Constanza Toledo is a predoctoral assistant at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. She earned her Master of Arts in Musicology from Leipzig University and her Bachelor of Music in Performance (Violin) from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. During her master's studies, she completed an Erasmus+ semester at the University of Vienna and received the Chile Crea Scholarship from Chile's Ministry of Cultures, Arts, and Heritage. She led two phases of a research project funded by the same ministry that consisted of creating a digital map of the art music scene in Chile during and after the dictatorship titled “Sound Spaces: A Digital Cartography of Art Music Activity in Chile Between 1973 and 2007.” Currently, she is leading a third state-funded research project in which children from two rural schools in central and southern Chile will create soundscape cartographic models as an exploratory, ethnographic approach to their local environments.

toledo@mdw.ac.at
 

Locating art music in exile: tracing Chilean music activity in the DACH region during Chile’s dictatorship (1973-1990)

The aim of this dissertation project is to analyse the musical exchange and international cooperation between Chile and the DACH region in the context of art music during the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990), with a focus on identifying the places in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where events by Chilean art music performers, composers and other actors took place. In this way, the following project aims to investigate the impact and contributions of Chilean musical activities in this region and to highlight the role of European cultural institutions and independent communities during the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. The approach and methodology of this study is essentially interdisciplinary, combining methods of historical musicology (archival work) and ethnomusicology (oral history) and collecting data in a digital cartographic model that allows new analytic approaches to revise the collected data. As the project is embedded in the context of the Chilean military dictatorship and investigates the musical flows that emerged through the exile and self-exile of the Chilean art music diaspora, this project addresses questions of memory studies and contributes to its exploration from a musicological perspective. As cultural exchange is a central theme of this study, immigration and global mobility are also addressed.