Instruments of time: music and History in the Andes

of Bolivia
BY

LUIS A. GMEZ

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 Geertzs definition of culture: the structure of
meaning through which people give shape to their experiences1.
So, when it comes to traditions and folklore were 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 model 2.
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 Zepedaa 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.
Zepedas 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. Zepedas work became mainstream and everybody listened,
the indigenous included.
Its my opinion that the most relevant outcomes from Zepedas 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 singingmusic 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 Im 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 soundsusing 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 its theirs: their roots, their languages, their
instruments, their life...and they are proud of it.
Audio: Kjarkas, El ltimo amanecer (El lder de los humildes, 2000).
Before I speak about instruments in Andean Bolivia, I want to briefly
state something that Ive discovered as a continuum within all the
indigenous musical expressions in Latin America Ive been in contact
with from Mexico to Argentina: their spirit is the same, its the spirit of
History. It doesnt 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 Zampoa, 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 moceo, 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 others place for a week,
learned about their daily lives, instruments, souls. After that, they
locked themselves in Montenegros 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 peoples
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
cant 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.