Walking around a working-class area in central Caracas on one of the days before the conference, I see a well-dressed, middle-aged woman trying to answer her new iPhone 4, and am struck immediately by what I hear: her ringtone is blaring out a catchy reggaeton dance rhythm that has sampled lyrics sung by maverick Spanish poet and singer Joaquín Sabina. I can't help asking myself why to my ears this person is spoiling, even corrupting, Sabinas' verses – full of characteristic telling metaphors that have the knack of capturing the zeitgeist in ironic, off-beat fashion – with that reggaeton rhythm, and indeed, why she has that ringtone at all. Is it because ‘popular’, or what in the Latin American media are often termed ‘vulgar’ genres (because of their heavy sexuality) are socially improved by technology? Or is it that the technology is more important to her than what could be construed as the evident ‘foreign status’ of those lyrics? As I walk a few steps further on I realise that I am battling with my own and common (mis)-informed prejudices and assumptions: is Sabina, an unconventional, quirky yet top-selling Spanish singer, perceived as Spanish only? Or is he also part of a broader category of Hispanic, Latin-American popular music? Or is his song merely a product selected by the corporate world (who may own the publishing rights) as a choice sound for a ringtone download? If so, are any social class and gender issues involved in this appropriation of Sabina's melody? Am I assuming that well-dressed women should be listening to classical music rather than street-cred reggaeton? Indeed, what really makes popular music ‘popular’, ‘pop’ or even ‘vulgar’ – words which in certain contexts imply negative value judgments when applied to cultural production? How can we become more aware of the implications of the easy, often unthinking value judgments we make every day?

These were in fact the issues that underpinned the IX Conference of IASPM-AL (the Latin-American Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music), held at the Central University of Venezuela, Caracas and organised by IASPM-AL's Venezuelan Chapter (IASPM-AL/VE) and the Central University of Venezuela. The event was coordinated by musicologists Juan Francisco Sans and Katrin Lengwinat, supported by a team of students with the participation of local musicians. The university, which was established in 1722 before the liberation of Latin America from colonial rule, led by Venezuelan hero Símon Bolívar, is famous for being one of the first in Latin America. Established in 1826 as the Universidad Central de Venezuela and re-built in 1954, its spacious buildings are set in gardens in the centre of the city. It features enlightening architecture by Carlos Raúl Villanueva involving huge protected boulevard-sized walkways offering shade from both tropical sun and rain (where people sit, work, chat, eat, and do everything from Tai Chi and salsa dancing to yoga and informal classes of all sorts). The whole space is decorated with artwork by distinguished Venezuelan artists; these are integral to its structures, so that murals, patterned tiling and giant sculptures form part of its vision. Its present-day form emerged in the 1960s when, boosted by huge oil revenues, Venezuela modernised – the modernity of its cultural life manifested through iconic public buildings, the reconstruction of the city and the establishment of a countrywide network of modern roads. While today this may be overshadowed at times by the number of cars on the roads and the proliferation of concrete high-rise buildings, nevertheless the university, which under the present government's expansive educational policies attracts huge numbers of students from all walks of life, offers a salutary image of an active cultural vision.

The conference attracted 70 researchers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, México, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Spain, Ireland, Scotland and North America, opening its halls and classrooms to almost 100 conferees. Ten concerts were organised exclusively for the conference inside the University precincts, with an average attendance of 200, while the spectacular closing concert inside the famous Aula Magna (Assembly Hall), designed by Carlos Villanueva, with its unique acoustic sound baffles created by Alexander Calder, attracted 1,000 people. An ambitious spectacle offering a panoramic history of Venezuelan popular music from the 1940s onwards through existing live performers, it involved celebrated Venezuelan musicians across popular genres including Miguel Delgado Estevez, Chelique Sanabria, Aquilez Baéz, Rafael ‘El Pollo’ Brito, C4 Trío, Los Sinvergüenzas, Vasallos del Sol, Mauricio Castro, Carlos Moreán y Alfredo Naranjo y el Guajeo and Cuban musician César Orozco (who happens to be the son of Cuban musicologist, IASPM-AL member and conference attendee Danilo Orozco). MC Miguel Delgado Estévez, an important musician, composer and producer as well as a radio personality, despite a slightly dodgy sense of humour coupled with traces of patronage, charmed and at times moved the audience with a heady mix of nostalgia and musical nationalism.

One of the most satisfying emotional musical experience for me came early in the week with a lunchtime concert of música tuyera (music from the Tuy Valley), featuring the impressive sound of Yustardi Laza on his silver-stringed harp, accompanied by José Miguel Arteaga singing and playing on maracas, with a couple of superb dancers who are part of their extended family. This was a unique opportunity to hear and see distinguished local musicians from the central north of the country, an area where people dance and sing many types of joropo, one of Venezuela's national musics, in both domestic and public spaces. The variety of material, quality of music, standard of play and the convincing nature of their performance demonstrated clearly why Venezuelan folk music is recognised today as one of the most important seedbeds of talent in the western Hispanic world, with notable world-famous groups such as Serenata Guayanesa, Gurrufío or El Cuarteto. On other days we enjoyed the experimentation, virtuoso performances and harmonic richness of many other ‘local’ musicians, including singer Toña Granados, and groups like The Bongó Project, Orozco Jazz, Los Hermanos Naturales, Terracanto as well as José Alejandro Delgado y Sur Solar. We also got a chance to hear how some of these musicians, notably the ones who have come through the pioneering and now world-famous Venezuelan music system known as El Sistema, which starts teaching children instruments in orchestras from a very early age, have recently formed a loose-knit cooperative called the Movida Acústica Urbana (MAU). This is as much a promotional vehicle for live and recorded music as a movement of creative synergy, giving rise to fascinating new fusions and innovations (featuring the prominent use of the small Venezuelan cuatro guitar) in what is unmistakably Venezuelan popular music. Indeed, what is striking for IASPM outsiders is how the terms ‘popular’ and ‘folk’ and traditional' and ‘jazz’ become redundant in this context, better described as new, cutting-edge ‘Venezuelan music’.

Apart from the music, yes, there was also a conference, which revolved around four main thematic streams. The first and perhaps the most successful was Popular Music Studies in Latin America: Genealogies, Pathways and Contexts which brought home in striking fashion how the emergence of different approaches within popular music studies – ground-breaking perspectives such as subaltern, gender, semiotics or postcolonial studies – have challenged the theoretical basis of constructions such as version, genre, folk music, canon, ethnicity and the very idea of ‘Latin American music’ itself. This is what we saw in the panel about analytical approaches to popular music, with Pablo Alabarces (‘Musicology and cultural studies in AL’), Silvio Merhy (‘The intelligibility of popular music’), and Ruth Suniaga (‘Rationality inside Latin American popular music’); as well as in individual presentations such us that by Rubén López Caño on ‘Originality of versions’, Julio Mendívil, on the differences between mediation and mediality in the Peruvian Andes, and Mercedes Liska on the border between gender and the genealogy of the Argentine tango.

It was clear that the construction and critical deconstruction of categories make small ‘earthquakes’ necessary for scholars from each country: they are part of a healthy if irregular move towards a redefinition of subjects and directions. Prominent among such critical enquiry was the panel on Popular Musicology which explored the ideas and concepts of seminal Argentinean musicologist Carlos Vega, with papers from Héctor Goyena (Argentina), Martha Tupinambá de Ulhôa (Brazil), and Marita Fornaro (Uruguay). Another panel on dance genre involved ritual and music (Marco de la Ossa) and social discourses behind folk scenes (Claudio Díaz, Natalia Díaz). Various other papers such as historical constructions of popular music (Mariantonia Palacios), popular music school festivals (Desireé Agostini), or the ‘returning’ of aesthetic idealism in Latin American popular music (Federico Sammartino), provided serious analysis of the discourses of the information published in 19th- and early 20th-century handbooks, programmes, repertoire lists and musicians' biographies.

More politically controversial were sessions in Popular Music, aesthetics and post modernity in Latin America, the conference's second major theme. Papers by Katrin Lengwinat, Carlos Bonfim, César García Solís, Heloísa de Araújo Duarte, Neusa Meirelles and Barbara Bradby focused on identity and politics (nationalism, diasporas, political compromise and performance). Another session featuring Raúl Nicolás López, Alex Zapata, María Carla Rossi, María Celeste Aichino, Irna Priore, Márcio Mattos, Simone Luci Pereira, Lucio Carnicer, Lorena Ardito Aldana, Eileen Karmy and Alejandra Vargas focused on specific ‘local’ musical genre (rock, huayno, bossa nova, forró, cumbia and bolero). Another panel focusing on gender involved Mercedes Liska discussing Argentine tango, Jan Fairley on two contrasting Cuban all-female orchestras, and myself on women and the Chilean urban cueca performances. The existence of value judgments in Latin American popular music provoked an interesting panel discussion (involving Felipe Trotta, Federico Sammartino, Claudio Díaz, Rubén López, Juan Francisco Sans, Heloísa de Araújo Duarte, Julio Mendívil and Christian Spencer) concerning new and old ethnographic popular music research paradigms, notably issues of aesthetics and value judgements within the composing process, particularly the epistemology of subject and object in popular music, and questions about the ongoing problematic of personal involvement and reflexivity in research. The intensity of debate in this session arose from the fact that the panel had emerged from months of discussion between participants in the active IASPM-AL List: as a result a publication is in the pipeline, hopefully forthcoming next year.

In contrast with the first two streams, the third and fourth, focusing on Covers and versions and The education and training of popular musicians were more specific. Debates involving Laura Jordán, Eileen Karmy, Adalberto Paranhos and Daniela Vieira dos Santos were particularly lively, with case studies such as Chilean composer Patricio Manns' activist songs, the rock cantata, the bossa nova in Geraes, and peripheries in Brazilian ‘tropicalismo’ taking on real importance, showing how Latin American music could be useful for the teaching of music at all levels. It was fascinating to hear how several musical forms, scenes and movements shaped or developed and disseminated in the region could be analysed in terms of versions that give identity to popular urban music forms, as for example with canciones de autor, rock cantatas, batucadas, tropicalismo or tango and rock scenes.

Live music, diversity and the Bermuda Triangle

Although the conference involved smaller numbers compared to recent IASPM-AL conferences (Peru 2008, La Habana 2006) the international and regional nature of the event offered an up-to-date opportunity to survey the broad sweep of Latin American popular music research. It was striking to note the continued importance of musical genre in Latin America, and how researchers and journalists use genre as an analytical category. Indeed, it is increasingly the case that researchers from one country are keenly involved in researching musical genres from other regions, either as a unified ‘complex’ (the so-called complejos genéricos) or tracing precise influences between areas, regions or entire countries, as in the case of cumbia, chamamé, punta, Mexican corridos and rancheras, tango and several forms of rock. In this way, genres have become an effective means of learning about diasporas, music industry practices and musical relationships between territories and languages (particularly between Brazil and other countries).

However, in various cases the tendency is to be overly descriptive, impeding the integration of newer discourses and approaches. This recurring problem reminds us that Latin America is a continent where much music (and its related social practices) have hitherto not been studied from any particular theoretical viewpoint or approach. This gives rise to almost impossible ideals of paying equal attention to both description and hermeneutics, the local and the global, time and space, and so on, which creates what could be described as a spiral of dichotomies that are somehow incorporated into regional popular music studies.

I'd like to call this the Bermuda Triangle of Latin American popular music research, by which I wish to draw attention to the need to balance three different elements: first, the implementation of new approaches, something that implies a necessary, even compulsory, embrace of theories and ideas usually developed outside Latin America (that is ‘northern’ intellectual production) without seeing this as a hegemonic impulse or even an old form of ‘cultural imperialism’. The situation is in part a consequence of ongoing mistrust in each country concerning locally produced popular music research, combined with the ongoing unbearable hegemony of the English language in the world. This situation is at the same time paradoxical if not compounded by the indifference of the strict Anglo-scholar towards Latin American music research, coupled with styles of writing imbued with deep-rooted ideologies which convince people that there is only one way to write about music, even about popular, pop or vulgar.

My second argument is the scarcity of the kind of in-depth research into popular music that involves long immersion in archives, in a region where archives are only recently being modernised, with subsequent systematic exposure of a scholar's work in dynamic journals and publications.

My third argument concerns the uneasy social pattern of co-existence between aggressive processes of modernisation and globalisation on the one hand and increasingly strong, independent music scenes (outside of the music industry and linked with various kinds of ‘piracy’) on the other. At the same time we witness the ongoing process of the blending of old and new music categories (such as músicas de proyección folclórica, ethnic music and World Music/Músicas del mundo).

Latin America is as much a region of peoples as it is a continent of musical places. Its idiosyncrasies and the everyday life of its people are made by music. Living there one feels that the continent absorbs and creates popular music everywhere – from the mountains to the coast, from the forest to the city. This is why deep and ongoing diversity and ambiguity is experienced around the nomenclature of popular, folk and traditional music, which can appear too ‘porous’ so as to lose their limits and borders in this context. Music is most often experienced live, vibrant, continuously mixed and remixed, transformed and re-elaborated. Thus, the success of Latin American research depends on the keen balancing of these three sides of the interrelated triangle: continual ideological and discursive updating, negotiation of the problematic processes of archival research and publishing, and the ability to surmount the tedious binary of old vs. new. Hence, in relation to the questions posed above, it appears that whether the Caracas woman is listening to popular, pop or vulgar music depends not only on the observer, on old vs. new technology, social status and context, but also on the language, approaches and discourses used to understand the very music she is listening to.

Renewals and continuities

An exciting conference achievement was the establishment of a new IASPM-AL Executive Board through an unprecedented democratic process, making deep changes in branch organisation and working practices. Between the first 1997 IASPM-Al meeting in Santiago de Chile and the 2008 Lima conference, IASPM-AL was established by a pioneering, ever-growing group of researchers (musicologists, ethnographers, sociologists, historians and musicians) who organised five additional conferences (Bogotá 2000, Mexico 2002, Río de Janeiro 2004, Buenos Aires 2005 and La Habana 2006), published proceedings and books, established a website and perhaps most significantly created a sense of collegiate membership through an international and regional organisation devoted to the sharing of knowledge about Latin American popular music. Branch history recognises the enormous input of this first group, involving conference teams, editors of proceedings, and the establishment of a simple but effective webpage (see Tupinambá de Ulhoa, M. 2005. ‘Introducâo’, in Musica Popular na América Latina. Pontos de Escuta, ed. M. Tupinambá de Ulhôa and A.M. Ochoa (Porto Alegre: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul), pp. 7–20).

The considerable growth of IASPM-AL has spurred on new demands and needs, which as well as ultimately necessitating more formalised organisation, participative mechanisms and international presence in line with IASPM international statutes, has also encouraged the emergence of a fresh style of administration involving a bona fide electoral system. During 2010 the independent Grupo 22 emerged from the active membership with a detailed electoral and work programme inspiring IASPM-AL's first democratic elections and thereby heralding a new era in the organisation's history. The new Executive Board is composed of Marita Fornaro (President, Uruguay), Felipe Trotta (Vice-President, Brazil), Julio Mendívil (Secretary, Peru), Mercedes Liska (Treasurer and Membership Secretary, Argentina) and Christian Spencer Espinosa (Editor and Webmaster, Chile).

These executive changes see the end of informal organisational practices which latterly produced tensions and problems inside the organisation. Through continuity with the prior organisation, new organisational practices, teams, publishing and collaborative work projects embody a dynamic, optimistic vision for the renewal of the international presence of Latin American music in both the academic and non-academic popular music spheres. ¡Viva la nueva etapa de IASPM-AL! As Sabina sings in one of his most beautiful songs, Esta boca es mía “this mouth is mine” – now put that in your ringtone, folks!