“The Ending that Never Ends” or The Posthumous Life of Musicians

Authors

  • Sergio Ospina Romero Universidad de los Andes

Keywords:

biography, musical afterlives, agency, reenactment, intermundane collaborations

Abstract

No matter how comprehensive a biography seems to be, it is but the unfinished account of a life—just like someone’s death usually makes evident a series of pending issues. By taking into account the interactions of the living with the legacy of the dead and the way in which the past is continually reenacted and refashioned by virtue of those interactions, it is clear that there is also a social afterlife for the dead among the living. This article examines the analytical and epistemological challenges surrounding the study of musicians’ afterlives. Considering the lives and afterlives of Chano Pozo, Selena, Luis A. Calvo, Nat King Cole, Julián Carrillo, Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and a couple of movie characters, at least three issues loom large in the article: the need of extending the limits of human agency towards the afterlife and the intermundane realm, the acts of forgery that are inherent to any attempt to reenact a life, and the transhistorical character of music and musicians’ lives.  

Author Biography

Sergio Ospina Romero, Universidad de los Andes

Sergio Ospina Romero es investigador y profesor posdoctoral en la Universidad de los Andes (en Colombia), y a partir del 2021 será Profesor Asistente de Musicología en la Jacobs School of Music de la Universidad de Indiana (en Estados Unidos). Sus investigaciones se concentran en la primera mitad del siglo XX, en especial en temas relacionados con tecnologías de grabación y reproducción mecánica del sonido, el jazz, y la música popular de América Latina. Es el autor de dos libros, Dolor que canta (ICANH, 2017) y Fonógrafos Ambulantes (en prensa), así como de varias publicaciones que han aparecido en revistas y libros de distintos lugares del continente. Ha sido profesor en la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, la Universidad Cornell, y la Universidad de los Andes. Ha sido galardonado con el Premio Klaus P. Wachsmann de la Society for Ethnomusicology, el Donald J. Grout Memorial Prize de la Universidad Cornell, y con menciones de honor del Premio de Musicología de Casa de las Américas y del Premio Otto Mayer Serra. Sergio es el pianista y director de Palonegro, un ensamble de música latinoamericana y jazz latino, con el que grabó recientemente el álbum Two Minutes Apart, disponible en todas las plataformas digitales.

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Published

2021-03-23

Issue

Vol. 22 No. 1 (2021): Dossier: Musical biography in Latin American musicology of the 21st century

Section

Dossier

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