"The Invention of Latin American Music covers a great deal of ground and offers a number of important insights for readers interested in the historiography of music research in Latin America. Based on meticulous archival research in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, and the United States, the various case studies included in this book are engrossing in their own right, many of them providing tantalizing leads for future research. The book is also important because of its emphasis on social actors, institutions, and perspectives within the regional context of Latin America, a much-needed complement to other recent research that has tended to privilege the role of US-based individuals and institutions." -- Javier F. Leon, Hispanic American Historical Review "Palomino's study shows how music factored importantly into defining Latin America as a region in the twentieth century . Moving between these different scalar vantage points, Palomino zooms in and out to write a history featuring three-dimensional protagonists engaged in a geographically expansive intellectual and cultural project." -- Elizabeth Schwall, Latin American Research Review "Latin America', Palomino shows, was never a distinctive and coherent song or symphony; it has been a contentious key to play sundry very local and very global cultural trends. Palomino provides the first and best more-than-national account of the lasting background music of the 20th century, whose Latin Americanness was neither in the non-Westernness nor in the uniqueness of its musical scores or lyrics, but in the very struggle to play notes, to sing feelings, this way today, that other way tomorrow, producing thus collective memories which, albeit never wholly Latin American, gradually fulfilled Joaquim Nabuco's old sense of being: 'We are but a drop of water in the ocean.

Let us be cognizant that we are water droplets, but let us also be aware that we are ocean." -- Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Samuel N. Harper Professor of History, The University of Chicago.