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One of the most famous tunes ever has also been one of the most peripatetic. Written in 1888 by an Otomí Indian named Juventino Rosas (1868-94) who lived not far from Mexico City, the waltz "Sobre las olas" ("Over the Waves") soon made its way to North America and beyond, reverberating in the great airy spaces of the circus, fairground, skating rink, dance hall, and park. Recycled in cartoons and films beginning in the 1930s, in television a few decades later, and in various cover versions over its history, Rosas's waltz has become a kind of popular liminal music. Moreover, its ubiquity and the complex, circuitous ways in which it has been reactivated decade by decade has resulted in a musical convention of substantial proportions. This essay will attempt to lay bare the mechanisms at work in the dissemination of such a widely known piece of music.
A cursory look at a few adaptations of Rosas's waltz suggests the difficulties for the scholar in attempting to define precisely what "Sobre las olas" has meant, and continues to mean, to its listeners. Consider two recordings of "Sobre las olas" made within two years of each other by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians (1949) and Mario Lanza (1951) titled, respectively, the "Merry-Go-Round Waltz" and "The Loveliest Night of the Year." Not only do the two performances vary considerably in style, orchestration, and vocal delivery, but their respective themes range from nostalgia for the fairground carousel to a timeless, intense evocation of the sensation of love. Also during the 1940s and 1950s, "Sobre las olas" was heard in animated cartoons as a single eight-measure musical quote paired with a mischievous ice-skating flea ( An Itch in Time , 1943) and as a bird-hunting cat running across a set of electric trolley lines (Canary Row , 1950). Example 1 gives the first eight bars of the melody.
Example 1 . Juventino Rosas, melody of "Sobre las olas," mm. 1-8.
[Image omitted. See Article Image.]
[Image omitted. See Article Image.]
[Image omitted. See Article Image.]
One takes strange comfort in David Bordwell's assertion that "the humanities have not yet solved the problem of how to understand conventions." The "problem" of "Sobre las olas" thus evinces a need...