Fred Rohner has written an outstanding contribution to the scholarship of Creole music (música criolla) in Peru, focusing on an under-studied topic: the reformulation of social identity and self-representation of the working classes (sectores populares) through the performance and participation in Lima's vals scene. The book is a detailed, innovative and critical study of the Peruanisation of the European waltz and its use in the transformation of marginalised and racialised working-class identities into modern, ‘decent’, patriotic and literate citizens. Rohner highlights how the working classes transformed their social position and citizenship in response to elite narratives using the vals to distance themselves from preconceptions and symbolic spaces of social marginalisation. Gradually, the vals grew in popularity and acquired a more Peruvian identity, borrowing rhythmic structures and expressions from other ‘more Peruvian’ genres that were heavily racialised and perceived as representative of stereotyped populations. It then replaced other racialised musical expressions and came to symbolise ‘criollo decency’.
Given the paucity of studies on links between popular music and transformations of citizenship and self-representation, it is refreshing to come across scholarship that transcends merely compiling musical repertoire to offer a critical examination of the musical body and its context, especially for me as a researcher interested in ties between citizenship, culture and class in Lima. Rohner explores the efforts to validate a working-class identity and citizenship through popular music, which seek to break away from elite imaginaries of social marginalisation.
This volume, written in Spanish, consists of an introduction, nine chapters and a final reflection. The inclusion of several topics that could have been summarised or linked more clearly to the main objective takes the book beyond ideal length. Nevertheless, even with numerous digressions, this tome is a pleasure to read.
Through an exhaustive literature review, Chapter 1, ‘La Guardia Vieja: Un estado de la cuestión’, highlights the lack of critical writing, theoretical production and analysis of Peruvian popular music, and the avoidance of studying the popular music of the urban Creoles in Lima as they were considered close to the elites and groups in power (p. 44). Chapter 2, ‘El vals criollo como objeto de estudio’, discusses the uptake of the vals in Peru in the nineteenth century and its influence on the Creole scene until 1930. Rohner states that the popularity of the vals is linked to the identity and material modernisation of the city. Moreover, Rohner examines other popular music scenes in Latin America in order to understand how ‘decency’ is constructed through music (p. 66). Chapter 3, ‘La Guardia Vieja en el universo cultural criollo’, focuses on the criollo subject, which Rohner understands as someone inserted into a community with the same symbolic cultural practices that become markers of identity; not a generational or a chronological movement.
Chapter 4, ‘Paisaje sonoro y cultura musical en la Lima del XIX’, is a lengthy but innovative analysis of musical sociability through the study of soundscapes, as a way to find the musical interaction of the vals with other more racialised musical genres. On the one hand, it documents how racialised music genres fell out of favour with working-class musicians, who in parallel incorporated musical elements of those very genres in the compositions of new valses, thereby constructing a more mestizo (mixed) and ‘decent’ musical form. This fascinating chapter would merit publication as a separate book on soundscapes and popular music musical sociability, though here it perhaps mostly distracts from the main argument.
Chapter 5, ‘La música popular en el siglo XIX’, documents the influence and incorporation of musical structures from genres popular in the nineteenth century, such as the marineras and yaravíes, into the vals. Rohner writes that performers of marineras and décimas could portray themselves as ‘less black’ through a ‘more decent’ and less racialised identity as new criollos (pp. 218–19). Chapter 6, ‘La música moderna’, gives an account of initial spaces where the European waltz captured the popular scene. Rohner focuses on the private salón space, the scores and the instrumentation, providing a historical account of the presence of the waltz, and then the vals in Lima from the 1800s. All these, together with advances in sound-recording technology, proved fertile ground for the composition of a new ‘more Peruvian’ vals that, amalgamated with racialised genres, served as a marker of social modernity and a medium to participate patriotically in the nation.
Chapter 7, ‘Cantar a la patria’, documents how nationalistic discourses were produced and reproduced in the vals to challenge the perception of the working classes as ‘lacking patriotism’ (p. 303). Recording technology provided a means for the working classes to represent themselves as nation-building patriots. Chapter 8, ‘La modernidad como clave’, examines the vals as a tool for constructing a modern/decent image on the criollo scene. It focuses on the habits and traditions of the popular criollo musician, including social codes, dress habits, photo settings and discographies. Chapter 9, ‘La literacidad popular’, considers the link criollo composers forged between modernity and literacy and how it contributed to achieving a textual self-representation as modern, ‘decent’, less racialised people. These three final chapters offer a historical overview of the range of both musical and extra-musical resources criollo musicians drew on in their identity transformation. This is a treasure trove of material, but the sprawling archival detail could perhaps have been integrated more organically and succinctly to avoid redundancy.
In his final reflections Rohner concludes that there is no chronology of the vals, but rather a mythology, an invention of tradition. Felipe Pinglo is the messiah of the Guardia Vieja. He embodies the culmination of a long painstaking process of self-representation and construction of the modern patriotic citizen, and the end of marginalised working-class identities in Lima. Rohner offers an interpretation of the vals mythology found in books, booklets, albums and source material like scores, album covers, photographs and repertoire accounts. His prose is clear and sophisticated and his eye for detail is sorely needed in contemporary Peruvian musicological studies. One regrettable omission is the absence of extracts from testimonies contributed by the ‘insiders’ Rohner so vividly describes in his introduction. As ethnography and qualitative methods are not central to this contribution, one could argue that it leans towards critical history rather than ethnomusicology. Nevertheless, it is a thorough account of an under-studied angle on música criolla, and a fresh point of departure for future research on contemporary popular music in Lima.
