In April 1958, a very significant Inter-American Music Festival took place in Washington, D. C. Perfectly planned and effectively carried out, the Festival included the best and most representative contemporary serious music from Latin-America. The several concerts that took place, presenting a wide range and varied quality of music, exposed the North American public and critics, for the first time, to a massive dose of the type of music that actually forms the core of the serious musical speech of the countries of the Southern part of our Hemisphere. If it is true that in the last twenty years names such as Chávez or Villa-Lobos — and more recently that of Alberto Ginastera — have become known to the public of the United States and Europe, and that various music Festivals such as those of Caracas and Montevideo have permitted a cross-section of North American music critics to face a larger volume of Latin-American music, it is also true that in the case of the three above mentioned composers — all of them individual advocates of strong personality, though sometimes their best known and heard music belonged to the minor species — a limited and isolated impression of what was happening musically in the rest of Latin America was created.