From ‘abandoned huts’ to ‘maps of the Pampas’

Melanie Plesch exemplifies her interpretive method of topoi and rhetorics in Latin-American art music with the particular emblem of the huella, a dance song that came to signify the ‘distance and loneliness’ of the Argentinian Pampas in literature and the visual arts. She argues that nationalist music contributes to the symbolic construction of the national landscape, and provides a genealogy of the huella from the 19th century to its topicalisation in art music in the 20th century.