a tripartite scale (the simplest existing musical scale), which
manages to create a perpetual unique present, without folds,
that allows us to learn the revaluation of silence as the most
noble place to be inhabited.
Folkloric Music: The Human Song
Argentine folkloric music has its roots in the multiplicity
of indigenous cultures that inhabited the territory before the
arrival of the Spaniards. It became a form of hybridization
between diff erent cultures, a mixture or miscegenation of
ancestral, indigenous, African, Creole and European sources.
All these cultures chiseled in a diverse geographic space and
during a long historical time, two new, unique genres were
formed: Tango and Folklore, the music of the city and the
music of the countryside.
Within the Folkloric genres, the Puna indigenous music
is not only characterized by a strong sacred component, in
which the song is performed a cappella or accompanied by
a Caja (simple percussion wood and leader instrument), but
it also includes and embraces the interaction with nature.
Instruments like the naseré, the sereré and the coioc simulate
the song of the birds and provoke the response of these, which
The Cosmic Wheel
The reference to the wheel and the circular is fundamental
in the metaphysics of Argentine folkloric music. The recurrent
as an image of time places us before the cosmic symbol of
Buddhism, before an undoubted oriental resonance in the
Argentine folkloric cosmogony. It is known that, for the
Buddha, the rays of the cosmic wheel are constituted in an
infi nite number, which symbolizes the always renewed human
hopes, yearnings, and longings. The rays are paths of life that
not only crisscross and intersect but also inevitably converge
and are integrated in the whole, absorbed by its immutable
unity. But the Argentine “folkloric karma” has even other
deep notes of similarity with the Buddhist karma. In both, the
destiny is not imposed but consciously accepted. The certainty
that destiny can be modifi ed by human’s desire confi rms that,
with the power of his will, the man can place himself aware
of the action of natural elements in order to face them and
affi rm human´s supremacy against them.
In concordance with the Buddhist stoicism, Leda
Valladares, Argentine researcher, musicologist and singer
(1919-2012) who worked for the recovery and conservation
of the American cultural musical heritage wrote: “Comfort
is the worst drug: it takes the man away from sensitivity, the
heroic dimension, the sense of adventure, poetry and mystery,
it confi nes him to a gentrifi cation, making him rickety (...)
We must return to the countryside and the mountains (Leda
Valladares: her passion for America, 1970, Julio 2, La Gaceta,
p. s.d. L.) The Argentine musicologist, perhaps unwittingly,
reveals in her work part of the Buddhist “creed”: the
dispossession and the song as a way of realization, ephemeral
art as an exercise of contemplation and assumption of the
cosmic order.
It seems a quite challenging task to reveal the alchemical
composition of the Argentine music and that of other regions
of the world, where from long ago, men embraced their land
and have sung this symbiosis. Maybe one day we may be
able to experience and recognize this intuition of the song as
wisdom, the song-trance as revelation, and “then we will want
to be born again in the paradise of song, in Matto Grosso,
in the Calchaquí Valleys, in the Congo or in the Himalayas,
where man meets his terrestrial roots and summarizes human
history in an exhilarating song” (Leda Valladares, The Wild
Substance of the Song, 1973).
* The author is Chair Professor – Western Music Chair /
Goa University, India
41
Among the various ancestral chants that have been
preserved, we can fi nd the Yo ‘Ogoñí (“The dawn”), a
Gom chant (indigenous tribe of the Argentine North)
which was performed daily to sing at dawn evoking
the solar rhythm and its cadences.
are integrated in this way to the musical experience. Among
the various ancestral chants that have been preserved, we can
fi nd the Yo ‘Ogoñí (“The dawn”), a Gom chant (indigenous
tribe of the Argentine North) which was performed daily to
sing at dawn evoking the solar rhythm and its cadences.