Blog A Musician's Log | The most recent note
Eyes that sound like rattles
Page thirty-four, page thirty-nine, page forty-two... Paragraph after paragraph, I turn the pages of Musical and other sound instruments of the South American Indians, the opera magna by Swedish ethnographer Karl Gustav Izikowitz. Published in 1935, the work is an enormous compendium of American Indigenous organology, based as much on bibliography as on museum artifacts and personal communications.
Blog A Musician's Log | The most recent sketch
The flute buxíxh of the Chiquitano
The Chiquitano are a society indigenous to the lowlands of eastern Bolivia, with a population of between 40,000 and 60,000 individuals (the third largest in the country) distributed among the provinces of Ñuflo de Chaves, Velasco, Sandoval, Germán Busch, Ichilo and Chiquitos (department of Santa Cruz) and Iténez (department of Beni), as well as in three municipalities in the state of Mato Grosso (Brazil). Speakers of the Bésiro language (the fourth most used in Bolivia), they dedicate themselves to agriculture and work on local farms, and keep alive an important part of their identity as a community.
Articles
El erquencho y otros clarinetes idioglóticos
Cuadernos de investigación musical, 17, enero-junio 2023, pp. 150-171.
[From the Spanish abstract] In his 1935 work on musical instruments among the indigenous peoples of South America, Karl Gustav Izikowitz noted the existence of a group of clarinets without fingering holes and idioglottal which he called "the Southern type." Curiously, he did not include in his list one of the few (if not the only) current survivors of that organological family: the erque or erquencho, an aerophone built and played in northwestern Argentina and southern Bolivia. Of relatively simple structure, it produces a sound hoarse, squeaky and gangly, in a limited range of notes, which does not prevent it from being very popular in its area of origin. Unfortunately, outside it is, even today, quite unknown. The article offers a review of the main characteristics of an almost lost family, and of a sound artifact almost invisible and scarcely performed outside its more traditional contexts.
All articles [in Spanish]
Books and other publications
Yanawan yuraqwan
Andean musical instruments in black and white
Bogotá: Wayrachaki Editora, 2021.
Photo album with 15 black and white images accompanied by brief descriptions, introducing some of the most interesting traditional Andean musical instruments: quenas, pusi p'ias, sikus, toyos, rondadores, ocarinas, charangos, pingullos, pinkillos, waka pinkillos, waylla qhepas and wank'aras.