UC Presents The Samuel Claro Valdés Award To Musicologists From Chile And Ecuador

In its thirteenth edition, the Samuel Claro Valdés Latin American Musicology Award will be received by a Chilean for the first time. It is the ethnomusicologist Leonardo Díaz Collao , who obtained it ex aequo (equally) with the Ecuadorian researcher of Venezuelan origin, Jesús Estévez Monagas.

Both musicologists are under 40 years of age.

“I hope this recognition is a window to strongly position the idea of ​​Mapuche researchers, musicians and musicians” – Leonardo Díaz, ethnomusicologist

In a unanimous decision, the jury established that the article “Más allá de la música mapuche: equivoco, definiciones y resistencias”, by Leonardo Díaz Collao, “renews and promotes the debate on the tension between what is understood by music in the production ethnomusicology and in the Mapuche communities”. It also highlights that it broadens this theme by incorporating speech and the soundscape.

On the other hand, “Musical life in the Cathedral of Quito (1545-1836): new perspectives and documents” , by Jesús Estévez Monagas, was distinguished by the jury as “a rigorous and very well documented work, based on unpublished sources and in the critical review of previous bibliography”. It is also highlighted that “it opens new perspectives to situate musical activity in the territory of what is now Ecuador within the panorama of Spanish-American colonial history, in whose general narratives it had little presence until now.”

There was also an honorable mention for the article “Ugulendu: drums, rattles, songs and sonofanías of the Guatemalan Garífuna spirituality” , by Augusto Pérez Guarnieri.

The jury was made up of Enrique Cámara de Landa, an academic from the University of Valladolid; María Gembero Ustárroz, a scientist at the Milá y Fontanals Institution for Humanities Research in Barcelona, ​​and Daniel Party Tolchinsky, a professor at the UC Music Institute. Thus, as is tradition, the fields of ethnomusicology, historical musicology and popular music studies were represented.

“This award means an opportunity to make musicians visible”

Leonardo Díaz Collao (1986) is a doctor in Musicology from the universities of Valladolid and Complutense de Madrid and a postdoctoral researcher at the Music Institute of the Alberto Hurtado University, where he teaches. Likewise, he is secretary of the Chilean committee of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM).

“(This award) means recognition and an opportunity for me to make my work visible, but also to make visible the Mapuche musicians and musicians with whom I work, so I hope that this recognition is a window to strongly position the idea of ​​researchers , researchers, musicians and Mapuche musicians”, indicated Díaz, and continued:

“The article ‘ Más allá de la música mapuche: equivoco, definiciones y resistencias’ was born from an ethnography that I developed in Wallmapu, with the machi Mercedes Antilef and the kimche Juan Ñanculef, in addition to other peñi/lamgen who very jointly allowed me to know part of the of the Mapuche world”, he maintained. “We are very ignorant about the Mapuche people in general, and about their different cultural expressions. In this text I problematize the relevance of the concept of music to understand the Mapuche sound universe.”

“I read a lot of leading figures in America”

Jesús Estévez Monagas (1988) is a doctoral candidate in Musicology at the Complutense University of Madrid and an academic at the College of Music of the San Francisco de Quito University, Ecuador. “For me it is a pride to represent my two countries,” said the musicologist. Born in Venezuela, he has lived in Ecuador for 14 years and already has that nationality.

“I am like a child who does not believe that he has a new toy. I always do my best to give my best, and in historical research I read a lot of leading figures in America, as Samuel Claro Valdés was at the time,” he said, referring to three researchers: Javier Marín López, Alejandro Vera and David Andres Fernandez. The latter, he said, “was my thesis director and who has taught me to be rigorous, which is something that the jury highlighted.”

His article, “Musical life in the Cathedral of Quito (1545-1836): new perspectives and documents”, responds to a gap that he identified. “The musicological work that has been done during a large part of the 20th century in Ecuador is very empirical. Despite the fact that it is very valuable, in my opinion this work has to be academicized,” said Jesús Estévez Monagas. Field work is not enough, he said, but the treatment of historical sources must be done ethically, citing them. “Since the work published in 1962 by Robert Stevenson on Quito, there had not been a study in 60 years that updated those contributions. In that ‘problem’ that I found, my desire to intervene and contribute to place the city of Quito and its cathedral among the most studied cathedrals entered”, explained the expert.

The Samuel Claro Valdés Latin American Musicology Award is one of the most prestigious recognitions in the Latin American world for the discipline. It was created in 1998, to pay tribute to the discipline’s pioneer in Chile, who taught at the UC Music Institute from 1982 until his death in 1994. It is delivered biennially and consists of a monetary amount of US$ 2,000. and also in the publication in the Resonancias Magazine . The latter implies a wide international circulation, since the journal is indexed in the Web of Science: Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and in Scopus.

In its latest version, it received 16 proposals from researchers residing in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, the United States, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. On this, the jury highlighted the “predominant high level” of the studies.

In South America, the Samuel Claro Valdés is the only award that has continuity over time. And it is one of the four recognitions in the Spanish language for musicology that are delivered regularly, together with the Casa de las Américas, the Otto Mayer-Serra and the Spanish Society of Musicology.

Professor Alejandro Vera highlights that the two articles that share the 2022 Samuel Claro Valdés Award are very different and valuable from a different point of view, a diversity that is very important in a musicology such as Latin America. “Leonardo Díaz Collao’s work reflects on music linked to the oral tradition, specifically to native peoples, but at the same time he uses that to reflect more broadly on the concepts of music, so it is a fairly theoretical article. On the other hand, the article by Jesús Estévez Monagas is much more empirical and provides new data regarding the musical life of Ecuador in the past”, Vera asserted.