From traditional to popular: the Construction of Bambuco and

Currulao in Colombian Music1

Oscar Hernández Salgar

Abstract: During 19th and 20th centuries, bambuco was the most representative genre of
the mestizo nation that was built in Colombia as part of a centralist political agenda. The
privileged presence of bambuco was given at the same time with several processes of
urbanization and mediation that allow us to denominate it as a popular genre (at least
for the first half of the 20th century). However, at the same time, currulao – a music with
rhythmic and melodic patterns very similar to those of bambuco, and a genre that is
almost exclusively performed by negro populations from the Pacific Coast – was kept
clearly apart from Colombian music mainstream. Since the 70´s, bambuco was replaced
by musical styles from the Atlantic Coast in its role as primary representative of the
musical nation. On the other hand, since 1997, currulao has reemerged in the media as
part of a movement that makes efforts to internationalize the music from the Pacific
Coast. In this paper, I will try to show how the popularization and the historical
construction of bambuco and currulao has been determined by complex global/local
relations. I intend to explain that some of the changes in Colombian local music can be
understood as a new way to perpetuate colonial relations of power. The difference is that
nowadays, the asymmetry of those relations is being silenced by global discourses such
as multiculturalism, immaterial heritage and world music.

What are the boundaries that differentiate traditional and popular music? There has been
a lot of discussion about this issue in Latin America, and the regular answer is that, in our
countries, musical genres move extremely fast between these categories, making
impossible to define any conclusive criteria. However, the most commonly used
definition says that popular musics are massive, urban and mediated. This paper deals
with two types or genres of Colombian music that are paradigmatic of these movements
between popular and traditional, and it shows that words as massive, urban and mediated
are not always enough to explain why we call a certain type of music “popular”. On the
other hand some people could say that this kind of discussions are useless and exist only
to justify a scholar’s salary. However, traditional musicians have many things to say
about how the use of one term of another may have serious repercussions on the income
of a family or a community. Beyond things like the origins of a music, or its formal
aspects, the traditional or popular nature of a musical genre is related to the construction
of cultural identities, and this construction is determined by three main elements: 1. What
we do with the music, 2. What we say about it, and 3. What it sounds like.

Bambuco is a rural, tri-ethnic influenced genre, generally transcribed in ¾ or 6/8, that

was built as the purest representation of the national musical soul in Colombia during
19th and 20th centuries. In the last decades, it has been substituted in this role by musics
from the Atlantic Coast (Wade, 2002). But, for many years, this genre was one of the

1
This paper was presented at the 14th IASPM conference in Mexico city, july 2007
most truly popular expressions of Colombian music, and contributed to the creation of a
national, mestizo identity, leaving concrete long-term effects on Colombian society.

On the other hand, Currulao is a genre with rhythmic and melodic features very similar to
those of bambuco (in fact, it probably has the same origin). The most visible difference is
that Currulao has been played almost exclusively in one of the poorest regions of
Colombia: The Pacific Coast, which is populated mainly by afro-Colombian people. In
the last ten years this genre has reemerged due to the invention of the Festival Petronio
Alvarez de Música del Pacífico, and has become a very distinctive type of music for the
creation of a black immigrant identity in the city of Cali. The central question of this
presentation is: How have these two genres moved between traditional and popular, and
how this process has influenced their ability to create cultural identities? In order to
answer this question I am going to say a few words on the relation between music and
identity.

The creation of identities is one of the most debated subjects of the last decades. The
concept of identity has been systematically deconstructed from several theoretical
approaches, but, according to Stuart Hall, it is still a key concept to understand the
possibility of agency of an individual that has been de-centered by discourses such as
structuralism (Hall, 2003:13-15). In order to re-think identity, it is necessary to avoid the
essentialisms that have been traditionally related to the concept. Hall takes some key
ideas from authors like Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau and Judith Butler, and says that
identity is a permanent, never ending process by which an individual adheres or
articulates to some idealistic images of himself (that have been produced through the
exclusion of other images), and reaffirms this articulation (with an ideal self), in order to
make it appear as a concrete reality in the surface of his own body (even though identity
is never fully completed).

Now, Simon Frith says that music is also a ritual that helps to articulate group identities
(Frith 2003: 186). In other words, music allows us to perform (to act) an ideal identity,
giving us the chance to fully experience the ideal image with which we would like to
identify. On the other hand, Pablo Vila includes Narrative theory in all this discussion
and says that this articulation is always contrasted against the plot that the individual has
created by selecting certain elements of his personal story (Vila 2001:36-38). The
correspondence between musical materials and certain aspects of the personality is a
semiotic construction that is determined in a great extent by the musical experience of
each person.

Summarizing, it is possible to say that the way we experience the music (and what we do
with it), the discourses about it, and the very musical sound (what we use to call “the
strictly musical”) are necessary elements in the construction of cultural identities, and
have a big influence in the criteria we use to call a music “traditional” or “popular”.

There has been a lot of discussion about how bambuco was used in the search for a
mestizo Colombian identity in the last years of 19th century. But there are only a few
analysis about the decrease in its consumption in the last 30 years. This decrease has
taken place after the fixation of the genre as a national symbol. Bambuco has been
moving away from people’s daily life towards becoming some kind of exhibition piece. It
is easy to observe that in those regions where this genre was created, bambuco is no
longer sung or danced spontaneously. It is only visible on a stage, in special celebrations
where national identity needs to be displayed.

But, what happens when a certain music has been created for a party context or any other
social function? What happens when rhythmic patterns have been developed to make the
body move? The experience of bambuco has clearly changed radically since it has moved
away from the private sphere and has been confined to the stage, to the public exhibition.
As a result, it is no longer perceived as popular music. On the contrary, it has become a
part of the national immaterial heritage, with all the limitations it implies.

This shift in the experience of bambuco is preceded by a series of discourses that were
meant to protect traditional expressions against foreign influences. Thus, there is an
interesting movement from a colonial discourse that marked indigenous and black musics
as primitive and even immoral, to a glorification of the national soul represented by
bambuco and other genres that were whitened by the dominant classes. This change
transformed the traditional musics into something valuable. But the same process also
transformed the different types of bambuco in a single static, homogeneous symbol. In
early 19th century, bambuco was clearly a living rural music. In the first half of the 20th
century it became a highly mediated genre. And for the last three decades it has been
converted into a frozen, though emblematic, tradition.

In Colombia, just like in any other Latin American country, the “festivales” are the sacred
temples where tradition is protected and saved. That is why in the Festival Mono Núñez –
the most important festival of Andean Colombian music – the appearance of new timbres
and harmonies in 1997 divided the jury in those who appreciated these changes as a
normal evolution, and those who wondered if these “experiments” had something
valuable to offer to “our national identity” (Gartner, 1998). This change from the ritual to
the exhibitional value of the music has produced an enormous display of virtuosism in
performances, compositions and timbre combinations. There is a shift in musical
materials that apparently seeks to get away form the “pure traditions” in order to get the
music closer to urban, modern listeners: use of electronic or symphonic instruments, non
triadic harmonies, complex textures and experimentations with the forms and the
rhythms. All these transformations have resulted in a movement called “Nueva música
colombiana” (New Colombian music), whose sound can not be easily classified as
“traditional” or “popular”. This is more like a concert, jazz influenced type of music
produced for a urban elite.

The changes in how we experience the music, the changes in the discourses about it, and
the changes in musical materials, allow us to observe the same kind of double-sided
effect that Steven Feld calls “schismogenesis” (1995) and Ana María Ochoa explains in a
different way in her book “Músicas locales en tiempos de globalización” (2003). On one
hand, transformations help to keep traditional music alive in spite of the growing pressure
and influence of global capitalism. On the other, sooner or later these changes integrate
traditional music to global market economy of which it was not meant to be a part. This
paradoxical situation is the very essence of discourses such as multiculturalism and world
music, that are supposed to rescue and encourage cultural diversity but, in doing so, also
include an endless variety of manifestations in one single category: the Other, the
minoritary, the exotic. Obviously, this helps to reinforce the hegemony of global music
industry.

Colombian Pacific Coast is one of the most humid, rainy and biodiverse regions on earth.
During 18th and 19th centuries there was a permanent activity of gold extraction. Since the
abolition of slavery in 1851 the region suffered a rapid economic decadence and the
former slaves moved into the lowlands, where they still live, in a relative and sometimes
forced isolation from the rest of the country. The most representative music from the
southern Pacific Coast is the one that is played with the instruments of the Marimba
ensemble: two conic drums called “cununos”, two cylindrical drums with double
membrane called “bombos”, several cylindrical idiophones called “guasás” and one
marimba made of chonta wood. Besides these instruments, there is one leading voice and
a choir of “respondedoras”. The most representative genre played by this ensemble is
Currulao. The tuning of the traditional marimba follows a diatonic pattern but, because of
the construction techniques the pitches are quite “irregular”. Very often, the marimba
plays a minor third over the tonic while the choir sings a major third or vice versa. Just
recently, some urban marimba players have begun to build their own tempered marimbas.

For many years, the music of the marimba ensemble was practically unknown for the vast
majority of Colombian people. It appeared described in some texts as a representative
element of the southern Pacific folklore, but it was generally perceived (and it is today),
as a primitive, marginal form of music.

It was only ten years ago, in 1997, that Festival Petronio Alvarez was created with the
aim of preserve the musical heritage of Pacific Coast. But, from the first version of this
festival, it was clear that other objectives included the exploitation of this music in order
to renew the repertoire of salsa bands, as well as the promotion of tourism in the region.
As a result, in the last decade there have been several modifications in the experience of
the music, the discourses about it, and the musical materials. These changes are part of a
bigger effort to “popularize” traditional genres of this music, like currulao. However, it is
not a simple task to resignify the colonial imaginaries that have marked this music.
According to several informants, the presence of currulao in the daily life of small towns
like Guapi or Timbiquí, has decreased dramatically in the last thirty years. Radio stations
broadcast mainly vallenato, salsa, reggaeton and other urban genres that are promoted by
music industry. On the other hand, in the city of Cali – known in Colombia as the capital
of salsa – currulao has been embraced by the immigrants from the Pacific coast as the
perfect way to recreate and express their black identity.

The construction of currulao as a powerful symbol is also part of a bigger change in the
discourses about black identities that has been taking place since the promulgation of a
multicultural constitution in 1991. Before this, black people were seen as inferior,
primitive, and even dangerous. But the new constitution has contributed to the perception
of black people as, for example, the true guardians of biodiversity (Aristizábal, 2005). In
the same way, traditional music is now seen as a tool to generate peace in a context of
war, violence and death. This is evident in the lyrics of the inedited songs that
participants are required to include in their repertoire. Traditional lyrics, those that were
created for rural daily life, used to talk about simple things and were easily
interchangeable, like medieval contrafacta. On the contrary, the new inedited lyrics are
carefully written and the majority of them are about peace, in a general sense. Michael
Birenbaum says that these superficial, abstract mentions of peace in a rather violent
context, demonstrate that the scenification of this music is a way to silence the
differences and cultural conflicts that are very common in the region. (Birenbaum, 2006).
But this use of lyrics also shows a strong desire to resignify the colonial imaginaries
about black people, through the ritual performance of a peaceful community.

Finally, the festival has brought substantial modifications to the very sound of music.
Some of the most relevant changes are the use of non traditional instruments such as
electric bass, modern drums, and brass winds, the absence of “bordonero” (a second
marimba player who used to play an ostinato in the lower register), the introduction of
improvisational sections in the marimba, and the delimitation of what used to be an open,
flexible form.

Just as in the case of Festival Mono Núñez, these changes are motivated in a great extent
by the fact that contestants are required to show their best abilities on a stage. For some
musicians, these modifications are progressively destroying the musical heritage. But for
many others, these changes are the only way to keep marimba music alive. In this
situation one could observe that global capitalism has a strong tendency to industrially
process cultural particularities and convert them into souvenirs for the tourists. Musicians
feel proud of their purest traditions, but use important modifications in sound, in order to
make music more familiar to urban listeners, more “popular”. At the same time,
traditional musics that don’t adapt are condemned to a progressive freezing, sponsored by
the State. Given this relation, an excess of mediation may threaten the identity aspect of
traditional music, but an excess of identity can make more difficult the assimilation of
this music by a massive, urban audience. Just in the same way that colonized people tend
to assimilate the colonizer’s way of thinking as their own – and this is the very essence of
coloniality´s epistemic violence – traditional musicians learn and assimilate the rules of
the game that are decided by global industry. These are more or less the same rules that
have been being established for centuries as a part of what we call modernity. In this
sense it is possible to say that these power relations between local and global instances
are a postcolonial phenomenon, because they constitute the postmodern version of
colonial power relations.

Now, the question is: are there still any ways to experience traditions without getting
caught in the same discourse regime that regulates and limitates them? Are there any
forms of resistance actually taking place?

For several years the participants at the festival have stayed in a group of hotels in Cali’s
center among which is Hotel Los Reyes. Traditionally, during festival days, the groups
rehearse at the hotel, and very often these rehearsals result in parties that last more than
three days, non stop. However, in the eighth version of Petronio, many white people who
were neither participants nor listeners at the festival, got into one of this parties to use
drugs and drink alcohol, creating a complete chaos in the hotel. For black participants this
was simply a non acceptable behavior, but anyway, the whole situation led the organizers
to forbid rehearsals in the hotel at night hours. It is interesting that the same organization
that was meant to promote the peaceful value of this music, was also led to limitate
traditional manifestations to the stage, reducing the possibilities for its use in daily life
contexts. One could criticize the festival saying that these conditions are unacceptable
and absolutely not fair for traditional musicians, but at the same time, none of these
spontaneous manifestations would have occurred if it wasn’t for the festival’s existence.

Very often, the more authentic side of Colombian festivals of traditional music is not on
the stage, but gets a space in the streets and the houses around the festival, where people
meet to play music, dance, and share their traditions without following a schedule. I think
this is where the possibility of a resistance finds its place. Because it is in this kind of
situations where the rigid schemes we have inherited from Euro centered world are
openly contested and interrogated. It is precisely in this kind of situations were the
difference between traditional and popular becomes irrelevant, since it is no more than a
western, modern invention, and it is here where one can really feel that music has been
always a lot more than just music.

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Fragmentos de canciones del grupo Bahía están disponibles en:

http://www.lablaa.org/blaavirtual/musica/blaaaudio2/cdm/bahia/indice.htm