Miguel Cantilo’s “La marcha de la bronca”: old and new unquiet songs

Abstract

In this study, we deal with the history of the musician Miguel Cantilo, leader of the Argentine rock, who built a musical career with intermittent periods of joint performance with Jorge Durietz, forming the duo Pedro y Pablo. It is also detached his performance alongside the musicians of La Cofradía de la Flor Solar. His well-known compositions are “Yo vivo en esta ciudad” (1969), “Catalina Bahia” (1971) or “La marcha de la bronca” (1970), the latter giving title to this text, was transformed into a sort of the seventies political anthem, winning the Second Festival de la Música Beat. Miguel Cantilo, besides being one of the Argentine rock forerunners, is also building a memory of the period through literature. The persecution of his musical work and the lack of perspectives led him into exile in Colombia and Spain, which allows us to expand our analytic focus beyond the national context in which it was inserted. Finally, it is analyzed here the route trodden by the musician and the aesthetic and political choices that gave substance to his repertoire.