The transcriptions of Narciso Garay and the Construction of a Panamanian Musical landscape in the Twentieth-Century

Abstract

Narciso Garay published Tradiciones y cantares de Panamá in 1930, which contains numerous transcriptions of traditional music that the author compiled during five years of travels throughout the Panamanian territory as part of an identity-construction effort. Panamanian composers Alberto Galimany, Roque Cordero and Eduardo Charpentier participated in a process of resignification of that effort through quotations of Garay's transcriptions and created works in diverse styles in which they recontextualize the music collected by Garay. In this study we analyze the musical quotations by these composers from the perspective of the conscious forging of identities and Garay’s “imagined Panama” during the first decades of the republic and the influence this repertoire had on the construction of a "Panamanian" musical landscape in the collective imagination of the following generations of composers.