Mujeres y Niños
*Women and Children"
Inca Spirit concert
Boca Raton Museum of Art
"Machu Pichu and the Golden Empires of Peru."
"Machu Pichu and the Golden Empires of Peru."
Inca Spirit music fusion inspired by Juan Jorge Laura Quisbert's song "Mujeres y Niños". Originally performed by Llapaku. Musique des Andes in France.
In this concert, I performed with different wind instruments. At the beginning of the melody, I used a bass siku. (panpipe) The bipolar pan flute is called a siku[1]. It is designed to be played by two people. Not one person. It's an ancient tradition to perform in troops of several musicians each holding half of the instrument and weaving the sounds with the other musicians. For the second part of the melody, I played a small siku one octave higher. I changed to a large, notched bamboo Quena[2] flute also called Quenacho or mama quena. The Quena is in the key of RE I improvised sounds emulating the blues to add a fusion feeling to the performance. This Quena is an ancient instrument[3] that evokes different feelings in the listeners and has a connection to the spirituality found in Japanese Shakuhachi notched bamboo flutes. It brings the opportunity to modulate long notes and make aerial sounds in addition to staccatos and ligatures.
The mystique of the Quena goes back thousands of years. A legend talks about a man who loses his lover and while she decayed, he carved a bone flute from her femur, to bring her voice back again to life. Juana Manuela Gorriti [4] retells the story. She makes the event very similar to another legend about the Quena played inside a large cylindrical egg shape ceramic. called the legend of the Manchaypuito.[5]
While producing and editing the final video I used scenes from a film I made in Machu Pichu during the rainy season. This added an ambiance sound of wind, echo, and rain sounds to the concert. Since the name of the exhibition at Boca Raton Museum was Machu Pichu I wanted to have a feeling of the citadel.
[1] Valencia Chacón, Américo. El sikú Bipolar Altiplánico, Volumen1. Editorial A. Valencia Chacón, Lima, Perú. 1983.
[2] de la Cuadra, Patricio. Balosso-Bardin, Cassandre. Vauthrin, Camille. Fabre, Benoit. OPTIMIZED REDESING OF THE QUENA. Sorbonne Universités, Chaire GeAcMus, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. University of Paris. France, 2016.
[3] D’Harcourt, Raoul and Marguerite. La Musique Des Incas, Et ses Survivances. Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner. Paris, 1925
[4] Gorriti, Juana Manuela. Sueños y Realidades: Volumen 1. Pp/84-87. Imprenta y estereotipia. Biblioteca de la Nación. 1907. Buenos Aires.
[5] Leguia y Martinez, Germán. El Manchay-puito (infierno Aterrador): Leyenda Dramática En Tres Actos, Original Y En Verso. Edición en Español Wentworth Press. Sidney, Australia 2018.