From the Puna folkloric lore
to the Himalayan Buddhism
The sacred singers of
the valleys of the Argentine
Northwest, the “vallistos”,
Baguala singers, descend from
the Andean centuries and even
today they can be heard singing
in the Puna hills revealing with
their voices another dimension
of singing: the alignment of
the terrestrial and the sidereal
through the sonorous celebration
of existence. When we listen to them, we land in the deep,
naked and unique America, and discover it. Their singing
speeches are the supreme nakedness, they, with their song
of only three notes, build a sound architecture that leads the
human voice from the abyss to the fi rmament. This “vertical
moan” re-signifi es the hierarchy of the cry and the lament as
sacralities of the initiate (I strongly recommend listening to
the Bagualas of Melania Pérez, Leda Balladares and Mariana
Carrizo, and especially the Bagualas of the “Persecuted
Payador”, the great Atahualpa Yupanqui).
In these “moaning songs” of the man and the women
who inhabit the hills of northwestern Argentina, we can fi nd
the track of many spiritual realities. “Their silence without
content, without technique or purpose and their ability to
be-being, manifests a cosmic wisdom” (Carlos Astrada, The
Gaucho Myth, 1948). It is very interesting that the pantheistic
metaphysics of the Baguala is in intimate communion with
the Buddhist thought of India, which, perhaps inspired by the
same majestic and imposing nature, also searches for ways
of abstraction, meditation and the practice of philosophy as
a way to establish communication with that silence that is
contemplative and creative, typical of the cultures that inhabit
the heights (not only in the singing of the indigenous Baguala
singers of northern Argentina, but also in the intonations of the
monks of the Himalayas). Undoubtedly, the dispersive eff ect
that the power of the imposing nature of the Puna and the
Himalayas -with its immeasurable
immensity- produces on the man
who inhabits it, along with an
inhibitory perplexity, confi rms a
particular meeting point between
these cultures.
It seems that it is in the wild
and naked substance of that
ancestral song that the Argentinian
Bagualas communicates with the
philosophy and silence of the
liturgical songs of the Buddhist
culture of the Himalayas. When
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singing, they both seek to eliminate the space that separates
the self from nature and reality, through a simple, almost
savage exercise. For both, this exercise of wild intonation is
essential to recover the human nature.
The Silence as a Source of Inspiration
The culture of the Andes Mountains has been forged by the
contemplation of the silence of the Puna. Even though today´s
silence seems to be an utopian state in the harsh rhythm of
the contemporary man, silence has always been a constituent
element of human experience which is even more evident
in the ancestral cultures. Perhaps for this reason, both, the
Baguala singing and the intonation of the Buddhist liturgical
songs reveal a “launch” of the human beings into metaphysical
experiences and realities that start from silence and seek to
return to it. Many works of contemporary classical music,
for example, the musical movement called Avant Garde,
led by the American composer John Cage (who professed
a veiled Buddhism in his compositions, such as the work
4.33 which is built only
with silence ..., yes with
The culture of the Andes
silence), reveal that need
to recover the connection
Mountains has been forged
with reality, nature and
by the contemplation of the
pure sound through the
resignifi cation of silence,
silence of the Puna. Even
beyond the classic canons
though today´s silence
of beauty and proportion.
This search for a manifest
seems to be an utopian
“sincere”, “naked” and
state in the harsh rhythm
“stripped” silence is also
of the contemporary man,
present in works of other
renowned composers of
silence has always been
the twentieth century: in
a constituent element of
the naked minimalism
of Philip Glass (with
human experience which is
his opera Satyāgraha
even more evident in the
[Insistence on truth]
based on the life of
ancestral cultures.
Mahatma Gandhi); in
the Aleatoric Music, the
Radical and Sincere Avant-garde style of Karl Stockhausen
(i.e. in his music piece Gesäng der Jünglinge [The song of
the adolescents], which is electronic music); or in the stripped
Micro-polyphony of Gyorgi Ligeti (in his magnifi cent opera
Le Grand Macabre, released in 1978).
The truth is that, although less intellectually developed
than in the works of Cage, Glass, Stockhausen or Ligeti, the
Argentine Baguala also seeks to re-signify the wild human
nakedness archetype against the absurdity of existence. The
Baguala song resembles the eternal echo of the hills, and
that is why, by means of its melodic constitution, is built in