Chilean musicians' discourse of the 1980's: A collective poetics, pedagogy, and socio-aesthetics of art and popular music

After trying the revolutionary dream of the 1960's, and living under a military regime from 1973 to 1990, Chilean society was more realistic, tolerant, and diverse by the late 1980's. This allowed the growing of a post-modern attitude among Chilean intellectuals and musicians. The eclecticism, the rooted and critical universalism, and the non-dogmatic nationalism advocated and practiced by Chilean musicians during the 1980's are manifestations of post-modernism in late 20th century Chilean art and popular music.;Chilean musicians critically assimilated a large number of intellectual and artistic influences during the 1980's. Synthesizing or superimposing a selected and imposed sum of cultural influences, and developing a personal interpretation of them, Chilean musicians "create" the cultural tradition that they have missed.;Chilean musicians developed during the 1980's an oral and written discourse because of and about their musical practice. It contains poetic, pedagogic, aesthetic and sociological matters. This study includes 635 citations and translations of Chilean musicians' discourse. They were extracted from 275 sources published in Chilean and non-Chilean periodicals from 1978 to 1990.;The musicians' discourse has been studied from the perspectives of four musicological fields: philosophy and aesthetics of music, music semiotics, and sociology of music. As a result, musicians' thinking is placed in a general context of thinking, and is illuminated from the universal perspective provided by humanistic and social fields of musicology.;Among the Chilean musicians living inside and outside Chile during the 1980's, eleven art composers and six popular groups have been selected for this study. This selection was made according to historical, cultural, and social criteria, such as the presence of the different generations of musicians; the inclusion of art and popular music; and the attention to different social and ideological backgrounds.;Despite social and cultural differences, Chilean musicians discussed common issues during the 1980's, such as the nature and meaning of music; the motivations, conditions, and processes of composition; the innovation, freedom and rigor in musical teaching; the isolation and commercialism of music; the relationships between art and popular music; their national, Latin American and Western identity; and their political positions.