Content area
During the 1950's and 1960's an important segment of the popular music industry in Argentina was based upon forms of rural folk music. While Argentine scholars have made important contributions to Latin American folklore and folk music study, their efforts have focused upon rural traditional culture. Thus there has been little attempt to analyze folkloric phenomena which exist outside rural culture.
This study aims to fill that knowledge gap by, first, describing how Argentine traditional music participated in the general historical development of the nation. Attention is given to the manner in which this music achieved or lost prominence as a result of the relative ascendancy of different social and political currents in Argentine life. Of particular importance are the dynamics of nationalism which surrounded the nation's centennial in 1916, the internal migration to the urban centers during the 1930's and 1940's, the subsequent rise of Peronism, and the processes which led the middle class to accept folklore as a legitimate part of the nation's culture.
Secondly, the dissertation outlines the development of Mercedes, a prominent city in Buenos Aires Province, relating the city's history to national trends in agriculture, immigration and social organization. The character of post-World War II Mercedes is summarized by pointing out how the region's economy became diversified and the extent to which that diversification influenced the community's life style. This section ends with a detailed description of how Mercedes' musical life is organized, showing one aspect of how musical performance in Mercedes is linked with Argentine traditional music.
Forty-six examples of twenty-three musical genres collected from Mercedes citizens are then compared to research findings on those same genres by Argentine folk music scholars. The analysis of the Mercedes repertory focuses upon the melodic forms and its relationship to textual structures, musical scales, tempi, and rhythmic accompaniments. To the extent possible, the summaries of previous Argentine research on rural folk music concentrate upon terms used in the past to identify a genre, social dynamics related to its history, geographic references pertinent to it, the diffusion of the genre through publication of anthologies or through composed music, and musical traits of traditional forms.
Finally, the attitudes and values articulated by Mercedes informants who recorded music are summarized to determine what relationships exist between their musical preferences and other aspects of their life styles and personal histories.
The dissertation shows that traditional music has a definite audience among the Argentine middle class, and that it is appropriately identified as part of middle class culture. It also demonstrates that certain processes of musical homogenization found in other parts of the world have also occurred in Argentina as traditional music achieved national prominence through commercial diffusion by the mass media.