Son Huasteco, Son Jarocho, Banda, and many others have an established instrumentation, rhythms, harmonic progressions, and are unmistakably received and perceived as Mexican music in Mexico and abroad. Music and sentimentalism, however, has consistently been explored under the musical genre known as bolero—a song form with origins that can be traced to Cuba that was transformed in several Latin American countries and achieved worldwide popularity. This, has from the beginning, posed a challenge to those who would prefer to have neatly arranged musical genres with nation states.
Although, bolero as a musical genre is firmly rooted in the Cuban tradition, the term was coopted by the media industries during the early twentieth century to provide an ideal packaging for musical products that could not otherwise be categorized easily on the basis of rhythm, tempo, harmonic progression, or instrumentation. Instead, what they shared was a rhetoric of romance, sentimentalism, and nostalgia (García Corona 2019). The popularity of bolero during the first half of the twentieth century, as manufactured by the media, has led scholars to study the genre mostly under theorizations based on globalization, modernity, and cosmopolitanism, while foreclosing potential explorations of music, sentimentalism, and the construction of knowledge through different combinations of sounds, particularly polyphonic voicing. Additionally, placing emphasis on bolero as a platform for sentimental music driven by the logic of capitalism (bolero as a commodity), undermines the importance of sentimentalism among people beyond “fans and consumers vs. superstar performers.” Many popular musicians of sentimental music were first fans and consumers before becoming famous performers, a kind of “real sentimentalism” vis-à-vis “real country” (Fox 2004). Here I argue that bolero has become an obstacle to fully understanding sentimentalism, and I explore the theoretical potential of sentimentalism in Latin American music. Few musical expressions escape the many compartmentalizing processes in music-genre formations. In this book, I aim to provide such exploration. I do so by departing from the music-genre approach, and by making use of the trío romántico style. My interest in the style is not one that superficially substitutes genre for style; rather, by looking at the elements that define a style I unveil sociopolitical and musical connections.
Trío romántico emerged from musical negotiations and migratory processes during the first half of the twentieth century. Today the style refers to a musical ensemble widely credited to trio Los Panchos, who migrated to the United States in the 1940s to combine their voices, guitars, and musical experiences to create the ensemble. The style is also sometimes referred to as the panchista style for that reason. As I explore further in chapter three the panchista style was the culmination of negotiating ideas of mexicanness and latin-americanness with the influential music scene of jazz, big bands, and barbershop quartets of 1940s New York City. This included a departure from iconoclastic imagery of mexicanness (sombreros and mariachi suits give way to elegant tuxedos); therefore, the style sometimes has been referred to as trío galante (gallant and/or elegant trio).
Formally the style, as established by the early recordings of Los Panchos, was comprised musically by three chordophones and three voices. Two of the chordophones were usually two acoustic guitars with nylon strings, and the third one, a smaller acoustic guitar-like instrument known as requinto, tuned a fourth above and used for melodic ornaments, introductions, and intermezzos. The voices were usually in a three-part harmonic arrangement, performing sentimental lyrics about love in an unabashed display of emotions by young urban males.
The convergence in time, space, and sentimentalism between the trio style and the bolero has often placed the trio style peripheral to bolero, or as the main musical vehicle for the bolero. The trio style served, however, as a musical vehicle for many musical genres, social, and political expressions. Through an exploration of its emergence, development, and consolidation, the style provides an opportunity to learn about sociopolitical negotiations captured in polyphonic musical configurations that while providing capital also voiced economic struggle and demands for social justice.