We are pleased to share that Prof. Sergio Ospina Romero has been awarded the 2020 Klaus P. Wachsmann Prize for his recent article “Ghosts in the Machine and Other Tales around a ‘Marvelous Invention’: Player Pianos in Latin America in the Early Twentieth Century.” The prize was established by the Society for Ethnomusicology to recognize a major publication that advances the field of organology through a presentation of new data, using innovative methods in the study of musical instruments.
Ospina Romero’s article, published in the Spring 2019 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, explores the reception and cultural legitimization of player pianos in Latin America during their heyday in the 1910s and 1920s (see full abstract below or read the article here).
“I am thrilled with this recognition. This was a challenging piece to write but it was also a fascinating research adventure. Up to this point, almost nothing had been written on the topic of player pianos regarding Latin America. I am glad to see that now there is a blossoming interest on the matter and I hope to be able to keep contributing to filling those historical gaps. Thus, as much as writing this article was a fascinating research adventure, it is, indeed, an ongoing adventure.”
The prize committee adds that “thanks to all the contributors and nominees, a lot of new fields are now open inside organology, including sound studies, queer studies, feminism and the racial question, the social lives of musical instruments, and critical interventions. In his article, el doctor Ospina Romero opens the study of music instrument to musicking instruments, instruments to share the pleasure of listening to music.”
Sergio Ospina Romero will join our department as Assistant Professor of Musicology in August 2021, after completing his postdoctoral appointment in the Music Department at the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogota.
Abstract:
Gabriel García Márquez’s literary portrait of the arrival of the pianola in Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude functions as a metaphor for the reception and cultural legitimization of player pianos in Latin America during their heyday in the 1910s and 1920s. As a technological intruder, the player piano inhabited a liminal space between the manual and the mechanical as well as between unmediated musical experiences and the mechanically mediated consumption of sounds. It thus constitutes a paradigmatic case to examine the contingent construction of ideas about tradition and modernity. The international trade in player pianos between the United States and Latin America during the first decades of the twentieth century was developed in tandem with the commercial expansion and political interventionism of the United States throughout the Americas during the same period. The efforts of North American businessmen to capture the Latin American market and the establishment of marketing networks between US companies and Latin American dealers reveal a complex interplay of mutual stereotyping, First World War commercial geopolitics, capitalization on European cultural/musical referents, and multiple strategies of appropriation and reconfiguration in relation to the player piano’s technological and aesthetic potential. The reception of player pianos in Latin America was characterized by anxieties very similar to those of US consumers, particularly with regard to the acousmatic nature of their sounds and their perceived uncanniness. The cultural legitimization of the instrument in the region depended, however, on its adaptation to local discourses, cultural practices, soundscapes, expectations, language, gender constructions, and especially repertoires.
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