Music and armed conflict: representations of identity, memory and resistance in the musical compilation “tocó cantar: una travesía contra el olvido”

Abstract

The main purpose of this research was to analyze the representations of identity, memory and resistance present in the 2015 musical compilation of forty-five songs titled Tocó cantar: una travesía contra el olvido, produced by the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica and thus explore the complexity of the relationship between music and the armed conflict. Through an analysis of discourse — based on the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce — the construction of meaning generated by the relationship between the lyrics and the non verbal sound materials of the songs was studied. The cultural dimension of the compilation was incorporated into the research through forty-five interviews conducted with people involved in the preproduction, production and dissemination of the compilation. Finally, the reception of the compilation and the relationship between its visual dimension (booklet) and sound were researched in two focus groups. It was concluded that the representations of identity, memory and resistance derived from the compilation are diverse and in some cases complicate the simplifications promoted by the disseminated discourses about the armed conflict. Furthermore, the relationship between thelyrics, non-verbal sound and the visual dimension are essential to build meanings and for the representations of memory, identity and resistance. Therefore, and contrary to the suggestion made when the call for compilation first went out and to what similar researches (which focused on analyzing the lyrics and the political, cultural and historical dimensions in which the songs take place) propose, the nonverbal sound dimension plays a fundamental role in the construction of meaning and its reception.