Incan or Not? Building Ecuador’s Musical Past in the Quest for a Nationalist Art Music, 1900–1950

Abstract

When the development of Ecuadorian national art music began at the end of the nineteenth century, composers and music historians followed European models and studied folklore as a window onto the past. In this quest to discover and articulate what was truly “Ecuadorian,” Incan culture occupied a complex position, sometimes hailed as a primary component of Ecuador’s musical heritage and sometimes dismissed as irrelevant. This article explores the music histories written by composers Pedro Pablo Traversari, Segundo Luis Moreno, and Sixto María Durán, and investigates a selection of Traversari’s compositions and Moreno’s music analyses. It demonstrates how they either included Incan culture in or excluded it from a national music history, in dialogue with scholars outside Ecuador. Early twentieth-century musical discourse in Ecuador produced a series of conflicting and converging perspectives on national and continental music that contribute to our understanding of the global history of nationalistic art musics.