My former professor at the University of Buenos Aires, Dr.  Ernesto Epstein
(1910-1996) was a pupil of Curt Sachs and Erich von Hornbostel at Berlin.
He was a funny old man, and a great lover of musical humor.  He told me
once a couple anecdotes of the Argentinian musical life at the times of
Peron (1945-1956).  Those anecdotes were told to him by Teodoro Fuchs
(theorist and orchestral conductor) and were reproduced at Epstein's book
"Memorias Musicales" (Buenos Aires, Emece 1995 pp 36-37):

* There were a couple vacancies at the Tucuman Symphony Orchestra, and
then the Ministry of Culture decided to organize a contest to cover them.
The official document called to a contest for "a violin, a flute, and an
english horn".  Before stamp his signature on the document, the Secretary
of Culture added of his own hand the following requisite:  "the horn must
be Argentine".

* Once, during a classical music broadcast, the presentation of the works
was commisioned to a young employee of the station, without any experience
in this kind of music:

   "Now we're going to hear Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Piano
   Concerto...hmm...  Kilometer 488."

My father told me this ancdote, more or less from the same times:

* The Cordoba Symphony Orchestra was performing Beethoven's "Leonore III"
Ouverture at a theater.  There was a trumpetist at the backstage, waiting
for the conductor's signal in order to begin his solo.  A couple seconds
before the signal, an alarmed security guard stopped the trumpetist:  "sir,
what are you doing?, don't you see that there's a concert at the hall?, get
out inmediately!!!".  The poor musician tried to explain to the guard the
complexities of that Beethoven's work.  Later he had to explain to the
conductor why didn't he play a single note of his solo.

Pablo Massa
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