ABSTRACT
In this text, UC San Diego colleagues Teresa Díaz de Cossio and Paul N Roth offer a collaborative dialogue on experimentalist musical practice in Díaz’s hometown of Ensenada, Baja California (pop. 300,000). First, they detail a lineage of the scene’s developments as drawn from ethnographic work undertaken in 2019, beginning with pianist/composer/educator Ernesto Rosas in the last quarter of the 20th century and moving through the multiple generations of musicians and aesthetic frames he sets in motion. Second, they discuss Díaz’s personal experience within these musical activities, including particulars of the scene’s most recent large-scale iteration—the 2nd Festival de Música Nueva Ensenada, August 2019—of which she was primary organizer. Ensenada’s historical and geographical sense of place (including, but not limited to, its isolation from central Mexico yet proximity to Tijuana, San Diego, and Los Angeles) is foundational for the unique ways these practices have emerged and prospered. This illuminates compelling instances of musical cultures inflected and enacted locally as they migrate around the world.
