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Volume 52 / Humanities

MUSIC

UNDER THE HEADINGS "MUSIC, "Music and Literature," "Music and Society," and "Musicians," the 1988 Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI) (Univ. of California, Los Angeles, p. 336-338), listed 107 articles published in 1987-88 in 31 different periodicals. However, only one of the 31 is a music magazine published in Latin America. None of the following seminal magazines was indexed: Art: Revista da Escola de Música e Artes Cênicas da Universidade Federal da Bahia; Correspondência Musicológica (S˜ao Paulo: Sociedade Brasileira de Musicologia); Heterofonía (México, D.F.); Pauta (México: Univ. Autónoma Metropolitana); Revista del Instituto de Investigación Musicológica Carlos Vega (Buenos Aires); Revista de Musicología (Sociedad Española de Musicología); Revista Musical de Venezuela (Caracas: Instituto Latinoamericano de Investigaciones y Estudios Musicales Vicente Emilio Sojo); Temas de Etnomusicología (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional de Musicología Carlos Vega). Two years later, only Revista Musical de Venezuela among the above had joined HAPI's lust of indexed periodicals.

As for other indexes: in January 1989, The Music Index: a Subject-Author Guide to Music Periodical Literature (Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press) did index Art, Heterofonía, and Pauta. Nonetheless, it again was of but limited use to anyone specializing in Latin American music, because it indexed none of the other periodicals listed in the previous paragraph. These absences from the most complete indexes now being published, HAPI and The Music Index, explain the present perilous state of Latin America music studies - both in and outside Latin America. Only with utmost difficulty can librarians even discover what specialized music magazines are being published, much less find a dealer who will supply them.

So far as reviews of books and music appearing in these magazines go, they should alert librarians to desirable purchases. But a spot check in late 1990 of the music and music literature purchases that have been made by 12 leading university libraries in five Western states confirms the absence of not only all but one or two music periodicals published in Latin America, but also of all such book and music items listed in HLAS 48:7047, HLAS 48:7050-7056, HLAS 48:7074, HLAS 48:7076, HLAS 48:7123, HLAS 48:7127, HLAS 48:7128, HLAS 48:7149, and HLAS 48:7160.

The decade of the 1990s must therefore take for its first goal not publication, but circulation. Some ways must be found to make Latin American music and music book purchases as easy for public and university librarians of good will as are purchases of the vastly more expensive music and books emanating from Germany, France, and Italy. At one of the Study Sessions of the International Musicological Society programmed for the week of April 3-10, 1992 in Spain (hosted by the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música, in Madrid) the participants focused on "The Dissemination of Music and Music Literature published in the Iberian World." Whether any panaceas for the most pressing problem that now confronts Latin American music specialists were then found, is doubtful. But at least during the Quincentennial the problem was looked at in all its magnitude and urgency.

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