Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The Cuban musicologist Danilo Orozco died in 2013 in Havana, Cuba. He was able to combine a solid scientific background with a deep commitment to social work. As the writer of or the responsible for numerous musicological studies, he stands among the most important scholars of the twentieth century. He undertook and handled a multifarious effort to further and value the musical heritage of his native Cuba, showing a special care for peasant musicians many of whom had been by then forgotten. He kept in permanent contact and had a close relationship with them as part of his musicological fieldwork. For him music could not be studied from the standpoint of isolated disciplinary fields. Far from that, he practised a widely encompassing musicology considering music on the basis of the musical processes themselves, rather than from the historical, cultural or social situation. For many his most outstanding achievement was his doctoral dissertation submitted in 1987 at the Humboldt University in Germany. However his most enduring legacy has to do with the monumental work that he carried out with musicians of the Oriente province in Cuba. Doubtless his intelectual endeavor was truly gigantic. However it has yet to be made widely known.

Based on the need to develop an interpretative and critical perspective of musicology, which has been postponed by the prevailing analytical approach focusing on musical writing, this article asks how popular song has symbolically built in the city. To do this, I consider fourteen songs recorded in the 1980s in Chile with Santiago as a central theme. Most of them expressed the symbolic construction of a social space stressed both by the military dictatorship and the neoliberal economic model. During this decade more songs inspired by the city of Santiago were recorded than ever before, despite the extent to which the prevailing censorship affected their production processes and mediation, generating new questions for the study of Chilean popular song in the 1980s. The article focuses on the case of “A mi ciudad” by Luis Lebert and Santiago del Nuevo Extremo, the first song to the city of Santiago of the eighties, which has since held a predominant position in the country’s memory. I also want to address aspects of canon and repertoire in popular music as well as forms of circulation and song production under dictatorship. I propose an intertextual study of “A mi ciudad” considering a cluster of musical, literary, performative, audio, visual and discursive texts, from a listening socially and historically situated. I propose that it is in the inter-relationship of these texts where the song is formed, so analyzing them separately would not allow to fully grasp their aesthetic and symbolic aspects.