Cantante is a generic word that means both female and male singer, and it often has a connotation of professionalism.
In the Spanish language, there are many words that mean ‘female singer,’ most of which are culturally specific to the place where they are spoken. In turn, this analysis considers how stylistic choices also allowed Violeta to reconfigure the tradition of the cantora, ultimately enabling us to see how she revolutionised female musicianship, impacting on collective understandings of Chilean identity as well.īackground: the tradition of the cantora, colonial heritage, and nationalism And as a singer-songwriter ( cantautora), she offered a new path for female artistry within a male-dominated circle of cantautores, while she further subscribed to non-nationalistic references of folkloric music as her music and poetry acquired more overtly political tones.ĭrawing on four musical examples, in the last section I show how Violeta Parra’s creative virtuosity and her audacious artistic decisions served to position her music within a specific social-political perspective. As a folklorist, in the midst of the burgeoning industry of folkloric music, Violeta-along with notable folklorists like Margot Loyola, and later Gabriela Pizarro and Héctor Pavez-promoted the art of rural cantoras and popular poets, and presented an aesthetic model that offered alternative symbols to the prevailing nationalistic images of Chilean music. In the following section, I outline aspects of Violeta Parra’s biography and their relation to this practice, distinguishing two approaches through which she navigated and defied these hegemonic values during her active period (1940s–1960s): that of a folklorist and that of a cantautora, or singer-songwriter. I then briefly describe the tradition of the cantora in Chile, and comment on how such hegemonic culture has shaped women musicians’ and cantoras’ practice and roles. In the first part of this article, I analyse the context of the colonial legacies that provide contents to a hegemonic post-colonial culture in Chile.
#MIGUEL PARRA INJUSTICE 2 PROFESSIONAL#
In adopting such a discourse, not only did Violeta contribute to raising awareness of a largely ignored and discredited culture in Chile, but she also broadened the professional path for women musicians and artists in the Chilean folkloric scene. 2 Instead of conforming to the nationalist aesthetics of folkloric music of her time, Violeta gradually adopted a discourse of the margins in her artistic approach-which herself and others have also called ‘singing to difference’ ( el canto a la diferencia) (Fairley and Horn 2002 Torres 2004). 1įollowing Catherine Boyle’s proposition to situate Violeta’s work within a poetics of ‘wilful marginality’ ( 2009: 83), I argue that Violeta’s life and trajectory as a cantora popular challenged prevalent epistemologies, social structures and roles within the folkloric music scene in Chile, historically built and imposed by the State in conjunction with the local recording industry, and supported uncritically by numerous practitioners.
In particular, I argue that specific aesthetic decisions in her work served to challenge certain hegemonic limits to the craft and activity of the cantora popular, in terms of gender, social class and nationalism. This article aims to bring to light the importance of her work as a woman musician in terms of altering long-standing Eurocentric post-colonial paradigms in Chilean (and Latin American) music. Violeta Parra (1917–1967) was a musician, researcher and artist whose work has been highly influential in Chile throughout the twentieth century and remains relevant in the present time.
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