Instruments of time: music and History in the Andes of Bolivia

BY LUIS A. GÓMEZ

To begin with, these brief notes on what indigenous music and instruments are today in the
region of the world I come from, I would like to adhere to Clifford Geertz’s definition of
culture: “the structure of meaning through which people give shape to their experiences”1.
So, when it comes to traditions and folklore we’re talking about the products, rituals and
relations that keep that structure alive. But, as in our brain structure (roughly, a tight net of
cells separated in two major bodies interconnected by what, maybe, is a super “bridge” of
knowledge), no single element of a culture can exist alone, isolated of that web of relations that
provides meaning (that is, life) to its being.
Recently Sean A. Pager, a profesor at Michigan State University, stated two general models in
dealing with what is called folklore (the sensible expressions of peoples): a presevation model
and an innvation model2. He discusses how both ways have different approaches to intellectual
property rights. The preservation model deals with purity and an “original” state of things that
seems to be a-historical. Arts, people and traditions become objects then, to be studied,
isolated and, in time, traded; the alienation of people and the commodification of their cultural
richness are inevitable in this reification process.
On the other hand the innovative model, that Sager subcribes to using Nollywood (the
Nigerian film industry) as an example, is not that far from it. “Given a choice between
promoting innovation versus reifying the past, the normative argument for the former is clear:
a dynamic conception of culture is far more conducive to commercial and cultural
development. Such creativity offers the best hope for the long-term survival of traditional
culture”, Sager states. So, objects of culture (pure or modified) can become commodities and
be preserved.
Today I want to talk to you of something in between these models, avoiding the commercial
part of the phenomenom because the moral and historical reasons to profit from cultural
expressions or not is something I strongly believe is for the bearers of the traditions and
expressions to decide.

II
Preservation of music and instruments of the indigenous peoples in Latin America has walked
different paths over the last 40 years. One notable case would be Antonio Zepeda—a Mexican
ethnomusicologist and composer whose extensive travels around the country in the 80s
resulted in an immense collection of drums, aerophones and many other instruments from the
more than 50 indigenous peoples of Mexico.
Once he gathered such a collection, for at least the next decade Zepeda focused mostly in
dissemination through active conferences in museums and parks, where he would describe the
instruments, the indigenous culture where they originated and then would play them for a few
minutes, first exposing the traditional performing way and then improvising, as a jazz soloist
would do.
Zepeda’s compositions range from progressive rock to orchestal works using all the same
“water drums” or clay whistles. He is, sort of speaking, a living sample of the restoration and
reinvention of traditions in music. But as far as he was not an indigenous artist, his work was
mostly enjoyed and discussed by other peoples than those he learned from.
Then the indigenous themselves came to reclaim their voice around 20 years ago. And while
the politics and the social problems expressed from their point of view emerged with particular
strenght around 1994, all over Mexico revalorization of the original cultures of the soil
blossomed. Zepeda’s work became mainstream and everybody listened, the indigenous
included.
It’s my opinion that the most relevant outcomes from Zepeda’s work are a wider respect for
indigenous music within the Mexican society and a “boomerang” influence on the indigenous
movement that grew stronger in the 90s in Mexico: indigenous youth rediscovered their own
roots, started playing their instruments again or, looping the loop more than once, fusing them
with rock, jazz or more recently hip-hop in their own languages.
Audio: Antonio Zepeda, “Danzando en el Templo Mayor” (Amerindia, 1995).
A similar case would be that of the Andean folk music groups, a modern version of the
Quechua and Aymara millenial music in what today are Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia and
Argentina. Recovering and recreating songs and rythms from the small villages in the Andean
mountains, these groups sprang up in the 60s and 70s, mostly as a reflection of the political
turbulence of the years after the Cuban Revolution and/or the indigenous identity resurgence
that started at the time. In that region of South America, where the indigenous are 60% of the
population or more, there was a massive explosion.
The groups broke with the traditional way of tropas: trouppes of musicians from one
community playing one or two instruments while dancing and singing—music is for them a
collective art, an expression with no audience, just performers. Then it started a definite mix of
Andean and European instruments, mostly guitar or violin, although in South Peru you will
also find the almost extinct pampapiano, a harmonium used before to play sacred music in the
churches and that sounds quite like those you can buy in Kolkata nowadays. You must note
that these new bands started playing for audiences, in radios and theatres, in squares and
stadiums.
Now I’m going to focus on the music produced in the Andean Plateau of Bolivia (my adoptive
country) and the music of the Quechua and the Aymara (my adoptive people).
This shift on the music included the assimilation of new rhythms, styles and genres, and the
recreation of the antique canon of the Aymara of Bolivia and of the Quechua of Peru and
Bolivia. Mostly songs, ballads. The basic ritual intend of the Andean music, related to gods,
sowing, harvests and seasons, made room for new themes, political and social (love of course
is a protagonist). But the most important change was the musicians themselves: they are
increasingly indigenous and not, as they used to be, urban mix blood people or mestizos.
This re-invention brought also a new decadence. With this folk music becoming more and
more popular, commercial and consumed, the production of instruments increased
exponentially but the quality of music decayed. The technologization of their sounds—using
more and more the Western techniques: pastes, amplification, recording studios, etc.—helped
little to develop this form, now in full swing because of the political ambience in Bolivia, but
with no significant advance or sign of growth. At least it’s theirs: their roots, their languages,
their instruments, their life...and they are proud of it.
Audio: Kjarkas, “El último amanecer” (El líder de los humildes, 2000).
Before I speak about instruments in Andean Bolivia, I want to briefly state something that I’ve
discovered as a continuum within all the indigenous musical expressions in Latin America I’ve
been in contact with from Mexico to Argentina: their spirit is the same, it’s the spirit of History.
It doesn’t matter what are they playing (modern or traditional) or what the music is all about,
indigenous peoples use art as a way to tell their collective past, in the long form of the
generations (with creation stories, heroes and wars, for example) or in the short form of
memory (with political changes, new social relations or simple new ways of love). Art is a live
heavy thing for them.

III
Charango is an ukulele, a mandoline created in Colonial times by the Aymara in what today is
South Bolivia (around the 17th century but it had spread through all around South America).
The body of this peculiar instrument was originally made out of the carcass of a small shy
Armadillo from the sand fileds in Oruro: the Quirquincho. Its peculiar acoustics owed much to
the animal and became one of the renown textures of Andean music.
Audio: Ernesto Cavour, “Punteadito” (Folklore, 1966).
Some of the most celebrated folk dances used the head and body of the Quirquincho for their
costumes as well. So when the explosion of Andean music started, the sand fields became a
major source for folk art. Quirquinchos were killed every year by hundreds till they were
almost extinct.
The Bolivian government had to pass environmental laws forbidding the killing of
Quirquinchos and rare birds to make costumes and instruments. But at the same time, the
music had to keep going and intelligent luthiers started working with wooden bodies and
different shapes to preserve the “traditional” Charango sound intact. They succeeded.
Maybe the market established by the Andean explosion of music played a significant part for
this to happen. But the key element was clearly a living people that came out of colonial times
and historical discrimination proud of their culture and language. Today, in La Paz and Oruro
cities you can acquire a marvelous instrument, ready to be plugged and played that sounds
exactly as it is supposed to do. Or more cheap but equally acustic Charangos that young men
and women play in parties, festivals and nigthclubs everywhere in Bolivia.
Same stories can be told on the famous Andean aerophones too, notably the Quena flute and
the Siku (or Zampoña, the Aymara panflute), both made originally from slim strong canes.
When folklore became trendy everywhere in the world (around the 70s), again the massive
production of instruments possed a problem to environment and “traditional” instruments
became very expensive (they still are). At present people developed techniques to built quenas
from wood and even plastic (a slim pipe of PVC can do the job if properly tried).
Tarka and moceño, both major aerophones in the Andes, are carved out of two very special
trees, the Tarko and the Tuquru. The thick resistant wood of both give the flutes a special
sound texture. But yet again, the fabrication of instruments put the plants at risk so people
started working with more common trees. At least one Aymara community in South Bolivia,
where Tarka originated, are working to recover the Tarko tree population while they have also
found substitute woods for their musical instrument, mainly Pines and Cedar.
Modernization and technologization (electrification mostly) have played a role too. Not just to
adjust the instruments to the modern forms of performing but to understand the most ancient
techniques of playing and building musical instruments. Composers and musicians from the
more Western path of life (I mean, from the Classical school) have been working on music the
way Antonio Zepeda did in Mexico, notably Cergio Prudencio whose Native Instruments
Orchestra is a remarkable mix of music styles.
In recent times the National Conservatory of Music in Bolivia have been debating and
researching the Andean aerophones in order to create a Native Instruments Department.
Scholars, musicians and students have had fruitful conversations and interchange sessions with
old maestros from the Aymara and the Quechua peoples. Not only to change the spirit of how
music is perceived and taught in a more formal school...but to even change the notation and of
course the evaluation and other pedagogical processes of music.
The heart and soul of this effort is composer and instrumentalist Alvaro Montenegro Ernst.
Educated in Japan, Spain and USA, Montenegro is an accomplished classical flutist. He also
plays saxophones (the La Paz Big Band is one of his brain childs). But he is mostly a fine
composer and artist, deeply in love with the music from the soil he was born.
Montenegro has been making music within the intersection of the musical styles he had
cultivated. In 2007 he started a project with Qaqachaka scholar and artist Elvira Espejo. The
Qaqachaka are strictly speaking an Aymara people that consider songs the most important
ritual expression: to give birth, graze cattle, build a house or havest a crop, they sing.
Montenegro and Espejo joined their talents to create Sonares Comunes (Common Sounds)
leaving behind them a colonial heritage. Their first album, La Senda/Thaki (the path) is not just
an ensemble of musicians: a hollistic approach reunited six Qaqachaka musicians with six
colleagues from La Paz, who visited each other’s place for a week, learned about their daily
lives, instruments, souls. After that, they locked themselves in Montenegro’s studio and started
creating what is, in my opinion, a new path for tradition and a new way of understanding.
Audio: Alvaro Montenegro/Elvira Espejo, “Qarwiru” (La Senda/Thaki).
Finally, I would like to address the false dichotomy folklore had posed since Valdimir Propp
and some other scholars started analyzing popular culture in the 19th century. Since then the
indigenous or popular stories, songs and paintings became folklorical, crafts and doings of
simple people. Whereas the paintings and music of, say, the European Renaissance or the
Classic Music of India became the highest expressions of art, produced by civilized advanced
societies. Classics are Beethoven or Mozart, or some music in India...in contrast with, say, the
Banam music of the Santal, diminished because of its simpleness and rooted ways.
The inherent racism and discrimination these conceptions imply have created an arbitrary
separation between forms of knowledge and, yes, the value of unequivalent cultures. A Santal
Banam or a Quechua Charango are not a Stradivarius violin, granted...so what? No people’s
history is the same, not sensibility gives birth to same forms of poetry (or even the same
language). Why should any of them copy another one and dissolve into it?
A tradition, an art lacks of meaning (again, of life) without its makers. I can’t imagine
Charangos or Banams or any kind of indigenous music reproduced and alive while their
creators perish gradually under the culture of their (still colonial) oppressors and political
rulers. Or, following Walter Benjamin, in a moment of danger the past shines momentarily.
That danger “affects both the the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat
hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes”. 3
Therefore, again with Bejamin in mind, we must “wrest tradition away from a conformism that
is about to overpower it”. Not just to keep music and instruments alive, for example, but to
inflame new life to the people who created them. If any, folklore has a chance to survive the
apparent implosion of Capital civilization it means a people, a culture, has still some meaning
to produce and share with the rest of us.
If anything, the work of the others (I mean, us) should be to help them ensure that whatever
they do is not just a treasure enclosed in time or a merchandise. What will come from their
hands and voices, from their ancestral cultures, is up to them and we must learn and respect
their ways. Or their music, the sweet voice of their instruments, will be a cry in a limbo...

Kolkata, March of 2015.

1 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Perseus, 1973.

2 Sean A. Pager, “Folklore 2.0: Preservation Through Innovation” in Utah Law Review No. 4 at:
http://www.epubs.utah.edu/index.php/ulr/article/view/951/713 (last visit: March 26th, 2015.
3 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New York: Shocken Books, 1968.