Over the past three weeks we have studied many different musical angles in search of a Great Americas Songbook. Today I want to share some of the voices I've been listening to, voices which have resonance in the places from which migrants begin their search for a better place, and the renewed resonance they find in other parts of the world, our world becoming their new world.
These are questions too broad to answer in a mere five minutes, or even the twenty-five minutes we have left with this season of Momentos Musicales, but today I will unpack several singer/songwriters, an example or two, and not only their music but other elements attached.
For instance, there's Natalia Lafourcade, at home in one of Mexico's most beautiful states, Veracruz, from which she hails, but equally at home here in the US and even beyond, in Canada, where she has lived off and on with her father, also a musician.
Natalia sings of “Mi Religión,” or My Religion, not about some organized religion – Catholic, Protestant, etc. Rather, Natalia sings her song as a hymn to love:
“Eres mi religión, mi cielo y mi condena…”(“You are my religion, my heaven and my sentence…”)
All the while her accompaniment speaks in the voice of son jarocho, a style of song from Veracruz, championed and preserved for decades now by the folkloric ensemble, Tlen Huicani.
Another Latin American singer/songwriter, and another Natalia, is Natalia Contesse, born in New Orleans, but her family moved to Chile while Natalia was still quite young. Contesse is not quite so well-travelled as Natalia Lafoucade. Contesse is kept grounded in Chile by her work with Casa Museo Violeta Parra. She was inspired by Chilean folk song traditions, Violeta Parra, and perhaps most importantly by her private studies with ethnomusicologist Margot Loyola.
Contesse explains in an interview with Hannah Elizabeth Snaveley, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside, “My proposal, and I always told her that, that I want to learn this form, this legacy, this heritage, these dimensions to be able to compose new songs. That was always super clear. So that was my exercise, I brought her the songs and showed them to her, played them for her, and she enjoyed them! Because she also saw how new songs, that were also from that world, were appearing.”
Contesse's is a poetic voice in the song “Ay que si, Ai que no”:
“Yesterday when you left
I swore I’d forget about your kisses
I scooped up a handful of dirt
And I put my prayers in it”
One of the traditional ways of extending one's musical reputation has been through touring. I don't know how often Contesse tours, though I do see record of her recently touring in the UK, but no evidence of recent dates in the U.S. You will read statements from some artists who are increasingly reluctant to tour the U.S., partly in protest and I suppose in part fear for their own security. Michelada Fest, a Latin music festival in Chicago, was canceled this year due to visa uncertainty for its main artists. There is also increasing frustration being expressed by tour managers around the world, particularly in Canada and Latin America. Both the artists and their fans suffer from current-day uncertainties.
There were no such barriers when in 1938 Mexican composer and conductor Carlos Chavez conducted a series of concerts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. On one of those concerts he conducted his own Sinfonia India. Let’s end this edition of Momentos Musicales with that music.
