Music in Chile
Authors: Rondón Víctor 
Published: February 2024

In 1520, the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan sighted the southern coast of Chile; in 1538, the Spaniard Diego de Almagro reached the northern desert after crossing the Andean mountains; and in 1540, Pedro de Valdivia (b. 1497–d. 1553), the first governor of Chile, settled in the Mapocho River Valley, where the capital city of Santiago stands today. Exploration and Conquest prefigured some of Chile’s geographic trademarks: seas and southern islands, northern deserts, central valleys and rivers, and the majestic Andes towering over the long strip’s spine. Three centuries of colonial history configured a stratified agrarian society whose inhabitants settled mostly in the central region. Among the most dynamic sectors of the population were the criollos and mestizos, bred from a mixture of Spaniards, Native Americans, and African descendants now lumped under Chilean citizenry. During struggles for Independence (1810–1818), the population barely reached a half a million souls. The Republican period encouraged immigration from Europe: the British, working mostly on commerce, settled around the port city of Valparaíso from the 1820s onward; the Germans, who settled on the southern stretch between Valdivia and Puerto Montt, arrived between 1840 and 1879; and the French, forging commerce and urban culture, arrived in the late nineteenth century. These migrations never surpassed 100,000 persons but had a considerable impact on local developments. Institutions founded during this period include the Universidad de Chile (1842), the Conservatorio Nacional de Música (1850), and the Teatro Municipal (1857), where Italian opera reigned supreme after reaching Chilean cities in earlier decades. Political and military history, however, was turbulent: between 1836 and 1839, Chile entered into a war with the Peru-Bolivian Confederation; this conflict surfaced again between 1879 and 1884 in the so-called War of the Pacific, which ended with Chile’s annexation of territory in the North. The period between 1885 and 1952 was marked by significant migrations from rural to urban areas, especially to cities such as Concepción, Valparaíso, and the capital city of Santiago. Around 1950, with the population estimated at five million, urban dwellers finally surpassed rural inhabitancy. By then the teaching of music had become institutionalized at the Universidad de Chile and was operating at a national level in the areas of training, outreach, and research. In literary circles, and poetry in particular, Gabriela Mistral (Lucía Godoy Alcayaga, b. 1889–d. 1957) was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature, and, during Allende’s Unidad Popular régime, the renowned Pablo Neruda (Neftalí Reyes, b. 1904–d. 1973) received the same recognition. The right-wing military dictatorship (1973–1990) dismantled Chile’s cultural, artistic, and educational infrastructure through the free-market-oriented 1980 Constitution that restricted government support for education and cultural institutions. With the return to democracy in 1990, social inequality carried over into the post-dictatorship period of social reconstruction by the legacy of market-oriented monetarism; its ferment for social unrest led to popular insurrections in the twenty-first century, which resulted in a revision of the Constitution that is still in progress as Chile’s population reaches a total of nearly twenty million inhabitants. This article was translated by Malena Kuss.