Landfillharmonic

Even though a Paraguayan professor had a big influence on my in graduate school, I am pretty certain that Landfillharmonic is the only film I have seen that was set mainly in Paraguay. It is also one of the very best films I have seen about music and about teaching. 

I wrote about this film and its importance in my own teaching and scholarship in Musica: Paraguay, a 2022 post that I wrote for my "main" blog about a year before I started thinking about the Planet Sings. It turns out that the collaboration in that film is an exquisite example of world music as we are using the term in this course. 

Lagniappe

That professor I mentioned was Dr. Diego Abente, who taught the only course on Latin America that I took while working on my master's degree at Miami of Ohio. I later completed my doctoral minor in Latin American Area Studies at Arizona, benefitting greatly from the insights I gained during that one course with Dr. Abente. The short version was that I was arguing for a rather simplistic approach to a complex political ecology situation. He challenged what was essentially transactional thinking on my part, pushing me to dig more deeply into essential context. He went on to serve in Paraguay's government before becoming Professor of Practice of International Affairs at the Elliot School at George Washington University.