Curt Lange’s “Musical Americanism”: towards a mestizo and tropical Bildung

Abstract

This article interprets a text produced by Curt Lange in 1935 and published in Revista Brasileira de Música, in which he presents the musical Americanism to Brazilian readers. Launching as search to identify, through this writing, theoretical beacons that based such movement, it is postulated that Curt Lange configures the musical Americanism as a link of the cultural singularity of Latin America with the universalism of a cultural legacy of humanity. Such imbrication, however, was not yet complete, and its improvement in the field of ideas and of the arts should culminate in a more fraternal society. This singular-universal interface, in its turn, can be invested onto the Germanic formation of Bildung, received by Curt Lange, in dialogue with premises of romantic imagery, of historicism and of the just founded cultural anthropology. As development, the musical Americanism reconfigures the universal-particular tension through the valorization of the miscegenation of the “Latin race” and the recognition of a “tropical ethos”.