina (Experimental Music Center, Córdoba, 1965), in Venezuela (Studio of Musical Phonology, Caracas, established by Asuar in 1966) and during the 1970s in Brazil by Jorge Antunes(Brazil, b. 1942) and Conrado Silva (Uruguay, b. 1940), and in Mexico by Héctor Quintanar (Mexico, b. 1936).  In Cuba the composers Juan Blanco (Cuba, b.1920) and Leo Brouwer (Cuba, b.1939) and others worked with the Experimental Sound Group of the Institute of Cinematic Arts Industry.

Some of the institutional studios were technologically extravagant or imitated European and North American facilities; they rarely produced much quantity or diversity of result, compositionally.  Usually more productive composers such as Jorge Rapp (Argentina, b. 1946), Joaquín Orellana (Guatamala, b. 1937), or the cooperative studio ELAC, in Montevideo, under the guidance of the composer Coriún Aharonián (Uruguay, b. 1940).  

The Torcuato di Tella Institute of Buenos Aires established an Electronic Music Laboratory as part of the Latin American Center for Advanced Musical Studies.  
Over the period it was operative (1962 to 1972), stipends for one or two years of study were available for composers from all over Latin America.  The director of the Center was Alberto Ginastera, a composer of international stature, whose reputation ad guidance were great assets to its operation.  

Various people were responsible for the technical direction of the studio, most notably Fernando von Reichenbach.  Von Reichenbach not only supported a diversity of compositional directions, but applied his inventive genius to the development of extraordinary electronic music instruments.  One such device converted graphic images into control voltages for sound synthesis.  His application of this idea was far in advance of its development in the affluent "high-tech" countries of the Northern Hemisphere.

Operation of the Latin American Center ceased in 1972, concurrent with the decline of a relatively liberal artistic and political decade in Argentina (and in Latin America generally).  The studio itself was moved to new quarters under the auspices of the Center for the Investigation of Artistic, Technological and Mass Communication.  Von Reichenbach was joined in its technical direction by Francisco Kröpfl (previously the technical director of the National University studio) and José Ramon Maranzano, and by composers Gerardo Gandini (Argentina, b. 1936) ad Gabriel Bren¼ci¼c (Chile, b. 1942).  However, by 1976 artistic innovation was badly constricted by a deleterious political climate.  Stipends were no longer available.  The name of the studio shifted evasively to become the less-provocative "Center for Acoustical Musical Studies," and non-Argentine composers rarely had access to the facilities.  

Public access to musical innovation in Latin America has been mostly through the efforts of metropolitan new-music organizations (e.g. in Bogatá, Caracas, Mexico City, Montevideo) or at occasional international festivals such as the notable Third Art Biennial in Córdóba, Argentina, which was co-sponsored by Kaiser Industries in 1966.  The "New Music Days" part of this festival presented an extraordinary panorama of contemporary electro-acoustical and chamber music.  
It was attended by large and enthusiastic audiences and was documented with publications and LP recordings.  

Perhaps the most important new-music endeavor has been the Latin American Courses of Contemporary Music which have been held annually since 1971, variously in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Venezuela.  These courses have an international faculty and include in their curriculum musical performance, analysis, composition, technology and critical studies, with attention both to cultivated and vernacular genres.  The Pan-American faculty of the courses has included Gerardo Gandini (Argentina, b. 1936), Hans-Joachim Koellreutter (Germany-Brazil, b. 1915), Emilio Mendoza (Venezuela, b. 1953), José Maria Neves (Brazil, b. 1943), Sergio Prudencio (Bolivia, b. 1955), and Héctor Tosar (Uruguay, b. 1923).  

A remarkable diversity of music was produced during the halcyon decade of the di Tella Studio n Buenos Aires.   The first major work was Intensidad y Altura (Intensity and Height, 1964) by the Peruvian composer César Bolaños (b. 1931).  
Other important compositions include Metéora, 1958, by Joaquín Orellana, and
the witty Parca, 1974, by Oscar Bazán (Argentina, b.1936).   Aside from fostering compositional achievements, the major impact of the di Tella studio was the cross-fertilization of ideas and the creative momentum nourished in the composers who studied and worked there.  Some of their major accomplishments occurred after they had returned home.  Several of the di Tella alumni developed studios or produced significant elsewhere.  Besides those mentioned above, they include Eduardo Kusnír (Argentina, b. 1939) and Graciela Paraskevaídis (Argentina, b. 1940).

Joaquín Orellana studied at the di Tella Institute during 1967 and 1968. After his return to Guatemala, he bypassed the distractions of the technological opulence that would have been quite inappropriate to the Guatemalan context.  Instead, he explored indigenous acoustical resources, developed extended performance techniques with local ensembles and built new musical instruments.  He gathered the sounds of his experiments and of file from both city and countryside.  Using these materials, during the 1970s, Orellana produced a stunning group of electro-acoustical compositions, some of which employed theatrical or projected images.   They include Humanofonía (1971),  Malebolge (1972), Primitiva 1 (19073), Tzulhumanachi – Rupestre en el Futuro (1978), and Imposible a la "X" (1980).  

The musical accomplishments in Orellana’s work are radical and profound.  His sense of musical time comes from a Guatemalan and Latin-American reality (indigenous or mestizo), rather than from cultivated European models.  He employs sounds as themselves, rather than artifacts; his primitive elements are authentic rather than exotic; he juxtaposes and overlaps blocks of sound in an intuitive rather than discursive continuity (analogous, perhaps, to cinéma vérité).
His sound montages, even at their most complex, manifest material and aesthetic austerity.  

A comprehensive representation of Latin-American electro-acoustical music is recorded on the Tacuabé label (available from the Sociedád Uruguaya de Música Contemporánea, Casilla de Correo 1328, Montevideo, Uruguay).  The Tacuabé series, titled Música Nuevo Latinoamericana, comprises eight volumes, and also includes new music for instrumental and vocal resources.  These Tacuabé recordings include electro-acoustical or instrumental music by many of the composers mentioned above.  

This article was first published in the journal of THE PACIFIC RING FESTIVAL, April 1986, by the University of California, San Diego.

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