The Cultural Biography of a Music Periodical: Boletín Musical (Buenos Aires, 1837)

This chapter offers a "cultural biography" of Boletín Musical, a periodical published in Buenos Aires in 1837, which survives in only one, nearly-complete, copy. Following Appadurai’s and Kopytoff's conceptualisation of the "social life of things", which considers that the meanings of an object are intrinsically related to the different cultural values bestowed on it at specific points in its "biography", I explore the many lives of this periodical, how it has been imagined and construed as it passed through various hands from its original publication until the present. Spanning the Boletín's nearly 180 years of history, this exploration reviews its appearance in the complex political context of the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas; its life as a bibliographic rarity and collectors’ item from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries; its role as an elusive source for the history of Argentine music during the second half of the twentieth century, leading to its facsimile edition at the beginning of the twenty-first; and its recent role in commemorations and performances of Argentine history. Undertaking the cultural biography of a periodical, I propose, helps uncover the multiple regimes of value at play at different historical junctures and allows us to perceive the social and cultural dimensions of the meanings it accrued throughout its history. Thus, the periodical illuminates its context (or, more properly, contexts), rather than the other way round