At the turn of the twentieth century vocal ensembles featuring close harmonies emerged as a popular musical configuration. Aided by the emerging mass media industry these musical configurations took many turns, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century. As Gage Averill has showed, in the U.S. some of those turns occurred among African Americans, Anglo-American males and females, sometimes in duets, trios, and most prominently quartets. Close harmony singing, particularly in the quartet style, was part of re-configuring of what it meant to “hear America sing.” As Josh Kun demonstrated in his book Audiotopia, there was an attempt during the second half of the nineteenth century to develop a native, exceptionalist aural notion of the nation, a fantasy based on a collection of sounds and songs (Kun 2005:19). During this reconfiguration of what it meant to hear America sing, women and minorities did not have a prominent place or musical space. In many instances, they were not welcome at all. This ideological position, however, stood at odds with an emerging vibrant, dynamic, and diverse cultural industry. The historic presence of Mexicans in the United States, particularly in the southern states, provided a niche market that was also singing in close harmony and which, I argue, found itself challenging the mainstream nativist project. In this article, I explore the negotiations and contestations of female polyphonic configurations in the U.S. during the 1930s, against the grain of male-centered white nationalistic aural fantasy.
My initial approach to the study of close harmony in popular music is derived from my performance experience with and later research on the trío romántico, a style widely popular in Mexico and in many other Latin American countries. Among scholars it is widely accepted that the style originated in New York City during the 1940s and was inaugurated by the seminal trio Los Panchos. As I have researched this topic outside of predetermined musical frameworks, I have found myself in a transnational and transhistorical conundrum. Ethnomusicological research has a long track record of studying and understanding music in its own cultural context. In this instance, however, it has produced some important blind spots. I can think of several reasons for this: 1) male-centered historicism, 2) the tendency still of studying music based on national identities, and 3) the emphasis on musical genres. Research based on musical genres, I argue, provides a neatly contained “object” of study which can provide theorizations based on globalization, modernity, and nationalism to mention a few, however foreclosing potential exploration of music and other social phenomena. Therefore, in this essay, I propose a different approach, one subtracted from musical genres as foundational elements, one that accounts for the fluidity in time and space of musical practices and negotiations, indeed a transnational, transhistorical, and what I call a transgenrelogical approach to close harmony singing in the U.S. and Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century in order to unveil issues of social and cultural membership, race, class, and migration. In doing so I am moved here by Foucault’s notions of discursive formations in which discourses create the realities they attempt to describe. I am also inspired by recent scholarship that addresses Foucault’s notions of discursive formations in relation to music in the Americas; here I am thinking of Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier’s theorizations about diverse listening practices in Latin America, and the construction of knowledge through aural processes as well as current scholarship that engages Josh Kun’s ideas of the “American audio-racial imagination” against the grain of the “Mexican sounds” as explored by Alex Chavez. I do so by focusing on three seminal female duets: In the United States, Las Hermanas Padilla and the Andrews sisters, and in Mexico, Las Hermanas Águila. This exploration does not include extensive biographical information, there is plenty of that elsewhere, here I am more interested in exploring the potential cultural, social and political insights that would result from a dialectical listening practice removed from teleological approaches, one that sheds light on the struggles of female singers in a male driven industry in an attempt to show how early female polyphonic musical ensembles contributed, in the case of Las Hermanas Padilla, to the reconfiguration of listening to America, and in the case of Las Hermanas Aguila to the acceptance of sentimentalism in music that paradoxically opened opportunities for new all-male polyphonic musical ensembles which overtook midcentury Mexican cultural production.
Article in preparation for Twentieth-Century Music, Cambridge University Press