The advent of digital resources, the Internet, and an interconnected globe has deeply affected the humanities and its research. Music scholars in Latin America, like everywhere else, have observed this explosion of digital information sharing, but not everyone has been able to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded by this technology. On the one hand, advantages of digitization are slowly becoming recognized as tools to fight the enormous size of the region (Latin America), especially through technology's ability to easily and promptly disperse sources across great distances. In addition, digitization acts as an aid in countering the endemic lack of economic resources, and more broadly offers a path towards making the academic world a more connected and equal place. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the digital revolution has not reached people across the globe equally. Digital segregation is a problem that deeply impacts numerous nations around world; and for Latin America and the Caribbean, it has meant a slower pace of incorporation into the digital era.Footnote 1 Key databases like JSTOR and the various READEX products are still largely unavailable to scholars in Latin America, and, given the steep price of such resources, the fight for a world of open-source information is becoming increasingly political.
In this brief overview, we aim to draw attention to some of the current projects within the digital humanities in Latin America that directly involve or impact the study of nineteenth-century music. These include general (and national) projects of digital cataloguing and digitization of sources as well as more specific examples of research being carried out under the larger umbrella of the digital humanities. In Latin America, the nineteenth century especially presents a field of study that can be clearly distinguished from the better-known research areas of ‘colonial’ music on the one hand and nationalist and modernist composers (like Chávez or Villa-Lobos) of the first half of the twentieth century on the other.Footnote 2
The study of nineteenth-century music in Latin America faces a series of specific problems, several of which could be addressed through contemporary digital technology. One of these is the lack of availability of manuscript and printed sources of music scores that are owned by public and private collections. Considering that most music sources are available only in single copies in national libraries and church institutions (like Catholic cathedrals), digitization has proven revolutionary for scholars. Now important sources copied in Lima but surviving in Caracas, can (in theory) be consulted without several hours of flight or expenses that go beyond what most universities in the region can subsidize.
In terms of the music sources from nineteenth-century Latin America, it is important to think about the spaces in which music was being made, and the sources that survive from those spaces. The two main areas of professional and amateur music-making were the Catholic Church and the salon, and thus most of the sources available to us today from the nineteenth century are related to either of those spaces. Most of the surviving music in manuscript copies comes from church archives, with very few sources in secular archives. Thus, there is an endemic lack of key instrumental genres like symphonies, concertos and string quartets, which were probably composed but have not come down to us. In terms of printed music, sources mostly come from national archives and libraries. The local production of printed music became more prominent from the 1840s on, and most of these sources relate to salon repertoire and the commerce of sheet-music, including the reception and local copies of European music from the period.
Considering this major dual aspect of sources and provenance, with music in manuscript copies in church archives and printed salon sheet-music in national archives and libraries, digitization has become an essential topic for the preservation and dissemination of the sources. The locally and externally financed digitization projects that are appearing all across the region are made all the more important and urgent when one considers the ramifications of the loss of sources due to the lack of funds for research on the arts or the protection of public collections. In particular, the destruction of the National History Museum in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, which resulted in the loss of several collections, highlighted the need for funding, preservation and digitization of sources in Latin America.
In this context, we want to discuss three key possibilities that the digital humanities present for the study of historical music sources in Latin America: increased access, better organization and new insights. We will discuss these possibilities by examining existing projects in the region that focus on music of the nineteenth century.
Digitization of the Humanities on a National Scale
Since the early 2000s, the notion of digital access has been essential to the creation of national digitization projects. Some of these, like Memoria Chilena in Chile,Footnote 3 or the online newspaper libraries from Mexico and Brazil,Footnote 4 can be seen as important examples of the ways in which countries within Latin America are both saving local heritage and making it available in ways that can foster research across the region and beyond. The Biblioteca Digital del Patrimoino Iberoamericano, which was founded in 2014 as a counterpart to Europeana, connects digital projects throughout Latin America, Spain and Portugal.Footnote 5 However, the project has also highlighted strong differences in support from the various countries.Footnote 6 Since Spain and Portugal are contributors, this contrast is exacerbated even more: a simple search for the keyword “música”, shows how acute this problem is. Of the 30,479 hits found on 6 June 2019, 26,484 belong to the Biblioteca Nacional de España, followed in second place by the library of the Universidad de Chile, with 985 results, while national libraries like those of Bolivia and Mexico only have one entry each.
When we were directly involved in the cataloguing and partial digitization of the collection of the Universidad de Chile (which can be accessed through the Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano), we became conscious of the need to create databases that could be shared with similar larger projects. In the case of the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile (BNC), for example, several meetings with RISM personnel reinforced the idea of adapting the Chilean databases to RISM models, or at least making them compatible.Footnote 7 But the convergence of databases and the adoption of RISM models proposed by the BNC has not been adopted by other archives and centres, and thus the centralization and normalization of databases has not been achieved. This means, for example, that it is difficult to know whether sources in one archive are also available in other ones; and if they are it is difficult to study them in interrelated ways.
That is not the case in Venezuela, where the Biblioteca Virtual Musicológica Juan Meserón (BVMJM) has been a key project in terms of the convergence of local databases and the digitization of musical sources. Unlike Chile, it began not as an institutional project, but rather from academic and scholarly interests. It tries to encompass sources for Venezuelan music from public and private collections. The BVMJM was developed in Caracas as a way to foster research on historical repertoires, particularly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 8 Led by Mariantonia Palacios, this project began its life in a different economic and political context, and it has been deeply affected by the contemporary turmoil in Venezuela. Nevertheless, if it survives, it has the potential to offer a counterweight to the dispersion of music across several archives, as well as to cuts in funding to most individual archives in the country.
What also makes the BVMJM an important project is the way it is shaped as a national incubator of ideas and new research questions. Though still in development, it uses MARC and RISM formats as a starting point for its own system. This includes a searchable database of musical and music-related sources with incipits which the team has worked on extensively. The internal workings of the database were shared, discussed and published by Palacios and Carballo in a joint paper.Footnote 9 A working prototype could be visited until 2018. It had an assortment of sources available to search: music books, iconography and a handful of scores.Footnote 10
Musica Brasilis, which was created in 2009 by Rosana Lanzelotte, is a similar project. While it began simply as a way to encourage the editing and sharing of historical music scores from Brazil, it currently has hundreds of scores, with metadata presented in the format of Dublin Core.Footnote 11 Many of the scores included in this project come from the nineteenth century.Footnote 12 The project rapidly gained traction in the region, with support from UNESCO, the Brazilian government, and various businesses and musicians from across Brazil, including institutions such as the Academia Brasileira de Musica and the Orquestra Sinfonica Brasileira. What started as a project to collect and share scores now includes interactive games, listening guides, papers and educational resources, as well as an ever-growing database of Brazilian composers. Several scores are linked to YouTube videos and recordings, and scores are mostly available for free and with a Common Copyright license. This encourages performances of works that have previously not been performed or recorded in our times. The number of those scores is now upwards of 1,500.Footnote 13
Specialized Digital Humanities Projects
In addition to national-level digitization projects, there are a growing number of more specialized projects. For instance, currently there is a project in Mexico to create a database that compiles information on operas composed in Mexico from the eighteenth century to the present.Footnote 14 This project, which is still in its very early stages, is of particular interest for nineteenth-century music research, given that so many of the productions under consideration date from that period. It is a collaboration of several institutions including the CENIDIM, the ‘Carlos Chávez’ National Centre of Music Research, and the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa. In general terms, the project considers each opera as a single entity in the database. Then the entries are linked into a series of interconnected categories: performers, librettists, cities, editors, performance dates and so forth.
All of the data in these categories allow the creation of links between operas which foster greater possibilities of doing research within the subject. While on the one hand it can be said that the way the project is being developed puts too much weight on the ‘poietic’ aspects of music-making (the work), on the other, the volume of data presented on specific performances greatly enhances the possibilities of a wide variety of research in opera of this period in Mexico. Furthermore, our informal discussions with some of the developers of this database have led to suggestions of expanding it to encompass other countries in Latin America.Footnote 15
One of the key scholars doing research in nineteenth-century Latin American music from a digital humanities perspective is Martha Tupinambá, a professor at the Universidade Federal in Rio de Janeiro. With Rosana Lanzelotte and Adriana Ballesté, she has created a protocol for metadata harvesting from sources of the ‘lundú’ (a popular dance from early nineteenth-century Brazil). They described their work in a conference paper from 2007 for the Austrian Computer Society, and the musicological results have been published in a 2013 article for The World of Music journal.Footnote 16
Another one of her projects, and perhaps the most relevant one in terms of scope and possibilities, is Música em periódicos oitocentistas (‘Music in nineteenth-century newspapers’), a rapidly growing database of nineteenth-century Brazilian newspaper articles on music.Footnote 17 This project grew out of Tupinambá's interest since 2002 in the appearances of musical concepts in nineteenth-century newspapers in Brazil.Footnote 18 As she recently commented in a paper presented in 2018 during the IASPM-AL conference in Puerto Rico, the initial project was carried out through microfilm copies, which is the way most newspapers are still consulted across Latin America.Footnote 19 During the last decade, however, the project was transformed by the possibilities of digital technology. In 2012 the Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira, which allows for OCR and PDF downloads, became public, and that reshaped the nature of the project because it enabled large-scale cross-searches.Footnote 20
Another interesting specific project is the one we are currently developing in Chile, which brings a Big Data perspective to the study of nineteenth-century sheet-music publication and marketing. It also highlights the function of the salon as a place for semi-public discussions and performances of new music by both amateur and professional musicians.Footnote 21 Given this interest in printed sheet-music, the database was also developed to learn more about editors and editions, a subject that has not been widely studied in the region. As with Tupinambá's project, this endeavour is a direct consequence of increased digitization, normalized databases and interoperability between the ways in which collections are described.
The project was funded in late 2016 by the Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes, as a way to consolidate several different databases (those from the National Library, the Universidad de Chile, and others), comprising some 5,000 scores. At the launch of its prototype in 2017, roughly 1,500 single scores were selected for use. This was done using Tableau and Tableau Public as tools for visualizing and understanding the data.Footnote 22 The database was constructed in such a way that it could yield new answers to long-standing questions surrounding the social relevance of genre and its gender associations during the period. The project is still in development, and there are many ideas under discussion concerning its expansion, both in terms of the number of sources and the chronological range of these sources.
A recently published account in a Chilean music journal states some of the newly gained perspectives achieved by this project.Footnote 23 These include the relevance of women as composers in this market (approximately 10 per cent of the sources with a known author are by women), the overwhelming centrality of the waltz as a genre in Chile, and the importance of Valparaíso as a centre for music editing and circulation of scores across South America during the nineteenth century. As with Tupinambá's project, these new perspectives can now be easily expanded as individual research topics, and in this way, they will reinforce the idea that the digital humanities can open important new roads in music research.
Finally, there are several other projects dealing with nineteenth-century Latin American music being developed outside Latin America and Latin American funding. That is the case, for example, of the Omeka-powered website Documenting Carreño, developed by Anna Kijas (from the Boston College Libraries). The website includes a powerful database of Teresa Carreño's performances, with interesting spatial and temporal tools for the researcher.Footnote 24
New Perspectives in the Digital Humanities
In a recent paper given during the 2018 IASPM-AL conference, on a session about studies of Latin American popular music in the nineteenth century, Juan Francisco Sans presented a paper titled ‘Google Books and Dance in 19th-century Spanish America’.Footnote 25 Sans discusses an article by Benjamin Walton titled ‘Quirk Shame’, that concerns the use of digital sources for the study of music history, and particularly nineteenth-century music history.Footnote 26 He focuses on the epistemological distance between Walton's considerations (the ‘shame’ of using large-scale digital sources rather than traditional archive or library methods) and what he sees as a Latin American Perspective: the growing consciousness in academic circles in the region about the relevance of the digital humanities for local scholars, and the way these new tools could address or relieve long-standing problems like, for example, the endemic lack of economic resources for research in the region.
However, that positive perspective of the digital humanities could also be controversial from another Latin American position in recent academic scholarship: that of postcolonial studies. Indeed, the digital humanities could make us forget the place of Latin America in an unequal world, another dream of cosmopolitanism for a region that has been adopted by many through the years. There are obvious considerations that must be kept in mind, chief among which are power relationships, which have been made explicit, as we mentioned before, in the case of the Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano.
Either way, the exploration of musicological projects in terms of the digital humanities in Latin America is still very much in its infancy. What has been done shows both the possibilities of expanding this field and the difficulties in doing so, mostly in terms of economic and human resources. For studies of nineteenth-century Latin American music, which are still uncommon, new perspectives gained from the digital humanities could be key to expanding our databases and research questions. This expansion, we believe, would revolutionize the methods currently being used to research music and music life in this region. We hope that global quality of digital scholarship will one day allow for more interconnected scholarship between academics in Latin America and in other parts of the world, which would immeasurably enrich our understanding of nineteenth-century music.
