Diccionario bibliográfico de la música argentina y de la música en la Argentina (review)

Reviewed by: Diccionario bibliográfico de la música argentina y de la música en la Argentina Morgan James Luker Leandro Donzo. 2006. Diccionario bibliográfico de la música argentina y de la música en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Gourmet Musical Ediciones. 534 pp. ISBN 9877266409. By the title alone, Leandro Donzo’s Bibliographic Dictionary of Argentine Music and Music in Argentina is nothing if not ambitious. The book takes a broad view of its topic, providing bibliographic information on “indigenous, folkloric, popular, and academic music from the colonial period to our days” including names of composers, interpreters, investigators, journalists, producers, musical genres, geographic sites, institutions, musical instruments, and specific musical pieces, including music for film and the theater. It is a Herculean task, especially for a single author, and a case could be made that Donzo, in his drive for comprehensiveness and laudable commitment to inclusively, has indeed cast his net a bit too wide. As it turns out, however, the book is somewhat more limited in scope than its name might imply. Instead of covering everything available on these topics (which is the goal of a larger, ongoing project already in its tenth year), this volume includes only what appears in fifty-two existing reference works. These range from international multivolume warhorses like the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the Diccionario de la música espanola e hispanoamericana to much more specialized works such as Silvia Astuni’s 100 años de música rosarina and Félix Eduardo Py’s Por quién retumban los parches: Algunas historias de baterías y bateristas argentinos. As such, the book reads less like a dictionary of Argentine music (and music in Argentina) than a massive yet selective table of contents for the reference works upon which it is based. Because of this, the book is, on the one hand, necessarily relegated to functioning as little more than an entry point into these other works, or, at the very least, working only in tandem with them. On the other hand, it does provide a quick and comprehensive image of what kinds of things are out there — which is quite informative in its own right — and will serve as a useful initial “go to” volume for anyone embarking on a new research idea or interest in Argentine music. [End Page 286] Even limiting his “database” to a fixed number of reference works, Donzo’s project amounts to well over 21,000 entries covering more than 500 pages, with each entry referring to at least one, but sometimes several articles that can be found on that particular topic. Like a dictionary, entries are alphabetically organized under boldface headings: the name of a person, place, instrument, genre, etc. Below these headings is the basic bibliographic information for articles on that topic — author name, title, and page numbers — which is accompanied by abbreviated codes indicating in which of the fifty-two reference books the cited articles can be found. These abbreviations, while clearly practical in the writing and printing of the book, do take some getting used to, and require a lot of flipping back and forth between specific entries and the table of abbreviations that is inconveniently buried over several pages within the book’s introductory passages. (A smaller table of abbreviations printed inside the book’s front or back jacket would have been better.) That said, Donzo does a good job of making the book as user friendly as possible, including a useful chart that shows how different kinds of entries are organized and explains how to read them, as well as a nicely concise prose introduction where more general issues, such as the criteria for a given topic’s inclusion or exclusion, are discussed. Entries on individuals usually include information on the date and location of their birth and death, and where multiple references have been unable to agree on this information, Donzo duly notes the conflict. Even more usefully, for some individuals, Donzo creates entries that cover their commonly used names, their sometimes numerous pseudonyms, and their full given or family name, each of which is cross-referenced to a single, principal entry. While

Art · Humanities · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Cultural and Mythological Studies · Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books

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