Description: In Representing the Good Neighbor, Carol A. Hess investigates the reception of Latin American art music in the US during the Pan American movement of the 1930s and 40s. Hess uncovers how and why attitudes towards Latin American music shifted so dramatically during the middle of the twentieth century, and what this tells us about the ways in which the history of American music has been written.
Review Quotes: Winner of the 2015 Robert M. Stevenson Award from the American Musicological Society
"This brilliant book offers the first critical analysis of the reception of Latin American art music in the US during and after the Cold War... Highly recommended." --Choice"[A] masterful reception history of works...[a] fascinating, valuable addition to the scholarship on 'American Music'."--Journal of the Society for American Music"Hess's Representing the Good Neighbor, with its sophisticated prose and historical insight, constitutes an innovative and efficient model for transnational scholarship despite its focus on Pan-Americanism as conceived and experienced solely in the United States. Indeed, she rightly states that she does not intend to speak for Latin Americans. We are confident, however, that this book will prompt the telling of other stories, which will potentially spark a broader dialogue with this masterful study including Latin American voices and perspectives. Ideally, such a dialogue would move beyond the canonical Big Three to include women composers like Jacqueline Nova-Sondag or cultural agents like Guillermo Espinosa, who organized Pan-Americanist events all around the Americas. As Hess herself brilliantly articulates, 'there is simply no point in overlooking the presence of one continent in the history of the other' (193)." --Latin American Research Review"The breadth of research presented in Representing the Good Neighbor expands its potential audience, and the presence today of Latinos as the largest minority in the United States gives the work added significance. Readers who are unaware of the intense collaboration that took place between US and Latin American artists and intellectuals during this era of pan-American accord will be surprised to discover a period in which our collective vision of 'American' music (and 'America' itself) extended far beyond US borders ... Representing the Good Neighbor is a compelling contribution to the deterritorialization of Americanist musicology, one whose model vantage point is capable of discerning cultural sameness without expunging cultural difference." --Journal of the American Musicological Society