Modern Language Review

Inca Music Reimagined explores how Latin American musicians brought ideas of Incan music into their twentieth-century modernist compositions. In a larger sense, it is also about the ways in which Incan music was linked to national imaginaries based in an ideal, remote past. Vera Wolkowicz argues that for many intellectuals, to reclaim the culture of the Inca empire and its glorious tradition preceding Spanish conquest—a kind of paradise lost—meant ‘the young nations of Latin America could claim a collective past as old and grandiose as that of Europe’ (p. 1). Following this line of thinking, she demonstrates the ways in which Latin American intellectuals aspired to present the region as a peer of European civilization, or at least a region with cultural qualities unique to it that Europe could not claim; North America, meanwhile, was to be followed in material terms but distrusted in spiritual ones, as per the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó’s ideas of the period expressed in his essay ‘Ariel’ (1900), where Ariel’s artistic tendencies are contrasted with Caliban’s materialism. The book, which emerged out of the author’s doctoral dissertation, examines a variety of historical sources, including musical scores, newspapers, and literary magazines, and also incorporates biographical profiles of composers nearly unknown today.

The attempts to translate ideas about the Incan music into contemporary sound patterns often involved quite speculative research by composers and musicologists into sound systems of the past; this research also mobilized many contemporary stereotypes. The supposed indigenous past became an exotic resource, in a kind of Orientalism. In this context, Wolkowicz mentions a perceived link between Asian and indigenous musical traditions, specifically based on the pentatonic scale, which several authors of comparative musical histories believed originated in Asia before it expanded to Europe, then South America. Sixto María Durán compared the Incan pentatonic scale to those of China, Egypt, and Scotland; Pedro Pablo Traversari highlighted the possibility of parallels between Asian and American indigenous music; and Segundo Luis Moreno considered in juxtaposition the Incan and Chinese pentatonics (p. 130). Similar arguments were made at this time about how indigenous languages supposedly traced back to Indo-European roots, and it would have been fascinating to see these brief references developed.

Across her different chapters, Wolkowicz looks at how musical nationalism differed in Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina. In Peru the recuperation was more nostalgic, whereas in Ecuador there was a complex relationship to the Inca heritage, since the Incas were conquerors there. The Inca empire represented an option for affiliation beyond Spanish criollo ideas of the nation state, yet the imperial nature of Inca civilization meant that it, too, was a colonizer, and turning to it raised issues parallel to those raised by similar turns to the Hispanic past. Inca is not a synonym for indigenous, and there were other indigenous traditions that could have been—and were—appealed to. In Ecuador, while Incan references do appear, [End Page 353] pre-Incan utopias also play an important role. Additionally, there is a passing, but intriguing, reference to the strong link in that country between conducting military bands and composing popular music. In Argentina, where the link to Incan heritage is more tenuous, references to Incas appeared mostly in operatic compositions. According to Wolkowicz, audiences do not seem to have identified with these themes, which she presents as a case of both poor musical quality and lack of cultural identification. The question of what Incan music actually is remains unclear in these authors, even as they evoked it. As Wolkowicz notes, the only consistent traits associated with Incan music were, first, the pentatonic scale and, second, the theme of unrequited love with its accompanying melancholy sounds, as in the yaraví song; historical Andean music was linked to sadness (p. 112).

Wolkowicz makes a few debatable assumptions. She repeatedly presents Latin America as a ‘European modern...