“Hoy es el tiempo que puede ser mañana”: tres hipótesis mesiánicas sobre la Nueva Canción Chilena

Abstract

This article lays the basis for an interpretation of the Chilean New Song from the category of messianism, understood as a path of offering and fulfillment of duty to one’s neighbor. To this end, it engages the Merriam-Rice ethnomusicological model, reviews the literature on the Chilean New Song, and addresses some fundamental notions of messianism, mainly from the theoretical developments of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Enrique Dussel. Finally, the article raises three hypotheses about Chilean New Song: (1) The Chilean New Song is accompanied by a rationality of life, (2) the Chilean New Song shows an idea of hope based on justice and the improvement of the world, and (3) the Chilean New Song has a messianic conception of time. Consequently, it shows how the sacred and the profane in Chilean New Song find their point of convergence in messianism: The religious forms are filled with a political-revolutionary significance, at the same time those forms of social utopia acquire a religious dimension.