ABSTRACT
Mario de Andrade wrote that “all American music [meaning Latin America and the Caribbean] has a particular drama” that it is necessary to comprehend in order to understand its history (or what he calls “social evolution”) (Andrade 1991, 11). The idea of “musical scene,” like Andrade’s quote, is built around a theatrical trope. Scene means “subdivision of an act or play,” “stage setting,” “place in which the action of a literary work occurs” (etymology dictionary). It is a word meant to highlight the unfolding of the performance of a story, its different “scales and vectors” (Straw 2002) in a marked frame of space and time. The idea of musical scene gained traction in the 1990s in the Anglo-American world of popular music studies, in order to describe forms of musical emplacement in a globalized world: “in place of using terms like ‘subculture’ or ‘community’, which imply music related groups that are bounded and geographically rooted, some writers have preferred to use ‘scene’, thereby emphasizing the dynamic, shifting and globally interconnected nature of musical activity” (Cohen 1999, 239). Thus, scene has been a term in search of the drama that unfolds in music and music theorization when theorists try to find a means to overcome the problems associated with the historical determinant of bounded place so central to the history of music studies and to the formation of musical typologies (popular, folkloric, Western art music, etc.). In this paper I would like to explore an alternative history for thinking a similar theoretical ground that has been explored by the notion of scene: that developed by Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) when theorizing the voice, particularly regarding Afro-Cuban cultural expressions and the question of their significance for modern times.
