Those who participated in the transformative years of the Popular Unity government in Chile, and those of us who came to know about them from a distance as scholars and solidarity activists, know the powerful role that music played in uniting people as a social movement. This recognition has an emotional dimension for many of us; we know parts or all of the lyrics of songs from the nueva canción canon, remember the first time we heard a certain song performed, and still hold onto that treasured album or concert program.
In her book Chilean New Song, political scientist J. Patrice McSherry asks how la nueva canción became so powerful. Her answer draws on the work of political theorists, most notably Antonio Gramsci, and on the collective experiences of those who participated in the new song movement as musicians, graphic artists, promoters, and supporters. The result is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between culture and politics in Chile across the turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s.
McSherry's book is based on extensive interviews conducted over several years with a diverse group of people who together enabled the new song movement to gain political momentum and flourish. The impressive list features many well-known and lesser-known musicians, record producers, graphic artists, and more. One senses that her interviewees were eager to share their memories and opinions with her. Their reminiscences capture the cultural effervescence of the historical moment, the rise in political hope that they helped to create, and their ruminations on the significance of the movement represent the culmination of a reflective process decades in the making. McSherry wisely allows the nueva canción participants to speak for themselves, and the richness of their voices is one of the many contributions her book has to offer. Another is the way she rises to the challenge of writing about music with grace and precision: her descriptions of the songs and sounds of the movement hit just the right balance between analysis and affinity. She also interviewed prominent Chilean ethnomusicologists and consulted valuable archival material, much of which was provided to her by the very same nueva canción participants she interviewed who have managed to preserve at least some of the records, posters, and programs that the Pinochet dictatorship was hell-bent on destroying.
McSherry's approach to the question of the relationship between music and politics is that of a political scientist. As such, she pays attention not only to the musicians and their music, but also to the complex and far-reaching network of institutions, people, and resources that sustained them and that helped them to build their audience. DICAP (Discoteca del Cantar Popular), a record company affiliated with the Chilean Communist Party, offers a prime example of a “key parallel institution for the promotion of la Nueva Canción,” one that would eventually capture 10 percent of the market (71, 73). McSherry's research highlighting the importance of this and other counter-hegemonic institutions is another of her contributions to a deeper understanding of the new song movement.
The book's organization is straightforward, making it easy to navigate. Chapter 1 lays out the book's theoretical framework, built largely around the Gramscian concept of the “organic intellectual.” Chapter 2 offers a select history of the various ways that art and politics intertwined in Chile prior to the 1960s. Chapter 3 traces the movement from its emergence in the mid 1960s, through its rapid rise in popularity across the decade and the vital role that it played in the 1969 presidential campaign that resulted in Salvador Allende's election.
Chapter 4 chronicles the Popular Unity years, when the new song movement became closely identified with the coalition of leftist parties in power. McSherry captures the cultural exuberance of the times, as reflected and refracted in the Popular Unity program's call for people to be “open to mass creativity and to the enjoyment of the most varied manifestations of art and of the intellect” (89). She documents the outpouring of creativity, recreates the debate surrounding “the perennial balance between art and politics” (102), and probes how music and culture in general became increasingly contested spaces over the period as political polarization grew.
Chapter 5 explores how music served to create a social relationship between the new song musicians and their public that “bound people together . . . [and was] conducive to political awareness and collective action” (116). The chapter examines the musicians’ relationship to Leftist political parties, and concludes with a discussion of the some of the movement's emblematic songs in English translation (though the inclusion of the original Spanish lyrics would have been appreciated, given their poetry).
Chapter 6 centers on the musical and political contributions of the movement. It documents the high levels of collaboration between musicians from very different backgrounds. The result of this “blending of classical music, folk-based music, and epic poetry was some of the most brilliant music Chile has ever produced” (144). It shows how the new song musicians became “organic intellectuals” who “communicated the dream for a better society and a better world and helped make them possible” (157). The chapter also covers the graphic artists who gave visual expression to the new song movement through their posters and record covers, and the contemporaneous movement of political murals. Chapter 7 takes us to the coup and its aftermath, when movement participants faced harsh and sometimes lethal repression in Chile. It recognizes the continued importance of music under the dictatorship, and the central role that Chilean musicians in exile played in awakening the world to the human rights violations of the Pinochet regime.
In keeping with its many contributions, McSherry's study also inspires potential new research topics. One that occurs to this reviewer is the tension between the new song movement's anticapitalist aspirations and its need to be “marketable,” a contradiction that she reveals in her close examination of new song institutions and music industry figures. Another possible topic is the question of gender dynamics in the movement. As McSherry correctly notes, there were few women performers among the ranks of nueva canción song musicians (64). Their absence is all the more notable in the face of the leadership roles women assumed in the folk revival of the 1950s, and again in the human rights and democratization struggles of the Pinochet era.
These suggestions of possible lines of future inquiry do not detract from the multiple strengths and overall completeness of McSherry's work, which stands as an original and thorough investigation of the topic. It promises to be of great interest to newcomers to the Chilean new song movement, to seasoned fans hoping to learn more about it, and to scholars who research the relationship between music and politics.
