Echoes and reflections in La Pampa's music. From the Cancionero de los Ríos to the testimonies of Sylvia Zabzuk and Viviana Dal Santo

Abstract

The songs reflect experiences that go through their creators, inserted in social, cultural, geographical, historical, political contexts, among other factors that can affect the composition process, where echoes of experiences remain that contribute to a textual-contextual result open to innumerable interpretations and analyses. This work began with interviews of the singer-songwriter Sylvia Zabzuk —born in Misiones and who has been living in La Pampa for twenty-five years— and the pianist and composer Viviana Dal Santo —born and living in La Pampa—, with an analysis on a selection of her work. Also part of the study was the Cancionero de los Ríos, a book that brings together compositions by Pampas, and two books by musician and researcher Rubén Evangelista, which recount the history of Pampas music.

The study allowed to propose categorizations and analysis methodologies to delve into functions, uses, discourses, intentions, receptions, etc., in search of musical traits that can present temporal and geographical analogies, and identification processes. One hypothesis was that there are poems, melodic designs and harmonies that become typical of times and regions, and that give rise to a reciprocity between music-time-landscape. Multitextual analysis was used that incorporated text and context from a semantic perspective, where an ethnomusicological study predominated, combining exploratory, descriptive and explanatory research methodologies, and drawing on qualitative and quantitative analysis approaches and techniques.

The historical information ensures that the reader finds the meaning of the discourse and the clean connection between the environmental situation of La Pampa, which prompted its inhabitants to create the music that later gave rise to the provincial songbook, whose only theme is to claim the return of the River Atuel and narrate the landscape, economic and population consequences caused by its absence.