La Flûte Indienne: The Early History of Andean Folkloric-Popular Music in France and its Impact on Nueva Canción

This article chronicles the early history of Andean folkloric-popular music in France and discusses its impact on the Nueva Canción movement’s emergence in 1960s Chile and reception in post-1973 Europe. I explain that Argentine artists from Buenos Aires introduced highland Andean instruments and genres into Paris’s artistic milieu, where Andean music became associated with leftism well before the arrival of exiled Nueva Canción artists.This article not only documents yet another instance of nonindigenous (mis)representations of Amerindian musical traditions, but also reveals an early moment in the politicization of non-Western music for European mass markets that has been overlooked in World Beat scholarship. I argue that this case study lends credence to Thomas Turino’s general observation (2003) that transnational musical processes usually viewed by scholars as cross-cultural interactions between the local and the global can be often conceptualized more accurately as phenomena occurring within the same cosmopolitan cultural formation. Rounding out this essay are some closing thoughts and a brief postlude.