Editorial

An article by the poet Montserrat Álvarez, from which we have taken the epigraph of this note), directs our attention to a book, an orchestra and a set of efforts coordinated by a Palestinian and a Jew in favor of peace and demonstrating that it must be reached together or else it will not be reached at all. The book is Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society; it was written by the orchestral conductor Daniel Barenboim and his friend, the philosopher and historian Edward W. Said; the authors—as stated by Álvarez—founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, “conceived […] to be a space where everyone, especially Arabs and Jews, can work together” (Álvarez, 2023).

It is almost pure chance that, while we prepare this issue number 6 of UNAM Internacional, devoted to music in as many manifestations as we have been able to assemble, this article arrives at our intimate reading space, outlining the luminous exploits of the Palestinian philosopher who devoted his life to unraveling the mysteries of colonialism and imperialism; he taught us, in his extraordinary book Orientalism, to understand how Western power and capital were built by exoticizing the Other, by inventing the East. It is almost pure chance, but it actually isn’t: in the context of war in the Closer East, whose ominous shadow looms over everything we do, Said is an obligatory, necessary call; an intellectual, an academic, a scholar committed to peace and justice, who also played the piano.

Science writer Philip Ball has provided essential texts for a broad public to understand very complex scientific developments or to give historical and scientific evidence to stories that, without empirical knowledge supporting them, seem to be the product of magic, or divine intervention. Thus, in Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, he tells how pictorial art developed being highly dependent on discoveries related to mounts, pigments, and fixatives, and in Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, he makes big data sciences understandable to common readers through a clear language. But one of his most important books—because of its capacity to explain something that is always part of everyone’s life, even of those who cannot hear—is The Musical Instinct. Here the author demonstrates, with the same lucidity and accessible speech, that there are no people or cultures alien to music, that no matter it may seem that there are individuals whose talent for this art sets them apart from the rest, makes them different, or perhaps better, it is an ability that no one lacks. We may not be able to create it, but we all can experience and enjoy music.

The message that this issue of UNAM International wants to sing from the rooftops is: we are music; music is part of what Humanity means; it is identity, hope, beauty, and exploration; it is creation and recreation, it is the human spirit speaking for us, singing with us.

Where did such unlimited talent come from? Do we share it with birds or whales? Is a song the origin of human language? (Did we sing before being we spoke?) Throughout the pages of this issue, we will witness numerous incarnations of music and what it encompasses, especially in our university and international environment. We will become acquainted with a literary hypothesis about the origin of music in the short story by Nacho Docavo Alberti, who speculates around the archaeological discovery of the oldest flute. We will visit New Orleans when it was the continent’s greatest cultural melting pot at the end of the 19^th century, accompanied by two Mexican orchestras that added some ingredients (genres and instrumentation) into that pot in which—no one knew at the time—jazz was being cooked. Elsa Aguilar Funes’s takes us to the northern Mexican Region of La Laguna to recognize how intensely feelings are expressed in cardenche singing. A group of young women researchers will speak to us frankly and bluntly about women’s place among popular genres identified as urban in which women are systematically subjected to violence exerted by patriarchy inserted in this music’s soul—reggaeton, heavy metal, and corrido tumbado. On her side, the coordinator of the Permanent Seminar on Music and Gender of UNAM’s Faculty of Music (FaM), Maby Muñoz, takes this reflection to an arena in which gender equality is still a distant goal: academic music, especially in the creation and conducting roles.

UNAM China sends news that bring back to life a five-centuries old route connecting Mexico with the Far East. We will ride the “Fandango Road” following that of silk and the old Manila Galleon in this long history of collaboration, crowned by a Mexican guitar that plays Chinese music.

Both the FaM and UNAM’s Music Directorate have a central place in this issue. Their relentless and diverse activity demonstrates how important music is to us, both as creation and as disseminated culture. An interview with Gabriela Ortiz, the Mexican woman composer with the greatest international presence in our history, UNAM’s graduate and teacher, lets us see how far the importance of our sound arts reaches. We will see the process that music has lived as an academic subject at UNAM, starting with early approaches and arriving to the consolidation of the FaM. José Wolffer, at the end of his management as head of UNAM’s Music Directorate, looks back on its achievements and searches: how popular and academic genres coexist, the effort to generate spaces of visibility for the work of women musicians, as well as for music originating outside the hegemonic sphere: the road to an authentic global diversity of music.

To reinforce music’s unavoidable presence among us, we have the testimonies of leading academics in their disciplines who, besides, also make music; linguist Erika Erdely Ruiz says of herself (and of others, as Pepe Franco, astronomer and rock bassist, also interviewed) that she leads two lives or inhabits two different worlds at the same time.

Reading about music informs, moves our curiosity, shows us the backstage of what may be humanity’s most complete aesthetic expression, but it doesn’t make us dance or sing, nor it fills our bodies with that which music brings and cannot be translated into words. So almost every article in this issue of UNAM Internacional includes a hearing proposal, a playlist carefully curated by the editorial team so that we can hear what we read about. In these playlists we have chosen to use links to freely available material.

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