TITLE:
Music, Eurocentrism and Identity: The Myth of the Discovery of America in Chilean Music History
AUTHORS:
Alejandro Vera
KEYWORDS:
Music, History, Chile, Discovery of America, Eurocentrism
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Historical Studies,
Vol.3 No.5,
December
23,
2014
ABSTRACT: During the past century, Edmundo O’Gorman, Tzvetan Todorov, Enrique Dussel and other scholars
pointed out the Eurocentric perspective implied in traditional narratives about the discovery of
America, most of which intended to confirm Europe as the center of world history and culture. At
the same time, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Hayden White and others argued for the mythical character of
history. According to them, even though historians attempted to assemble documentary evidence
objectively, they constructed their narratives incorporating such evidence in preexisting stories,
characters and categories with a mythical origin. This paper uses these viewpoints to analyze and
criticize the way in which Chilean music history has been constructed, particularly during the republican era. The main hypothesis is that traditional discourses about that history have constantly
recycled narratives on the discovery of America, which thus operates as a kind of founding myth
for historical and musicological interpretations, especially when dealing with turning points such
as the change of dynasty (1700), the beginning of independence (c. 1810) and the centenary of the
republic (1910). A corollary would be that documentary evidence about music has been frequently
hidden or distorted precisely in order to fit such a myth. That is why the present paper examines
both bibliography and original documents found in different archives.