PONCE
Mestizo Music: a Political Topography of Diachronic Times
Inscribing my mestiza aural experience of Yangana and Prender el Alma
Isadora Gabriela Ponce Berrú
Thesis rMA Cultural Analysis
Faculty of Humanities
Supervisor: Dr. Joost de Blois
Second reader: Dr. Barbara Titus
August 2018
PONCE 1
Table of Contents
Introduction 2
Part „A‟: Listening bodie„s‟: sounding place„s‟ 14
i. Geographical sounds: music and space 15
ii. Sounds as bricks: music as de-territorial/re-territorial practice 22
A new Placeness territory 25
Part „B‟: Listening rhythm„s‟: sounding time„s‟ 40
i. Ritual and festival sounds 44
ii. Resounding the historical fracture: a dichotomic ear 48
iii. Fracturing the habitus: restoring new times. From the ritual and festive time
to the aesthetization of life 55
Final Coda: Political assemblages 67
Bibliography 76
PONCE 2
Introduction
“Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.” Gilles Deleuze
“El sur como una insurrección de sabidurías subyugadas…como historia, como el hallazgo de nuevos paradigmas políticos…como conversaciones entre civilizaciones, el sur como nuevos universalismos, nuevas interpretaciones, nuevos significados, nuevos imaginarios, nuevos amarres…” Corinne Kumar
Although this thesis does not respond to a linear argument and its components are interrelated, my encounter with what I will call mestizo Ecuadorian music – the object of inquiry – has a chronological history. The first time I listened to it was in 2012, inside a small concert hall where “Mancero Trio” was performing their new album Yangana. During the hour-long concert, I felt that performance and performativity became one for those musicians and I was caught in the materiality of the sounds; my fragmented mestiza subjectivity was loudly resonating in the music, this time, without any hierarchies and power relations among its voices. Somehow I was confounded by them. I felt they were screaming to be heard and I surrendered to them in a way I cannot explain. My vulnerability emerged with theirs and my sense of self felt changed. I was undone by the music. Yangana traversed the independent space of the small and obscure hall to filter into other social institutions of my body. Its affective power acted upon me in various forms: making me move, dance, remember and dislocate from my „here and now‟ to another space where my cultural memory felt simultaneously uncanny and familiar. I projected myself in all those voices, places, and temporalities rendered by the music and, oddly enough, I was repaired by them. As a re-existing gift, my past was brought into my becoming in the present, and I experienced my body in its individual, collective, and political dimension.
Yangana (Mancero) is an album composed by Daniel Mancero for a trio format: piano, contrabass, and percussion. It comprises thirteen compositions that combine diverse cultural PONCE 3 codes: indigenous, Euro-American genic1, mestizo. For the composer, his work is framed as postcolonial music due to its political purpose. Yangana‟s aim was to rethink the understanding of Ecuadorian music closing the gap between the popular and the academic, and the traditional and the contemporary to discover the music from its reality (Editorial, “Yangana es un andino cosmopolitaˮ).
Since that night, Yangana produced a crack in my collective mestizo subjectivity. Mestizo is the product of crossbreeding between races and cultures emerged with the conquest of Latin America. Paraphrasing Gloria Alzandúa, it is a coming together of two or more self-consistent but habitual incompatible frames of reference, causing conflict, cultural collision, and a state of perpetual transition (100). It is a condition of inhabiting and moving between multiple cultures, internal voices, and languages making the mestizo reside “in the borderlands”, while inhabiting contradiction and ambiguity (Polar 1994), which for some Latin American scholars occurs despite the pain of turning the ambivalence into something else (Alzandúa 100–03; Echeverria 1998). Therefore, mestizo and mestizaje go beyond an identity discussion to reach a particular form of culture and being of a Latin American region (Alzandúa 2007; Echeverria 1998).
In this regard, the main stream of mestizo – “ that under goes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war”(Alzandúa 100) marked by colonial relations of power that locates it in a dilemma of which collectivity should be heard – was questioned by the music (Roitman and Oviedo 2016; Silva 2004; Sierra 2002). By bringing different cultural codes using particular techniques, the traditional and popular music and the western form of the contemporary jazz cohabited together, re-constructing themselves in the musical space without “whitening” the sounds. For the first time, I could experience my local traditions and my cultural memory trough sounds within the art-academic realm. Art stopped being an individual activity to reach its collective dimension and enunciation.
My unexpected first encounter with Yangana and the effects-affects produced could be framed under Gille Deleuze‟s understanding of encounter (Difference and Repetition 176). An object of encounter is perceived by our senses and gives rise to sensibility. It is a being of the sensible by which our usual way of being is challenged and our systems of knowledge disrupted
1 I refer to harmonies, rhythms, structures that are original from these areas or have been associated as part of the “Western-Modern culture.” PONCE 4
(Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 176; O‟Sullivan 1). For Simon O„Sullivan, within art encounters: “We are forced to thought. The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivity […] The rupturing encountering also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently” (O‟Sullivan 1).
Two years ago, I came across with Nicola Cruz‟ album: Prender el Alma (Cruz), whose diverse sounds took me into a journey of sounds and rhythms producing similar sensations than Yangana. I heard the place I come from sounding in its voices, places, and temporalities all of them in the same space. Despite Cruz‟s music belonging to the genre of electronic, the introduction of indigenous, afro, and traditional elements in it alters the experience of electronic music. The ritual occupied the technological sphere to revert its instrumentalized use to give us the possibility of listening to nature‟s voices that are part of the place we inhabit, our culture, and ourselves.
Cruz‟ composition crystalized in what Mancero had already prompted: the possibility of thinking our relation with the world and ourselves through the sonorous, allowing connections that differ from the hegemonic ones, as I will expose throughout this thesis. My listening to both, ever since, has become an endless process where the music unfolds over time. Although my memory can sketch what sounds come next, their materiality continues producing diverse affordances, where I, as in the first time, rethink my subjectivity, my cultural memory, my space and temporality with and through the music.
Both type of music disclose a similar process of creation, in which the territory‟s anchor comes from the composers‟ inner experience marked by their relation to Ecuador‟s sounding geography. This is to say, a certain distribution of sounds that gives an account of diverse landscapes, relations, of a culture are characterized by a peculiar sonorous space. This particular form of listening enclosed in the two albums is replicated in the last two years in Ecuador‟s musical scene, where a new musical language within the mestizo urban middle class is emerging significantly. This new sonic language, lacking conceptual framing to define it, has in common PONCE 5 with the incorporation of traditional2 and popular sounds to other music genres a claim for belonging to a place and exploring what we are3.
Although this „hybridization phenomena‟ could respond to effects of globalization and the growth of the fetichization of the ethnic otherness in the West (Sanjay 411), there is a similar acoustic practice operating in the music, this is to say, a specific form of listening and understanding sound that shed lights on a comprehension of the world based on a different form of producing and transmitting knowledge. Can we re-think our relation with the world through the acoustic? And if it is so, what are the edges embedded in this music, from which the mestizo is fraught in her understanding of the world and herself? What are the politics of those sounds?
Through my musicking – understanding this as any acts involved in musical performance: whether listening, composing, performing, dancing to broadcasting and analyzing the music (Small 9) of Yangana and Prender el Alma – in this thesis, I will explore how sounds operate as a modality of knowing and being in the world (Feld, “Acoustemology” 2015; Ochoa Gautier, Aurality 2014), in which the music simultaneously reflects and constructs the mestizo aural experience from which a particular subjectivity could emerge. Presenting the aural as the preponderant sense locates sounds as the substance of the world, a force that constitutes it, and a medium from which people frame their knowledge about it (Ochoa Gautier, Aurality 3; Novak and Sakakeeny 2015; Feld, “Acoustemology” 2015). To build my argument of the relation between music and knowledge, I will turn to Steven Feld‟s account of acoustemology, which discloses a relational-ecological understanding of sounds. In my thesis, I will parallel Feld‟s approach with the Deleuzoguattarian notion of assemblages, as open ended gatherings, that align and complement with acoustemology to explain how music constitutes and operates. However, my understanding of both of these conceptual frames will be performed under a decolonial reading due to the geographical location of my object and my self.
According to Feld, “Acoustemology” is the combination of “acoustics” and “epistemology” to theorize sound as a way of knowing” (“Acoustemology” 12). It focuses on
2 I understand the term tradition as a trait of cultures (indigenous or not) that comes from a non-capitalist modes of production and it is inherited from a shared memory or constructed history (Mullo 14). 3 To see some of the emergent bands watch: “Sonido Mestizo: The Nu LatAm Sound Ecuador” YouTube, uploaded by ZZK Films, 28 Feb.2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9ZaOF5Gl6s&t=4s. Access 1 March 2018. PONCE 6 how sounds are “present to experience and experiencers, to interpreters and interpretations”, in which the outcome (sounding) is simultaneously social and material, “an experimental nexus of sonic sensation” (12) that departs from a relational ontology for which existential relationality is built on the between-ness of experience (12). By focusing in the encounter between sound, subject, environment, and social context, acoustemology searches the “mutual” and “ecological” space of sonic knowing as situational, contingent, polyphonic, dialogical, and unfinished. It is here where particular histories of sounding and listening emerge (12,13).
This ecological intersection of acoustic knowledge resembles Felix Guattari‟s three ecologies: social relation, human subjectivity, and environment that coexist in an ethico-political articulation or what he calls „ecosophy‟ (Guattari 28). Each ecology has its own logic, operates individually at the same time that interact transversally like ecosystems, from which entities are formed (43). Music will be formed in the interrelations of those, resembling a Deleuzoguattarian notion of assemblage as aggregated parts constituted by diverse relations within „ecosophy‟. Assemblages are open-ended gatherings that pose two sides: the organization of bodies and their potential (Turestsky 15). Like assemblages, the music departs from and is formed through a particular territory, holding the content and expression of it: they are the territory‟s enunciation and practice, as the first section of the thesis will analyze (Deleuze et al. 8,9). Simultaneously, they interact with external territories/assemblages de-territorializing themselves and decoding their elements, from which new configurations and inexistent relations could emerge. Paraphrasing the authors, there is a tetravalence in the assemblage: content and expression, and territoriality and de-territorialization (9,10). By taking into account Deleuzoguattarian assemblages in combination of acoustemology, I will understand music as a polyphonic assemblage that is formed within the three ecologies, functioning as a form of subjectification, in which a process of singularization -construction of individuals- take place.
Both conceptual approaches converge in an ecological and relational perspective without addressing relations of power and knowledge. Acoustemology does not account for how power and knowledge relations percolate the encounter of sonic sensations, nor do Deleuzoguattarian assemblages, whose purpose is the opposite: to find forms to evade power. However, relations of power and knowledge are inscribed in any phenomena, even more in the inquired object that comes from a postcolonial country. Therefore, it is necessary to question how those elements problematize and ravel the construction of knowledge with and through the acoustics? How do PONCE 7 they affect the encounter, and therefore, the production of knowledge? How do power and knowledge relations influence the capability or incapability to translate what is perceived into the linguistic realm? If music is an epistemic “thing” that crystalizes how people know the world (Feld, “Acoustemology”; Ochoa Gautier, Aurality), what are the filiations involved and produced by it? How does music construct sentiments and sensibilities displayed in the subject subjectivity, constructing and reshaping it?
In her book “Aurality,” Ana Maria Ochoa addresses an aural understanding of the world that aligns with acoustemology besides situating the discussion in Latin American context and remarking the relations of power and knowledge. For Ochoa, modes of aural experience are directly linked to modes of listening that have been historically inscribed on different surfaces and are present in the schemes through which we construct knowledge: linguistically, visually, and/or aurally (Aurality 1–7). Following Lisa Gitelman, Ochoa understands inscription as “the act of recording a listening into a particular technology of dissemination and transmission” (7) that involves "legible representations of aural experience" (7). This, in turn, recognizes the multiplicity of legible technologies used throughout history that have made possible the circulation of sounds, of which music has itself been one.
In this regard, the valid aural expressive forms as the outcome of the relations among ear and sound are part of the sensible fabric of experiences, resonating in Rancièrean distribution of the sensible4, from which ideas, perceptions, affects, and forms of listening-interpretations will be established (Rancière IX). Indeed, there is a distribution of the sonic within music, which in the case of Latin America involves not only class-power relations established by the structure of Capitalist Modernity, as Rancière lucidly analyses, but also due to colonial relations of power (Quijano 2007). Having partition and differentiation as two of its constituve principles, Western Capitalist Modernity‟ displaces bodies according to both: class and geography. This determines bodies‟ position in the world system and legitimatizes whose voices or sounds are more loudly, who has the right to speak and sound, and under which forms and circumstances (De Sousa Santos 2016; Walter D Mignolo 2010; Rancière 2013; Ochoa Gautier 2014). Therefore, due to Daniel Mancero and Nicola Cruz‟s spatial location, it is necessary to contemplate the geo-
4 It is the construction of the sensible order: “a set of relationships between the ways of being, thinking, and dong which determine at once a common world and the way in which those subject take part” (Rancière, Modern Times 12). PONCE 8 politics of knowing and sensing in order to be aware of how music anchors a politics of knowledge that is ingrained in their bodies and in the local histories from where the music emerged and is displayed.
Edgardo Lander sustains that Modernity established not only the world‟s colonial organization, but also the colonial constitution of knowledge, language, memories, and imaginaries where all cultures, populations, and territories were organized into a totality of a space and time. In a universal narrative this based itself on the „ethnicity‟ and „racial‟ supremacy of the white man (Lander 16). Instituting the white as the conquer of Latin America and what Aníbal Quijano has called the colonial matrix of power; a political, economic, social, and cultural domination system that articulates itself through the global market (Capitalism as its system) and the idea of race, producing social discrimination (Quijano 168). Coloniality was grounded as the zero point of observation, where modernity/rationality positioned itself as the only and universal epistemology, hiding its geo-historical body location (Mignolo, Darker Side of Modernity 80). In the cultural realm, it inferred cultural repression, colonization, and extermination of the local narratives and cultures, in addition to imposing a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge that still having devastating repercussions in postcolonial nations (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2014). For decolonial scholars, within a Gramscian notion of culture, European culture was and still works as an instrument of power to legitimize the perception of the world under a Western epistemology and Modernity as a hegemonic symbolical order (Quijano 168; Mignolo 2014). Art‟s paradigmatic basis in European art discourses has established the valid sensing and knowing to participate in the sensible sphere (Vazquez and Contreras 79). Within this sphere, music has contributed to the creation of a sonorous space marked by colonial relations of power, acting as a subjectification devise to reinforce the Modern/Colonial order (Estévez, “Sonoridades y Colonialidad Del Poder” 54; Holguín and Shifres 45). Notwithstanding this, the complexity of sound and its space cannot be reduced to the coloniality of sound, as the thesis will disclose. The sonorous space with its sounds and silences is a space of resistance and production of different politics of life that cannot be subsumed under Western Modernity and its episteme (Ochoa Gautier 2014; Estévez 2015; Periáñez 2018), from which Deleuzoguattarian account of assemblages will provide the tool to argument how from and with sounds there is an alter form of think and being. PONCE 9
Returning to Ochoa‟s argument of modes of aural experiences, she argues for the existence of two audible expressions in the region that can be grouped in the audible techniques of lettered elite and the peoples historically considered "non-literate," acknowledging their complex fabric and their multiple connections between the linguistic and visual realm (Aurality 4). Expressions, I will argue along the chapters, still carve the mestizo sonic achieve‟ archetype from which we listen and sound becomes sounding. With this, I am referring to how from physics‟ acoustic understating of sound: as “a form of energy that travels in waves through a medium” (Brabec de Mori 25), the vibration is perceived and becomes known though its materiality as sound, voice, silence, noise, or music (Brabec de Mori 26; Ochoa Gautier, Aurality 75). Transformation that occurs in the encounter with the subject‟s auditory apparatus, whose socio-linguistic system and cosmology will vary according to the sound‟s affordances and understating (Clayton 7), as I will develop further. Hence, the process of sounding would depict multiple ecologies of the acoustic, in which the act of listening is essential to the “translation of sound” (Kapchan, “The Splash or Icarus” 2) and implies a "different understanding of the relation between sounds, music, people, and place”(Ochoa Gautier, Aurality 75).
Likewise Ochoa understands Colombia as a disputed site of different acoustic practices (Aurality 4). As such, I will understand both Yangana and Prender el Alma as a form of inscription –taken from Ochoa – comprising a contested and relational site that reflects and construct the mestizo aural experience. Although I will acknowledge and highlight how these legible representations are marked by a “highly unequal power in the constitution of the public sphere” (Ochoa Gautier, Aurality 6) by colonial relations of power, I am interested in exploring how these practices relate at the sonic level to produce in their encounter a new mestizo audible practice. A form of listening-sounding, in which the relation between the ear and the sound from which the music arises is fraught under a particular spatiotemporal configuration that will reflect a form of being in the world and construct knowledge about it through the medium of sound (Feld 2015; Ochoa Gautier 2014).
I will demonstrate how this audible practice exceeds colonial histories capable of problematizing unequal relations of power and reaching other surfaces acting in and through the body (Kapchan 2015). The aural experience prompted by the music‟s sonic sensation clashes with the linguistic realm – embedded in coloniality –, resisting conceptualization and activating a phenomenology, in which the senses cannot be divided. Therein, the body works as the center PONCE 10 and collector of experience from which the world would be apprehended, and memories, cultural traditions, places, and voices are felt and transmitted it (Maya Restrepo 2005; Merleau-Ponty 2002; Taylor 2003; Viveiros de Castro 1998). Consequently, the musical language resonates with what many decolonial scholars have called decolonial aesthesis, understanding this as unveiling the geo-political location of knowledge and how it operates, while simultaneously opening up options for liberating the senses and affirming other modes of knowledge that have been marginalized or denied by imperial-colonial structures (Mignolo, “Decolonial Aesthetcis Manifesto”).
By locating myself in the research: my musicking of the albums, I will select three pieces of music: Neblina de Guápulo5 from Mancero‟s album Yangana, and Sanación6 and Prender el Alma from Cruz‟s album Prender el Alma7 to perform a close listening-reading of the pieces8. The musicking will include brief statements of the composers and my personal affective responses in the encounter, performing an integral reading of the object where the visual (in the case of Prender el Alma), discursive, and sonic will not be separated in the analysis.
Within this approach the division between researcher (me) as the subject and the music as an object of research study becomes blurred. Interpreting sounds, or what acoustemology refers to as the transformation of sound into sounding – social and material – will occur only in the encounter with the body in a specific time and place, wherefrom meaning and knowledge can be produced through participation and reflection (“Acoustemology” 13,14). Subsequently, the analysis of the music is also my personal inscription of the sounds. Consonantly, musicking implies a process-based understanding of the music instead of dealing it objectually, convoluting Cultural Analysis‟s methodology and requiring the combination of close reading with another methodology more suitable for the music‟s analysis.
5 Listening to: Mancero, Daniel. “Neblina de Guápulo,” Yangana. Quito, 2011, https://mancero.bandcamp.com/album/yangana. 6 Listening to: Cruz, Nicola. “Sanación,” Prender el Alma. ZZK Records, Quito, 2015, https://soundcloud.com/nicolacruz/sets/prender-el-alma. 7 See: Cruz, Nicola. “Prender el Alma” Prender el Alma. YouTube, uploaded by ZZK Records, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnXMe7RPfgw. Access 10 February 2018 8Although the focus will be on the selected tracks, I will be referring to their albums as part of their larger narrative, likewise a book or film analysis. PONCE 11
Sound writing coined by Debora Kapchan and many other music scholars, is a speculative approach to theorize sound leading towards a phenomenological-affect perspective. According to them, music produces sound knowledge, this is to say “a non Deleuzoguattarian discursive form of affective transition resulting from acts of listening” (“The Splash or Icarus” 2). In this way, sound writing will be the performance in word-sound of such knowledge (2). Under this approach, listening and the body are the hubs for theorizing sound, placing a speculative inquiry into the method/theory in order to write sound (2). Therefore, there is a difference between writing about sound and writing sound. The first one keeps the positivist position between subject (writer)/ and object (sound), while the second one breaks the division to “inhabit a multidimensional position as translator between worlds” (12). By departing from listening as the research‟s method practice, theory and method are entangled. Listening works as a mode of practice, but also as technique of the body, skewing subject/researcher and object/sound (4). For Kapchan, listening reflects what is known but also how we come to know (11): “what we hear depends on how we listen and what we listen for” (5). Every act of listening is political and aesthetical and will orient the listener into particular affective directions (12).
The assemblage character of the music and the interdisciplinarity of my approach make the rhythm of this analysis an interconnected space of encounters that must be understood as a whole. For that reason, the thesis is structured to resemble a piece of music: an albazo9, which is also a mestizo musical structure that gathers the North and the South and likewise, my analysis. The main tonality10 of this thesis will be the ones already presented: a decolonial Deleuzoguattarian reading of acoustemology; however, like music modulation11, I propose to work around one main concept in each part: space and time, which will be constructed in a constellation of diverse authors and from the three objects due to the music‟s complexity, whose
9Albazo is a lively and festive rhythm of the Ecuadorian highlands. Its name comes from the word alba, which means dawn. Its popularity is traced where traditional festivities ended and people went home playing this music. Musically, it is characterized by the use of pentaphony and a 6/8 meter. Despite its intimate association with the indigenous culture due to its cultural and musical features, it is considered a mestizo rhythm by being framed under European musical structure (Mullo 64). 10 It refers to the system that arranges and determinates the scale sounds (key) and frames the relation between sounds. 11 It is the use of other tonalities as sonorous material without changing the main tonality of the music piece. PONCE 12 diverse layers and inquires cannot be addressed in one particular account-theory nor in one isolated object, keeping the assemblage character of the thesis.
A conventional albazo has an introduction and two main parts: A and B. In part „A,‟ I will delve into the relation between music and space by illustrating how both albums embody a politics of location that produces a sonic sensation that works as territorializing tool. Using the Deleuzoguattarian notion of “Refrain” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), I will delve how diverse sounds/rhythms function as „sound bricks” that delimitate the space: a territorial practice that creates a new placeness and territory. By analyzing the three musical pieces through a cluster of concepts that relate and explain different aspects of space and place (Borja 2017; Escobar 2001; Soja 1996), I will argue how music gives an account of an ecological form that involves a decolonial reading, in which the body merges with the environment that is expressed and constructed acoustically (De la Cadena 2014; Feld 2015; Morton 2007; Watsuji 2006). As part of this understanding, I will explore how in the process of knowing and experiencing the place with and through the acoustics some sounds, rhythms, and frequencies, paraphrasing Ochoa, open an interpretative gap between sounds affection and systems of signification (Aurality 33), in which discursive constructions such as rural/urban, and culture/nature entangle, reflecting how the historical-material conditions from which the music arises problematize those naturalized divisions.
In part B, I will explore the notion of time disclosed in the music by performing a rhythm analysis of music as an assemblage. Suggesting an analogy between music‟s rhythm and time in Modernity, I will delve into how music gives an account of a baroque temporality operating in the music (De Sousa Santos 2016; Echeverria 1998). I will argue how the implementation of the feast and the rite modifies the time and creates an alter plot and distribution of temporality, diverging from the one headed by Western Capitalo-centric Modernity. This section will also include briefly how the two acoustic practices were constructed founding a habitual form of listening in the mestizo that could be challenged by the sonic language.
Hopefully, by focusing on the acoustic from phenomenological-affective approach, I will show how an alter episteme operates. In my opinion, music by the virtue of its structure and operation has the potential to create communion nodes between knowledges, what Boaventura De Sousa Santos calls ecology of knowledge (De Sousa Santos 2014) to rethink more PONCE 13 possibilities for reflecting upon the world. In this case, to a border zone, as is the case of the mestizo, that operates within and outside the hegemonic Western Modernity. By disclosing what the music depicts, I hope to give an account of how despite many voices are not hearing or listening for certain audible techniques, it does not mean they are not part of the political space, since their way to speak or sound could have other types of registers invisible to a logo-eye center ear or untranslatable for the Western ear. I intend to assert how music puts into question its “universal” and abstract understanding by eliciting its multiple entanglement layers to reflect not only what sounds communicate, but also our position and construction from where we apprehend the world. In this case, the mestizo, whose audible experience – including mine within it –gives an account of a microcosms operating with and through sounds. Although it relates to the situational character of both the mestizo and the analysis, this decolonial polyphonic assemblage is part of a larger history of some mestizajes or altered ways of thinking with and through the senses in order to overcome and suture power and colonial relations, to never foreclosing the forms of constructing knowledge and being-with the others and our inner others. PONCE 14
Part „A‟: Listening bodie„s‟: sounding place„s‟
As the water‟s heart beats in the sounding body of the rain forest, Sanación –which means healing in Spanish– opens the journey of Prender el Alma. Beating repeatedly in the time of a familiar rhythm (⁴/₄ 텟 텠 텭 텡 텟 턽), the digitalized sound of the dropt merge subtlety with the soft guitar rip, whose accents prepare the canvas for the mountains to come. The flute‟s short pentaphonic melody brushstrokes the familiarity of the rhythm into a sound and rhythm that I know: it is an Andean rhythm, a Danzante12 I guess; naming it is still speculative act (0-0:40m). A pause follows, to make me think, digest what I have just heard: the melody was a fragment of Vasija de Barro -a traditional Ecuadorian song that evokes indigenous traditions of burial and death-, but also to hanker for what is coming. It is the force of rhythm, although this time are the bongos-an instrument commonly used by our afro music- that drives you faster, corporeally, vividly into the sound of the guitar, whose melody plays with resonances of Vasija de Barro (Valencia and Benitez) to create the section‟s leitmotif along with the sounds of new percussion instruments: chajchas13, maracas, digital sounds, and nature‟s multiple voices. Each instrument has created its own talea14, whose circular repetition echoes a ceremonial cadence and come together juxtaposing one to another to render a space where I am caught. The sonic sensation produced by the music has dislocated me from my here and now to walk across the Andes, Amazon, and Coast, sounding the place I come from.
How could both sonic languages produce a displacement of my body to re-spatialize my “actual space” at the same time as this new space transmits a particular configuration of place? In other words, how can music de-territorialize and re-territorialize simultaneously? In what
12 It is festive rhythm of a binary tempo, characterized by cadence tempo marked by the bombo or the tambour (Mullo 64). 13It is a percussion instrument made of seeds used by the Amazonian and Andean indigenous in their rituals and ceremonies:
14Talea refers to a repeatedly rhythmic patter. PONCE 15 follows, I delve into how music embodies a politics of location which is able to render a placeness territory that reflects Ecuador‟s geography while it transforms it.
i. Geographical sounds: music and space
The sounds and rhythms of Neblina de Guápulo, Sanación and Prender el Alma immerse the listener into a journey of multiple soundscapes, in which diverse cultural codes sketch a territory that holds various acoustic practices. In terms of sonic qualities they are hazily comparable, yet their diverse sonic languages contain traces of the place they inhabit talking locally for my body who shares the composer‟s geography . Cultural memory, practices, and traditions are transmitted through the music, at the same time as it is transformed and reconfigured by each composer‟s musical language, showing a similar form of listening and sounding despite their genre difference.
The three pieces, equal to their larger narratives, are connected to Ecuador in their sonic features, entitled, and content. If we extend Cruz‟ pieces to their album, there is an implementation of traditional rhythms, local instruments (maracas, chajchas, bombo, timbales, flutes, quenas, marimba, and guitar) that within Ecuadorian musical history belong or have been implemented by local communities whether they be indigenous, afro descendant or in “popular music”. More importantly, Cruz‟s music echoes a ritualistic function.
In the case of Neblina de Guápulo its name already discloses a place in Quito. Guápulo was founded by the Spaniards as an independent town in XVI century. The place is located in a small plateau of the hills that used to divide the city from the rural areas. Its architecture is between colonial and modern. Nowadays, it is considered part of the urban area of Quito due to the city‟s growth; however, many rural life practices remain, especially, around festivities and agriculture. Their local inhabitants were husipungueros (indigenous workers of the haciendas), yet in the last decades the upper classes have moved there duo to its location, landscape, and exotization of the colonial architecture. This gentrification entails the continuation of colonial relations of power, in which lower-indigenous classes are still treated as exploited, displaced, and disposable subjects. The road that connects the place with the city is called Conqueror‟s Avenue and it leads to the top of hill where one of the upper-class Quito modern neighborhoods is located. The place PONCE 16 is portrayed with a climatologic characteristic: the fog (neblina) as constituve and representative element of the place. Moving forward to its larger narrative, Yangana makes references to Ecuador‟s territory: six of its thirteen compositions are entitled from specific places in Ecuador15, whereas the rest of the music pieces refer to specific objects, figures, traditions, or aspects of the daily life16.
Overall, both music languages reflect a strong connection with the place the composers inhabit. According to J. Eisneber, sounds are attached with a spatial narrative due to our process of audition, in which the listener tends towards a spatial association (193). Despite Eisneber‟s reference to the instinct for seeking the sound‟s origin -what produced it and where it came from- , this spatial narrative can be extended to a broader spatiality. For example, there is an association between pentaphony to indigenous communities from the highland region in my description of Sanación. Although this is the scale per excellence used in their music; there is a tendency –even in my listening- to enfranchise indigenous to a couple of musical features and to rurality. Confining their sonic languages under a Western comprehension of music under rational-“universal” categories (melody, pitch, harmony, rhythm, and so on) and to a particular zone: the Andes. What is beyond this association? Is music working as an internal frontier displacing bodies and places along with particular sentiments? Does this tendency reflect a form of listening? Although these questions will be addressed fully in the following chapter, it is necessary to introduce them for understanding the territory in which the music displays.
This type of association crystalizes an aural frame of reference (Titus, “Walking like a Crab” 290) that operates under a Western musical episteme based on a representative form of accessing knowledge base on a logo-form (vision) (Pallasmaa 2012; Mignolo 2011). Thinking music in terms of scores encompasses a subtle displacement from a hearing phenomenon to a linguistic experience implying an understanding of culture in terms of writing and conceptualization (Holguín and Shifres 2015; Santamaría 2007; Castro-Gomez 2002). Within representational form, there is a propensity of hierarchy, fixity, and stasis hidden in the echo of „Truth‟ and original (O‟Sullivan 12; Rancière 59). As Ochoa argues:
15Yangana, Tupo Salasaca, Diablo de Tandapi, Atardecer en Quito, Neblina de Guápulo, Ronda de Saraguro. 16La imprenta de Antonio, El ángel feo, Amapola Sisa, Yaraví de la lluvia, Pasillo en triciclo, Guaguas de pan, Pasillo para el tío Enrique. PONCE 17
Once sound is described and inscribes into verbal description and intro writing it becomes a discursive formation that has the potential of creating and mobilizing and acoustic regimens of truths, a power- knowledge nexus in which some modes of perceptions, description, and inscription of sound are more valid than others in the context of power relations (33).
In the contexts of Latin America, besides fostering a particular Western philosophical discourse, it adhered to trope of alterity discourse, from which the „Other‟ was constructed (Dussel 1994; Ochoa Gautier 2014).
If naming comes with a set of characteristics that works as an operational process and a deifying-performative tool, so do sounds (Bull and Back 15; Cimini and Moreno 12–15) Therefore, what problematic emerges from this action? What power relations are involved in my associative form of listening? As a postcolonial nation, the valid aural genres produced in Ecuador are constructed in the relationship between the colonial and the modern (Ochoa Gautier 2014; Bloechl 2008). As mentioned in my introduction, following Ochoa‟s work, there are two acoustic practices historically formed: “the audile techniques cultivated by both the lettered elite and peoples historically considered "nonliterate,"” (Aurality 4). Along “Aurality”, Ochoa illustrates how the audible participate in the creation of the Other‟s features, in which many of the associations inscribe more than sound, but a reflection of understanding the world beyond sonic features. To clarify this, I am referring how when “lettered elites”, or even before the Catholic priests, encounter sounds or functions around them that differ from their own, those were categorized as out of tune, noises, or improper. As Ochoa argues, “in the process of inscribing such listening into writing, the lettered men (and it was mostly men) of the period simultaneously described them, judged them, and theorized them” (4).
Coming from the National Conservatory of Music, my point of entry into indigenous and Afro music is conceptually meager. My limited musical description is based on few studies of national composers of the late XIX century and early XX, whose works, influenced by European nationalistic movements, was about our “folk” (Moreno 1949; Moreno 1972; Salgado 1989). They focused on indigenous communities from the Andean region, neglecting Coast and Amazon indigenous and Afro descendants. Indigenous music was typified under western PONCE 18 categories, indicating pentaphony as the scale per excellence accompanied by ternary and quaternary rhythms (6/8, 4/4). Those descriptions were filled by moral and reductive adjectives such us simple, repetitive, melancholic, nostalgic, and sad. This reflects how Quijano‟s colonial matrix of power continues leaving its traces on the way we listen today. To not deviate from the space as our main concern, I will come back to this point in the following section.
The referred association is also triggered in Neblina de Guápulo, whose introduction drives me to the present, in an urban and calm environment due to the piano‟s contemporary melody with brushstrokes of impressionist and expressionist styles (00:00 00:20). However, the 6/8 syncope sound of the cajón disrupts the melody to introduce an albazo -for the next sixteen bars I am moving synchronized with the rhythm and my mind travels to the mountains where the piano‟s pentaphonic melody resonates indigenous festivities and a sense of rurality, dislocating me to the past where the memories of Guápulo popular festivities mingles with other indigenous festivities. The sense of place and rurality are not mere static representations. Their quotidian time is reimagined in their feast form. Through the sounds and rhythm, I am able to recall the sensation of the feast, the community, their yumbos17 and livelihoods that this space entails (00:21 00:50). Nonetheless, the modulation of the melody to an upper tone produces a pandiatonism18 where the multiple voices start clashing and the albazo in its rural and traditional color becomes more urban and dissonant, as Guápulo, where rural and cultural practices of our past coexist with the conflictive modernity of any Andean city (01:00 01:28).
My conceptual association between sound, place, and people tends towards grouping indigenous or afro community sounds with rurality and euro-american sounds with and urban and modern narrative, fitting Thomas Turino‟s indexical music understanding19. This is to say, when personal experience of hearing music played by particular individuals or social groups or/and in particular regions works as medium to delineate people‟s social identities enclosed into a specific place (8,9). However, the audible experience is entangled in this discursive dichotomy. While listening to Neblina de Guápulo, as well as the entire Mancero‟s album, these seemingly
17Yumbos are dancers that recall the Yumbo culture (800-1600 AC) located in the lowlands of northwestern Quito (Borja 3), and a type of dace in the ritual of Yumbada: a war festivity that thankful the past and aims to reestablish harmony and peace (Mullo 141). 18Pandiatonism is a type of harmony that allows many tonalities at the same time. Looking it metaphorically, it allows the parallel existence not only of tonalities, but times, places, and subjectivities. 19For Turino, an indexical association occurs when the sing and object are experienced together in our actual life (8). PONCE 19 separated spheres are in the same space and I experienced both simultaneously. This led me to question why I associate city-urban-western/countryside-rural-local within a country where industrialization attempts exist precariously (Acosta 2006)? Are rural and urban enough categories to analyze the space sounded by the music?
For Edward Soja, space must be understood from a historical and geographical materialist approach, in which it and its political organization express social relations, but also reacts upon them (Postmodern Geographies 7). Rural and urban are two rhythmical spatial containers that hold particular representations, daily practices, landscapes, and modes of production, remarking their difference as two separated spaces abide by a dialectical relation due to and for capitalism (Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic” 2008; Monte-mór 2012). The development of capitalism in the South diverges from the North: Ecuador‟s extractivism and agro-exportation mode of production is constructed in complex network between the colonial heritage, the natural abundance of resources, the global market, and the cosmologies of Afro and Amerindian cultures, which have resisted capitalism system (Acosta 2006). Subsequently, the spatiality created by this is different, as well as its understanding.
The regionalization of the territory between Coast, Highlands, and Amazon with their own logics is the first spatial distribution and configuration in Ecuador‟s spatiality (Acosta 26–29). Although there differences between countryside and cities, life always exists among the regions; the consolidation of the modern urban project -concentrated in Quito and Guayaquil- in the late XX century was fragile, contradictory, and heterogeneous; the cities urbanized rural lands, circumscribed colonial haciendas, and received a “rural exodus”20(Carrion and Erazo 2013), forming a city, in the case of Quito, of several cities joining and overlapping (Borja 168). Precisely, Neblina de Guápulo makes audible the limitations of rural and urban categories to understand the space fully. Its fragmentary character that oscillates between traditional and an amorphous modernity bouncing among them, sounds the contradiction and harmony of this mingled spaced. Through its festive colors, the music sounds Guápulo‟s social space: a place that attunes the description above.
20The process of the capital modernization started in 1960. The discovery of oil (1970) accelerated the urban modern project. The urban area increased 500%, the peripheries start to developed and the city expanded disorganized and unplanned (Borja 163). Despite Ecuador‟s aim to industrialize and modernize under the Economic model of the region, it did not succeed due to international conditions that already condemn it to fail, resulting in a precarious industralized model (Acosta). PONCE 20
In this regard, the sonic sensation brings Soja‟s concept of geography as the third space of “heteropias”21. Adopting Foucault‟s idea, Soja‟s space holds a multiplicity of spaces, and within them, a set of relations that delineates sites and relations that are constituted in every society taken diverse forms and changing as „history unfolds‟ (qtd. in Soja, Postmodern Geographies 12). However, in my description, the music led me towards an understanding of the space from its cultural memory, affect, and connection to the territory in its topographical dimension. Soja‟s “trialectic” dimension of space as: lived, perceived, and conceived (Thirdspace 68), introduces to the Lefebvrian space the symbolical dimension: “ the space is directly lived, with all its intractability intact, a space that stretches across images and symbols that accompany it, the space of „inhabitant‟s and „users‟”(Thirdspace 67). His arguments provide a ground to think a livable space mingled with habitants‟ bodies, to think from its locality beyond capitalist modes of production to its relation in terms of ecosophy (Guattari 2000).
For the anthropologist Arturo Escobar, following Edward Casey, we are „placelings‟: we always find ourselves in places: ”to live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the places one is in” (143). „Place‟ is the experience of a particular location with some measures of groundness, a sense of boundaries, and connections to everyday life (140–43). Place, body, and environment integrate with each other; places gather “things, thoughts, and memories in particular configurations” (143), which I sustain can be expressed and experienced through sounds. Returning to the music description, the relation with the space prompted by the sounds, reactivate a phenomenological and affect encounter with it. Sounds and place mutually designate, going beyond their material features to the sentiments they produce in the body. There is a movement from space to place that sounds seem to reactivate through an affective and phenomenological connotation.
In my conversation with Daniel Mancero regarding Yangana´s process of composition, he states:
I have the fortune to record places. When I am in a place I get the recording of it that later I translates into a musical idea [...] The experimentation at the time of Yangana was composing thinking about places. I closed my eyes and started playing [and] thinking about places,
21Heteropias for Foucault are “those singular spaces to be found in some given social practices whose functions are different or even opposite of others (qtd. in Soja 21). PONCE 21
trying not to change the image regarding what I played. Then, I started writing the things that kept the image […] other times, the music ideas were based on the sonorities of the place and the experience you felt in it.22
Similarly, Nicola Cruz‟s manifest the album is related to the process of:
…soul awakening and how this awakening of consciousness for me is reflected trough music. In the album there are many songs with a lot of ritual involve… For me is about seeking the highest point between music and consciousness that the ancient traditions: indigenous or afro cosmologies inspire me. Traditions that I value and I try to learn from our ancestor and how the things were done before. Also, I question why things happened that way [silence]. It is interesting coming from a small country and being able to tell something at a macro dimension at the same time that I feel responsibility for showing my country, as an imprint of what is Ecuador.23
Both albums enclose Ecuador‟s place woven by the composers‟ personal experiences. Music is the reflection of the place and the reconstruction of it. The musical‟s narratives resemble how the subject‟s aurality – this is to say their form of listening and sounds transduction (sounding) – and the „place‟ in Escobar‟s sense, are constructed in a relational ontology that resonates Guattari‟s three ecologies that involves a deep engagement with the phenomenology of perception between body, place, and sound. In Fled terms, Yangana and Prender el Alma sounds open an “experimental nexus of sonic sensations” (“Acoustemology” 14), in which the place- based body enhances its positions and participates actively in the production and transmission of knowledge for both the listener and the composer/musicians.
However, if the „place‟ entails location and position, in which “elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence” (De Certeau 117; Escobar 2001), what happens when two or more things inhabit the same position? As in Sanación‟s multiple taleas, Neblina de Guápulo‟s
22Mancero, Daniel. Personal Interview. 8 December 2016 23See Cruz, Nicola. Interview by ZZK Records. Quito, 15 December 2015. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz9Xtv2KPHk. Access 10 March 2018. PONCE 22 pandiatonism, or Prender el Alma‟s juxtaposition, is then music placeless only a „place,‟ or it is also a reconfiguration of space?
Music placeness is not only a territorial reflection, since there is a displacement and reconfiguration of it. Concordantly with the assemblage‟s process, the music does not keep Ecuador‟s three geographical regions separate nor rural and urban, or past and present; conversely, they are rhythmically assembled24. In Neblina de Guápulo‟s fragmentary space urban and rural comes and goes to confound each other in the sound: from the contemporary introduction to the traditional albazo and then to a dissonant jazz improvisation. Sanación gathers the instruments from the three regions attached to specific cultures, and Prender el Alma‟s rhythmical convolution between forest sounds, human voices, and acoustical and digital instruments along with images of Ecuador‟s geography are material example of what an assemblage is and does.
ii. Sounds as bricks: music as de-territorialize/re-territorial practice
If sounds can be the place‟s utterance – an appropriation practice of the composer‟s site –, then, their movement, dislocation, and transformation denote the creation of a territory of its own: a new place, in which the vectors of Ecuador‟s geographies are the main material for their composition. Deleuze and Guattari‟s understanding of music through the notion of refrain „Ritournello‟ fits perfectly to explain how music practice resembles per excellence the construction of a territory and its functioning without losing the sense of locality (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Through the philosophers‟ metaphor, I will portray how this music is the spoken sound of „place‟: it is able to transmit our geography and construct our relation to it at the same time as it creates a new territory that stands for its own.
Briefly, the refrain is constituted by three stages: anchoring, demarcation, and opening up, which are not a sequence process, rather three aspects at once. It is a territorial assemblage25; “a means of erecting a portable territory that can secure ourselves in trouble situations” (Deleuze
24Part B will explain this idea. 25“We call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes (there are optical, gestural, motor, etc., refrains. In the narrow sense, we speak of a refrain when an assemblage is sonorous or "dominated" by sound” (Deleuze and Guattari 323). PONCE 23 and Guattari 313). Following their line of thought, a refrain can be materialized into a sound, melody, or rhythm, from which an assemblage would emerge. This is to say, they will be the center from which a process of demarcation will start, since for creating a territory already-set-up borders are indispensable (311-12). I will take Sanación as an illustrative example of this process to make it graspable. The anchor of the new piece comes from the traditional song Vasija de Barro, paraphrasing Cruz, it was this song that inspired the sample of Sanación (ZZK Records). If we focus on sounds‟ materiality, we can hear from minute (00:29 00:40) how the flute sticks to song‟s musical notes. However, if we move further from the musical technicalities, it is Vasija de Barro‟s ritualism character and feeling that is maintained along the piece. As Cruz emphasizes, “what I wanted with Sanación was kept the ritualistic sensation the tradition [referring to Ameriandian and afro cosmologies] have”26.
Within the refrain‟s anchor, the composer‟s way of listening goes beyond the sonic features to music‟s social and symbolical value. There is something functional and collective behind those sounds that come from particular territories and peoples, resonating other form of listening beyond Western conceptions that respond to a local acoustic practice that – as the composer and I perceived – is inscribed in the music, but also in another type of textuality that requires our bodies to alter forms of listening. As a sort of Deleuzian minor art, from whom minor, referring to literature, consists of the revolutionary conditions that literatures outside of the hegemonic narratives have (Bidima 189). For the philosopher, there are three characteristics that makes art minor: its capacity to break with the habitual formation and hegemonic signifying regimes by its de-territorizliation, to open the individual onto the political, and to operate through a collective enunciation that comes from a collective production (Bidima 189; O‟Sullivan 69–71). In this case, the use of local or “vernacular language” in Deleuzian words leads the body to be listener organ in a wider spectrum, transgressing the conceptual understanding of music from the hegemonic musical language and working as an alter collective enunciation.
Settling the anchor by de-territorializing it from its original assemblage, the territory starts to shape by expanding itself while it settles its borders, or what Deleuzoguattarian call territorial practices, which keeps the territory stable (314–17). Returning to the piece, before the flute played Vasija de Barro‟s melody, the guitar rip already contained traces of pentaphony and the
26 Cruz, Nicola. Interview by ZZK Records. Quito, 15 December 2015. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz9Xtv2KPHk. Accessed 10 March 2018. PONCE 24 ritualistic cadence was introduced from the beginning through nature voices and the sounding of instruments that are locally used in ritualistic settings, such as the chajchas by Amazonian indigenous groups. Acoustically, the music piece expands its border. It does not stick to the Andean region, as Vasija de Barro does, going beyond to the Amazon, Coats (by the use of bongos and rhythmic patterns), and the city with the use of digital and electronic sounds whose territoriality is associated with the Western and globalized world, also part of Ecuador‟s urban space. All the codes are decoded and transcoded by the composer‟s language to create the new space. These composing materials, as the territory‟s exterior, will work as sort of permeable membrane, establishing limits while allowing porously the introduction of new sonic elements. In other words, the third refrain‟s element is its opening up (Deleuze and Guattari 311,314). Although I linearly divide the stages for explicative purposes, as we could hear in the piece they are entwined.
As I showed, within the refrain‟s operation, the de-territorialization and re-territorialization movement does not restore the old territory; rather they create a new one, which will serve as refrain for another (Deleuze et al. 13; Buchanan 14). This notion of the refrain can be extrapolated to rest of the pieces and their entire narratives. For the French philosophers, every piece of music is an imprint, a signature from the composer‟s style that contains a refrain, yet the territory is constructed broadly when a style is constituted (Deleuze and Guattari 347,348).
From an aesthetic gaze, Mancero and Cruz are in between an impressionist and expressionist artist „capturing‟ the landscape (Rancière, Aisthesis 212). However, it goes further to their artists‟ capacity to play with lights, sounds, and objects for a composition to a form to think and relate with space (Periáñez 2018; Feld, “Acoustemology” 2015). In my previous argument regarding music „placeness‟, the relation between sound, place, and body asserts a phenomenological apprehension of space, in which the body is more than a sponge of sensations, avowing Merleau-Ponty‟s idea that the body “uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for the world, and through which we can consequently „be at home in' that world, „understand‟ it and find significance in it” (275), as a form of transmitting and constructing knowledge about the world beyond logocentric forms with and through sounds.
The composers‟ recreation and imagined reconstruction of places, memories, ideas, and sensations that have passed through their bodies are perceived and expressed acoustically. PONCE 25
Alphoso Linger‟s expansive work on Merleau-Ponty‟s body, includes the kinesthetic and affective sensations capable of producing multiple actions-reactions on the body (83). Those dimensions are not necessarily the perception of something – such as physical object –, yet it comes from the relation between the environment and the particular body. The body‟s postural schema is aligned to its spatial and sensory levels, developing some capacities, such as more sensitivity to some sounds, images or particular stimulus according to its ecology (85). This reveals the performative aspect of the space in the body‟s capacity of perception, including an affective disposition that is not only inner process within the subject, as the phenomenologist Bryan Bannon states, but also lies outside the self. Following Heidegger, he argues affects are “a particular form of relationship to one‟s environs” (340). They are not only experiences on the body, but also relations that are determined by the space the body is in (340).
These phenomenological accounts that contemplates the relevance of space are a bridge to understand the place‟s phenomenology sounded by the music, in which the way of listening of both composers are a set of culturally informed bodily and sensory dispositions constructed in and by the place (Rice 101; Kapchan, “Listening Acts” 277). Therefore, the notion of the body coined by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro as: “a bundle of affects and which is the origin of perspective” (478) would be more suitable for this analysis. As we observed around Neblina de Guápulo and Sanación, the composers‟ listening acts have performative capacities; they represent sounds as much as they transduce27 them into another medium (music) by their bodies as the center of perception (Kapchan, “The Splash or Icarus” 5). Music will crystalize in the following section a relational multiplicity from which a different form of being and relationship with space emerges.
A new Placeness territory
Prender el Alma elucidates sonically and visually the animated and transformational character of this new musical territory constructed and expressed by the music. This is to say, a new place-based network of “disclosive spaces” that provides a set of practices to relate with one
27Transduce means “to alter physical nature or medium of (a signal); to convert variations in (medium) into corresponding variations in another medium” (EOD). For Adrian Mackenzie “to think trasnductively is to mediate between different orders, to place different realities in contact, and to become something different” ( qtd. in Helmreich 227). PONCE 26 self, others, and environment, producing a self-container web of meanings (Escobar 167) that will reflect an ecology form of relating and inhabiting place and space.
By taking elements borrower from Ecuador‟s geography –its environment, its heterogeneous places, and the global culture –, the composers transform and assemblage them producing a new site that articulates the two acoustic practices. As an assemblage, music operates in double movement: content and expression (Deleuze et al. 8). It will be the territory‟s signifying register: a locution of its content, but also as an expression of it. It is through its sounding, in the process of musicking when the territories‟ properties are resembled and apprehended, as my following close reading will depict in the case of mestizo. The process of musicking for both the composer and the listener materializes the relationality between bodies and environment, in which the space is understood affectively and Nature has a central role.
Along the music video, I listening-watching to some of the historical material conditions of my body constructed in multiplicity of vectors. The rhythmical pace of the sounds and images start a soundscape journey of Ecuador‟s geography. During the first 10 seconds of the song, I walk along the bass riff in the rainforest and Coast: I recognize their vegetation that mingles one to another. After few seconds, a distorted male voice speaks to me in Quichua, yet its voice as a vehicle of linguistic expression fails (Dolar 27). The voice is not signical to me, its speechlessness reflects Ecuador‟s coloniality of language that has endorsed the inaccessibility to indigenous cosmology by mestizos, even more, when it is an oral culture. This apartheid not only separates „them (indigenous)‟ from „us (mestizos)‟, but the mestizo itself, since it is my mestiza body that has been historically dismembered.
However, I continue the journey along the voice and the percussion instruments that gradually do a crescendo accompanied by images of: Andean indigenous women inside Amazonia flowers (Fig. 1), waterfalls and vegetation of the Amazonian and Coast region (Fig. 2), and scenes of Ecuador‟s daily life that juxtaposes with nature, such as different markets and their local practices (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4). PONCE 27
Fig. 1: Andean indigenous women inside Amazonia flowers. Prender el Alma. Screenshots, YouTube, Web. 18 March 2018
Fig. 2: Waterfalls and vegetation Prender el Alma. Screenshots, YouTube, Web. 18 March 2018
Fig. 3: Bandas de pueblo (local orchestras) and street market Prender el Alma. Screenshots, YouTube, Web. 18 March 2018
Fig. 4: Juice maker and ceviche (typical food). PONCE 28
Prender el Alma. Screenshots, YouTube, Web. 18 March 2018
As if the music forces me to recall that the market is not a picturesque scene of Latin America‟s landscape: flamboyant of colours and textures, of “exotic” fruits, vegetables, and herbs to be photographed and posted, nor the core of Capitalism; rather it is an ambivalent geographical space in Soja‟s sense. The tianguez (market) has been for us an historical space of encounter and exchange, where indigenous, afros, montuvios and campesinos from all three regions have traveled to exchange their products periodically. The market was and still is not only a place where products are trade, but where traditions and local practices of the past remain. In Lefebvre‟s words paradoxically, the market in Prender el Alma is perceived as a social space: portrayed as a product of social relations between its physical form, instrumental knowledge, and symbolical practice from which the West, Amerindians, and Afros confound (The Production of Space 1991).
The new territory created by the musical piece, as in the whole music, is based on the ecology of the composer‟s space. The music sounds and portrays how the composers‟ ears are drowned in their environment, resonating Murray Shaffer‟s notion of soundscape, as a form of assessing sonic environments (Eisenberg 197). Although within Shaper‟s soundscape sound is central to understanding space and the interaction between humans and their environment (Wrightson 12; Eisenberg 197), it holds a pictorial echo where sounds instead of the images are there to be contemplated/heard, keeping the distance between agency and perception, as Steven Feld argues (“Acoustemology” 15), but also independently to the subject‟s cosmology and power relations.
However, in my process of listening that holds intention28 (Kapchan, “The Splash or Icarus” 5; Rice 99), I am able to listen with other registers, to disseminate some Quichua words and find its meaning in its relation with Ecuador‟s images and sounds, to reactivate the soundscape in a based-process manner that addresses my body corp-oraly. Adriana Maya coined this concept as a form to understand the body as a holder of cultural and historical memories, from which group histories, traditions, and forms of understanding the world can be transmitted through bodily
28Hearing is considered a passive mode of auditory perception; while listening entails an action of attention towards a sound (Rice 99). Listening is grounded and requires hearing, however is not reducible to it and will entail a disposition of the subject (Rice 99). PONCE 29 practices29 (Maya, 20). In this sense, I feel how my body registers sounds that have been corp- oraly passed through me, transforming the soundscape into a livable sonic space where my cultural body is involved and I learn from it.
Karina Borja‟s concept of „paisajes vivos‟ (Ecuadorian living landscapes) (15) provides a decolonial understanding of landscapes to move from soundscape beyond a pictorial affective phenomenon, towards to a space of living practices where landscapes are considered living entities that reflect a life-in-relation with living and nonliving entities with an affective cognation (20–23). Borja claims Ecuadorian urban landscapes work as cohersitive elements between subject and subject, subject and territory, and humans and non-humans through the tie sentiments they produce (26). Leading her to understand space from Amerindian thought30, from which space is understood through myth and rite, and are appropriated by the affect and filiations they produced through livable practices, such as the feats (Borja 18).
Living landscapes are places that gather diverse forms of inhabiting space, in which there is no unity since every landscape has its own character, qualities and sentiments because they have been raised diversely, in different localities by different people (21). Along my previous close readings, I could corroborate the connection between what I consider soundscape with Ecuador‟s place and my life. For Borja, there is a correlation between landscape and our life: “I am landscape,” “we are landscape” in a teaching and learning process (22). Consequently, in my musicking of the three pieces, I learn from the sounds about my cultural traditions, such as the example of feast, the market, but more importantly a relation of reciprocity between people, environment, and territory, which includes humans and nonhumans.
There is an epistemology of sound operating in here, where music exceeds the isolated act of music as moment of art to set in motion a local knowledge, meaning “a mode o place-based consciousness, a place-specific way of endowing the world with meaning”(Escobar 153). The acoustic practice of the „non literate‟: indigenous and afro communities, from which music is
29For the Colombian author, the body for the black slaves in La Nueva Granada was their site of resistance by being the space were they could keep their culture and materialize it through bodily practices (Maya 20). 30Amerindian though is an epistemic and ontological paradigm (Abya Yala cosmovition). It is based on relationality: in the interconnections between the parts and the whole. From this view, the world is perceived as net of relations that knows and expresses its knowledge in upbringings, rituals, and feasts. The relationality circumscribes the principles of: correspondence, complementarity (karywarmikay), vivential-simbolic (myths and rites), and reciprocity (ayni) (Borja, 12). PONCE 30 inseparable from the social functions and works as the means of fastening the community through affection and imagination at the same time as it transmits their knowledge about the world around rituals, feats, agriculture, and production is displayed by the music (Godoy 19,33; Mullo 18,19).
The voice‟s sound, the melody, and the percussion rhythms along with the images compose a music that portrays Ecuador‟s placeness geography, where their rituals, symbolical elements, practices, nature and animals are part of it as a whole:
Fig. 5: Market‟s ecology. Prender el Alma. Screenshot, YouTube, Web. 18 March 2018
The repetitive image of diverse markets, the sounds of nature, animals, and humans, compose a music that is communicated through the senses the sensed, the memory, and a situated knowledge (Periáñez 33). The market is not only the exchange of products, but the result of our relation to our land and crops that keep many local practices alive, such as traditional medicine by the trade of healing herbs and the importance of food as an element of cohesion and identity among all beings. There is an epistemology of the south operating in music that resists the logo forms and is transposed aurally; it uses the sensing as its means of expression and source to produce a significance of the world, thus knowledge. These are perspectives that align with what Iván Periáñez has denominated “epistemología del sentir situado” (epistemology of the situeted sense) (31) and can be framed under De Sousa de Santos‟s „Epistemology of the South‟ as “new forms of process and valorization of valid knowledge (scientific and non- scientific knowledge) and new relationships between different types of knowledge (33). In this PONCE 31 case, from local practices of classes and social groups who have suffered a systematic inequality and discrimination caused by capitalism and colonialism” (“Epistemologías Del Sur” 33).
In this regard, music brings to the surface its two audible techniques and through its sounding gives the mestizos the possibility to access to their local culture and knowledge. For instance, the sounding picture above (Fig.5) teaches me the ayni31 a relation of reciprocity and exchange between the runakuna (humans, or people like humans) and tirakuna (earth-beings), in which both “come into being through the relations that enable them and they, in turn, are able to establish”(De la Cadena 55). It is a daily law of life, practiced among the community between them and with the Pachamama32 and other beings (De la Cadena 55,56; Borja 12) . In the image, humans are present through the campesina woman, as well as the human labor that is contained in the food; nonetheless, the carrots and lettuces are also gifts from the Pachamama, who nourishes us. All beings are together: nature, animals, and people, and the crops lingers the reciprocity relation among two spheres of reality, showing me that “the runa gives to others and receives from them: it is a being for itself and for the other” (own translation Borja 13). Furthermore, the symbolical figure of the balance in the images is not weighting anything, rather is located in the center where humming birds rest and all beings encounter (00:38 00:50).
Along music‟s placeness territory, Nature has its multiple voices that are part of the composer‟s material of expression in Deleuzoguattarian terms, but also of who they are by the relationality in music sounds/depicts (Watsuji 2006; De la Cadena 256). The nature, in Cruz‟ work is not recorded as soundscape and presented as if there were the music, as Shaper‟s composition presupposes (Wrightson 12), rather his music „living soundscapes‟ reveal an intimate relation between place, Nature, and man being–in-together, turning the sonic landscape into a living entity of mutual becoming. Tetsuro Watsuji‟s phenomenological construction of being proposes the subject‟s construction through time and space, in which he argues that the role of environment (climate and geography) is structural element of human existence (9). If environment is considered a material condition of space matters from the very beginning (Soja, Postmodern Geographies 1989) and the environmental particularities entail diverse mental and
31Ayni implies a correlation between two planes of “reality” (Borja 12). 32Pachamama is close to the mother Earth a sacred deity where all entities coexist harmoniously. Under this cosmology, the human body is perceived as a micro cosmos of the Pachamama; therefore, any action would have effects and causality. PONCE 32 body structures, as Watsuji states, then how, as I have been arguing, can they be projected into artwork? And, how does this imply a different understanding of Nature operating in the music?
In my description of Sanación, the sound of the rain forest, whose voices of water, birds, insects, and vegetation orchestrate a polyphonical becoming, turns Nature into a powerful and polyphonic voice among Cruz‟ acoustic assemblage. Following its broader narrative, the entire album is percolated by Nature in several forms that will be displayed and inscribed differently. Echoing a Rancièrean perspective, Timothy Morthon argues the fundamental role of aesthetics is to establish ways of feeling and perceiving Nature. Artists delve into all types of ideas about space and place that hold a Nature narrative content and shape and dissolve within the artwork (Morton 2–4).
For Morthon and Watsuji, Nature, particular ideas of it, and what we want and expect of it is contained in the artwork (Morton 2; Watsuji 209–45). Nonetheless, Watsuji‟s approach shifts the conditions of possibility of some art pieces proposed by Morton‟s into a conditional state from the artist‟s subjectivity, whose idea and the way it perceives Nature is already preconditioned by its body‟s geographical location due to the climatological and geographical impact in its becoming (Watsuji 241). For Watsuji, the artist‟s creative force is manifested in a certain way that cannot be detached from the characteristic of the place it came from (245). This thesis corroborates Lingis‟ argument relating to the environment influence on the body‟s system.
Morthon argues art can exhibit an environmental content and form. The first consists of a direct message about nature (22). For example, this can be seen in many pieces of Prender el Alma album, in particular the ones that are songs, whose lyrics point straight to the importance of and connection to Nature, having an explicit message33. The second one comprises an ambient poetics, responding to nature‟s ideas through the form. They are materialistic practices that are performed and displayed in the artwork as a form that renders an “inside-out form of „situateness‟ rethoric” that focuses on the environment (Morton 32), In this sense, sounds can
33Colibria (female hummingbird) talks about the encounter of a girl who was born from the volcano. Cocha Runa (lake-human) is a tribute song to the water. Finally, Equinoccio (moonlight) talks about the connection between mestizos and the nature‟s four elements: fire, water, earth, and wind. According to Morthon, environmental content could be used by environmentalist as political and cultural response to the current ecological crisis. In fact, Cruz has participated in many festivals with environmental connotations, which turns the reception of its music problematic since in the last three years he has become a worldwide artist and the „ecology trend‟ can play a role in his fame and in the commodification of its content. PONCE 33 operate as the means to locate yourself in and outside of a nature, resonating Gaston Bachelard‟s poetic space, to create a phenomenological connection with it and its environment as a part of being-in-the-world (Bachelard 212–16). Through the imagination and affective dimension of sounds, Cruz and Mancero‟s music delaminates and renders their place unified with the environment, from which Nature is present in both content and form disclosing an ecological form of subjectivity engraved in its composition practice, as the following paragraphs will explain.
Although the last part of the chapter I have focused on Cruz‟s work, if we come back to Mancero‟s musical language we can also hear-see an ecological form in his notion of place and landscape. Neblina de Guápulo is named after a climatological characteristic that defines this area. In the conversation about the piece, he started by telling me the location where the piece was born: “I was close to Guápulo‟s site viewer looking the landscape: how the fog arises and covers the place and trees appear and disappear- when the melody resonated in my head, as if someone was whistling it”34. Here, the fog is crucial for both a physiological characteristic of the place and the way it is perceived by the subject. These two aspects that can be understood in Deleuzoguattarian terms as the percept and affect of the place, they are preserved in Neblina de Guápulo sounds‟ sensation and were reactivated somehow when I was listening to the music. The calm and nostalgic introduction of impressionist sounds locates me at the top where the fog serenely lets you contemplate the view (00:00 00:20). Suddenly, its playfulness shows you Guápulo‟s streets and people: its living and danceable space, yet its unpredictable character starts changing the landscape, arising and spreading gently its brume along the way, covering the roof tiles of colonial houses to reach the top of the trees (00:21 01:50). During minutes of expanding gently, the fog plays with the view: hiding and seeking Guápulo to our eyes (01:30 03:37). It has taken the space fully to vanish unforeseen when the morning has come (03:38 04:06). Soundlessly, the fog, as a climate characteristic, has determined aspects of our quotidian life, of our way to see, hear, and sense Guápulo.
34Mancero, Daniel. Personal Interview. 8 December 2016. PONCE 34
Fig. 6: “Guápulo view” Search. Google. Screenshots, Web. 20 March 2018
Likewise, in Prender el Alma‟s piece men and Nature confound. Despite the electronic sounds increasing their presence, they do not overlap the humanity of the landscape. Contrary, its usage is a tool to enhance and expand its potential, to show the interior of nature‟s multiple voices and expand along the territory, as Guápulos‟s fog. For Watsuji to put an artificial order into nature it means submitting the artificial to nature, not the other way around (229). The human work behind the electronic sounds is always felt it in Cruz‟ entire album.
If we do a meticulous hearing of the sonic, we could listen to how nature‟s sounds are misperceived with the ones “produced” by men. If we extract a fragment from the musical video (02:09 03:40; 02:22 03:59), there is a dialogue between animal voices, humans, and technology. The animal voices: owl, monkeys, and birds become human, or a least there is human phoneme in them, a sort of human breath that ravels the ontology of the sound you just heard. As if Cruz wanted us to question ourselves along the album –using different audible and visual techniques– what sounds are culturally or naturally produced and their nubilous, fictitious, and subjective border. Afterwards, the human melody is a bird‟s chant. For indigenous and afro-cultures it is common to imitate their sound and other animas as the sonic dimension of the everyday, a form of communication and a component of musical expertise (Ochoa Gautier, Aurality 61). PONCE 35
Likewise the sounds are in constant becoming; the lyrics of all the songs: Colibria35, Equinoccio36, and Cocha Runa37 illustrate this imbrication from a discursive perspective; in the following extract of Equinoccio we can read how the narrator transits in various bodies: the human voice talks to you, but its human conditions mutate to the earth and animals:
“It's the jungle that moisturizes my tides They are the rivers of mestizo blood And the jaguar we carry in our minds run strongly through my guts With the yage (Ayaguasca) I'm swimming for your blood As the yagé I serpently go” (01:34 02:05 own translation).
In this song and as in the others, we cannot distinguish an exclusive and steady identity. The body is both, a becoming for Deleuzoguattarian or a multinaturalims in Viveiros de Castro‟s terms (470). Contrary to Multiculturalism which presupposes the unity of one nature and the multiplicity of cultures, multinaturalism implies the multiplicity of natures in a spiritual unity or culture: “Culture and subject are universal whilst nature or the object would be the form of the particular”(470). In this regard, people animals, plants, things are endowed with human connotations, conscious intentionality, and agency differing from the materiality of their bodies, which function as the „clotting‟ of any species (471). This ecological relation occurs for the decolonial listener, for whom the human and not-human interrelate with each other in the sounds and lyrics.
In this regard not only the understanding of Nature would differ, but the position of the subject which, using De la Cadena‟s term is not only human (De la Cadena 256). This is to say, the position of the subject is not necessarily only human and the same for the non-human due to their mutual independency. As the close reading depicts, and as I have argued, the space-of- being-with characteristic of the music‟s placeness reflects how the position of the subject or the
35See Cruz, Nicola. “Colibria.” Prender el Alma, ZZK Records, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRV90c_uWpQ 36 Listening to Cruz, Nicola. “Equinoccio.” Prender el Alma, ZZK Records, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTHaoMLrETI 37Listening to Cruz, Nicola. “Cocha Runa” Prender el Alma, ZZK Records, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_lqOb2lq-M PONCE 36 non-human can be only with the other (De la Cadena 256). This foggy characteristic which overlaps with Nature and Culture and locates in the same plane humans, animals, nature in relations of reciprocity is repeated along Prender el Alma through different living soundscapes that portray multiple perspectives towards nature. There is a constant association between Nature and the divinity or the sacred, as there is for Amerindian and afro cosmologies.
Fig. 7: Virgin inside a waterfall and cross on the top of “Ilaló” volcano. Prender el Alma. Screenshots, YouTube, Web. 25 March 2018
Fig. 8: “Cotopaxi” volcano. Prender el Alma. Screenshots, YouTube, Web. 25 March 2018
The sincretism portaryed between the Catholic religion and Amerindian cosmology represents how Nature is experienced in a betweeness space of deity and Good creation (Gose 2016). Fig.6 depicts a Pachamama that is a mother earth asociated with the Virging Mary as both female fertilites. Moreover, mountains are reurrent images that are accompanied by symbolical elements (fig. 6 and fig.7). For the indigenous certain montains are Apus: montain gods that are spirits or superior divinities that connect the sacred with the mundane world (Gose 10; Borja 85). After the colonial period Apus were a form of resisting and maintaining their culture adopting the symbolical importance and functions of the ancestral mommies and kurakas (political PONCE 37 authorities) (Gose 19). As the indigenous leader Humberto Cholango argues “the Pope should note that our religions NEVER DIED, we learned how to merge our beliefs and symbols with the ones of the invaders and oppressors.”(qtd. in De La Cadena 334). Asserting De la Cadena‟s argument on how practices that might be identified as religious are lifted with the sacred and spiritual: “placing them within historical, earthly, and political concerns of cohabitation between Catholic and non-Catholic, indigenous and nonindigenous”(De La Cadena 335).
For Watsuji, a rational or irraltional undestanding of nature would defy men‟s expetations and exigences about it. For him, facing exuberant nature does not allow men to subjugate and dominate it. Nature‟s irational force exceeds men‟s power to present themselves with an infinitive depth of ethical and religious connotation. However, Nature is also the source of nourishment as the following images depict:
Fig. 9: “Cropping the see” and orange harvest Prender el Alma. Screenshots, YouTube, Web. 25 March 2018
Fig. 10: Copping the land and the diverse grains and corns Prender el Alma. Screenshots, YouTube, Web. 25 March 2018
PONCE 38
Despite Cruz‟ depictions of agrarian life, in which a relation of reciprocity is conceived, it also locates Nature as if its fertility will never cease. There is a paradox in our conception of it, between its subjectual and objectual form. We have never intended to dominate nature, its grandiosity and power is unquestionable; we live together and its unidimensional power sets the limits through earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions that constantly remind us of our smallness and position on the Earth. As consequence, it has produced the development of skills to live in different environments and climates to create and keep forms of cropping since Pre-Columbian times instead of developing and implementing technology to control and modify it (Watsuji 240– 41). However, simultaneously, Nature is seen as infinitive source of materials that explains Ecuador‟s economic model of production: extractivism and exploitation-exportation of raw/agro materials. This ambiguity in the conpcetion of Nataure, following Watsuji‟s though is engraved in the music in its conent and form by being part of the mestizo subjects, who have nurtured in a contradictry space of multiple forms of existence. Therefore, the assembling of two acoustic practices performed by the music entails more than a combination of sounds and rhythms.
Conclusion
Likewise Feld argues that for Bosavi people “sound always becomes and embodies sentiment; sonic materiality is the transformed reverberation of emotional depth” (17), in both types of music a process of transformation and mutual becoming occurs. Departing from their place and its networks of meaning as the anchor, the composers take sounds and rhythms opening their borders without losing their sense of locality to transduce them into a new placeness territory: a musical assemblage that is formed under an ecological relation, in which the environment plays an active part in the composition form.
Music reflects and suggests a relational ontology, in which sound, body, environment, and territory are constructed mutually. As I have shown, music reflects multiple acoustic ecologies operating in the territory, in which the act of listening – the composers and mine – is essential to the transduction of sound. It places the body as the center of experience and production. It is the body that holds the technologies to translate sounds that have passed locally through it: experiencing and sensing the livable soundscape of Ecuador‟s geography. PONCE 39
Furthermore, it is a sound body, which is to say: “a resonant body that is porous that transform to the vibrations of its environment, and correspondingly transforms that environment” (Kapchan, “Body” 38) that accesses the logo form and makes possible a mutual affective encounter between sounds and place. Yangana and Prender el Alma are a way of knowing the place through the sonic environment and sensations, sounding and portraying its practices and relation (Feld 91). They go beyond the reproduction of similar sounds according to each region to establish a relation between the music and the perception of the place in its geographical dimension.
Music allows the subject to position itself: „here‟ or „there‟. Its multiple layers set a boundary around getting inside and outside according to the body. From my affective corp-oreal encounter I am inside its territory, where music overflows my “here and now‟ to make reference to past times, experience, places, and memories endowing non-present realities to be rendered. Music is a de-territorial-territorial practice, and, in the case of Yangana and Prender el Alma, a place-based practice.
PONCE 40
Part „B‟: Listening rhythm„s‟: sounding time„s‟
Submerged in the sounding times of Sanación, the digitalized water drop gathers Nature‟s materials in the beginning of what would be an ongoing rhythmical assemblage. Every instrument displays its own character, whose talea unfolds throughout its sounding. A cyclical movement between the guitar‟s melody and the percussion‟s layers echoes a ceremonial cadence, while the water‟s sound continues ghostly along its linearity (00:51 02:00). Despite their difference in pitch, tempo, and color, the polyphony of sounds seems to merge in rhythmic stresses that link them as continued movement –„as if the rhythm where the place in which the various experiences of time can be assembled without vanishing in the encounter. I felt driven by the music without any separation between the movements of my body and the beats. They are passages of intensity that occupy my body leading it towards unconscious gestures that I have experienced before and my body seems to remember it as part of its habitus. I am dancing the ritual trough Nature, acoustic, and electronic sounds, and the other way around. I am experiencing my past dancing with my present in a temporality that montages fragmentary sounds and images of my cultural memory onto the same surface, waiting to be heard and re- interpreted.
Rhythm synthetizes the materiality of sounds with the abstraction of the interval through time. It creates assemblages between material and non-material elements. It gathers a complex connection of formed matters, such as pitch, timbre, and so on, and the expression of an abstract organization of temporal intervals, providing rhythm its metric dimension (Turestsky 143; Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyda Life 10,61). Within rhythm, time provides the existential form. To make this graspable, imagine that there are two parallel lines as the fig.9 illustrates. In one, there are sounds (air vibrations), and in the other, there is the idea of the interval, of the metric (usually confused with time). Time is in between them. It is what conjugates and contracts the abstraction with the material, creating a particular form, such as quarter, crochet, and so on; a disposition of the material that endows a particular identity, whose aggrupation, conjugation, and repetition constitute rhythm. Thereby, rhythm is time and time is PONCE 41 the main element of rhythm (Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyda Life 2004; Turestsky 2004).
Fig.9: Rhythm. Own elaboration
For something to be rhythmic, it requires a contraction of the moments that will be retained and associated within the present moment. It organizes past, present, and future into a non-teleological arrangement that configures time in a particular disposition and locates the body at the center of perception. Following Phil Turetsky‟s Deleuzian analysis on rhythm, the listener- subject encounters rhythm in what he calls the living present, establishing particular connections between past and future that will occur in parallel (144). The principal movement of music‟s temporal disposition is the contraction of past and future in the present that constitutes the living present, where the pulses are felt and perceived (144–47). This temporal movement echoes a phenomenological and Deleuzian notion of time. For Deleuze, time is not a matter of an empirical succession, rather of an intrinsic quality in which the before and after are brought together in the becoming of the present: “the past is former present, and the future a former present to come” (Time Image 271,275). Similarly, Merleau-Ponty argues the concrete hold on time and subject resides in the living present who interweaves the two consciousness temporalities: “the living present is torn between a past which it takes up and a future which it projects” (388). The existence of the subject will depend on its living present which opens to a past that is no longer living, and on a future which is not yet living (503). Within rhythm‟s living present, the body creates a memory of the pulses‟ repetition that is taken into the present, instituting in this movement the past as such. Nonetheless, the movement also anticipated the succeeding moments connecting them to its expected present, as fig.10 illustrates. This presupposition connects towards the future, in which the expected future, as Turetsky denominates, is brought into the present to materialize phenomenologically rhythm in the living PONCE 42 present. For Turetsky, “past and future moments combine as dimension of an extended or living present constituted by the contraction of moments which connects them” (145).
Fig.10: Experiencing rhythm in time. Own elaboration
Although the perception of rhythm and its complex temporal operation occurs as a mental activity, the rhythm and its beats are felt in our flesh and body. Their resonances go beyond the scope of logic; nevertheless, it contains logic. Rhythm acts upon the body neurologically, corporeally and affectively. The repetitive character of the beats produces patters apprehended by the body activating “mirror-neurons” that synchronizes with the pulses and leads the body towards the replication of the patter through movement, merging with the beats and sounds (Tarr et al. 12–14). The synchronization also takes place affectively; for Iván Periánez rhythm connects the subject‟s senses and the emotions with the music that function as a memory catalyst (39). For the decolonial author, rhythmic memory is a learning technique used by oral traditions to transmit and produce local culture and knowledge (39). In this regard, rhythm and the body are closely tied. Paraphrasing Henry Lefebvre every subject would be the metronome who marks and tells the measures of tempo (9), but also rhythms are engraved in the subject‟s body. Once more, the body is the point of departure but also the point of analysis, where place and time converge.
If we move rhythm structure to a philosophical discourse regarding time, there is similitude in their configuration, function, and operation. In both cases time‟s narrative oscillates from the tangible to the intangible as a major narrative that has intertwined in two planes: the material and the abstract. It is an ethos in which human life and music unfolds. For Rancière the PONCE 43 narrative of time “defines the framework of the world experience that we share with everybody: that which is given as the now of our present, the way in which this present depends on a past or breaks away” (Modern Times 13). By doing so, it defines the way of being in one‟s time, in other words a distribution of humans‟ being and form of being in which one can be in tune or out of tune (13).
Modernity as the world‟s temporality is constituted in the articulation of two planes: the possible, potential, or fiction and the actual or real (Echeverria, La Modernindad 144; Rancière, Modern Times 14,15). The first is seen as the idea of modern temporality, which implies an idealistic idea of human life presented as a future promise: a potential, where humanity addresses the totality of life (Echeverria, La Modernindad 114; Rancière, Modern Times 13–15). The second one responds from the real to the material sphere constituted by the configuration of historical projects and attempts to accomplish the first plane; this is to say that it is to achieve the idealistic idea of Modernity‟s temporality (Echeverria, La Modernindad 144). It is in here where Modernity resides. By the emergence of it in the XVI century there were pluralities of historical projects coexisting at the time and struggling to impose themselves as the dominant project (Echeverria, La Modernindad 144). Among these multiple Modernities, Europe established industrial and capitalist societies as the only possible ones to organize the economic and social life under the domain of instrumental reason and the humanistic discourse (Echeverria 2010; Mignolo 2011; Quijano 2007). This is a paradigm that encloses an anthropocentric comprehension of the world until reaching what Echeverría calls anthropolatry: a tendency of human life to create a world for itself, self-sufficient of the Other, in which the subject constitutes itself apart from the Other, turning the latter into a pure object (La Modernindad 150). Following Cartesian perspectivism, Nature was located as object and a cognitive perspective of a radical dualism was found: divine reason and Nature, where only subjects are bearer of reason, in particular European ones (Quijano 172,173). Europe established a profoundly Eurocentric time with a teleological conception of it, in which its way of being and its form of knowledge was the aim to reach (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2011; De Sousa Santos 2016).
Despite Western Capitalist Modernity‟s marking of the world‟s temporal narration as the hegemonic one (Echeverria 2010; Mignolo 2011; Quijano 2007; Rancière 2017), time is inseparable of space (Watsuji 2006; Lefevbre 2004). For Lefebvre time is localized; every time PONCE 44 is “a relation of a time with a space, a localized time, or if one wishes, a temporalized place”(230), meaning that our form of being, our location is in relation to time‟s disposition: past, present, and future and their connections. Our distribution and form of inhabiting the space is constructed in a complex dialectical relation among space, people, and time (Lefevbre 2006; Rancière 2017). Therefore, each territory has its own temporality that cannot be reduced to Western time.
By departing from the music‟s abstract dimension: its rhythm (time) to the materiality that this encloses, in the present chapter, I will argue that rhythms, due to their structure and operational process, make possible the coexistence of multiple temporalities without colonial relations of powers among them. In other words, an ecology of knowledge from which music will be turned into a site of cultural encounter, providing new possibilities to re-think mestizos being in the world. By analyzing the time of the feast and rite implemented in the music, I will be able to excavate how the mestizo‟s audible frame was historically formed, in addition to a different temporality operating in the music: a baroque ethos as an alternative form to inhabit Western Capitalist Modernity (Echeverria, La Modernindad 14). I will explain how the structure of the rhythm allows music within its baroque ethos to overcome colonial relations to bring different temporalities onto the same surface, and thus forms of being.
i. Ritual and festival sounds
As I argued in the introduction of the chapter, rhythm‟s structure gathers complex connections of formed matters, which will contain an abstract organization of temporal intervals, providing rhythm its metric dimension (Turestsky 143). Despite rhythm in music tents having a larger metric narrative that can be materialized in compasses (4/4, 3/4 6/8, etc.), and sometimes with determined characteristics (such as lento, allegro, andante, and so on), every rhythm is its own constellation whose interior gathers a universe of multiple associations, conjugations, and repetitions. All the diverse rhythm reflected in Yangana and Prender el Alma‟s albums are characterized by the assemblages of several rhythms within one that will move between two types of movements: linear and cyclical, whose multiple combinations reflect that there is no one single spatiotemporal framework; rather, there are multiple temporalities. PONCE 45
Throughout my musicking, there is a repetitive element prompted by the music that goes further from being a feature to being a constitute element of the entire music‟s narrative: a ritualistic-festival dimension lingered in the sounds and rhythms that keep drawing music to its locality accompanied by a particular temporality. If the music placeness is the anchor of music‟s territory, as I have argued previously, rite and feast would be traces of the local cultural identities operating within. In this regard, music would work as site of cultural encounter, ambivalence, and resistance.
Despite the whole musical languages making reference to ritualistic and festive elements, rhythm is the incisive component that brings these temporalities into music. According to Echeverria, human temporality is constitutive of the rhythmical coexistence and tension between the experience of the absolute discontinuity of time, which is to say, the time of extraordinary moments where the singular form of human composes and recomposes, and the time of the ordinary of that form, where it reproduces and propagates (La Modernindad 186). In the extraordinary time, social life is questioned either as a threat to its identity or as possibility for its total realization. Within this time, the general code of the human along with their particular cultural identity are reformulated and reconfigured. Antagonistically, the time of routine guaranties the reproduction of life: its production and consumption in a continual and automatic movement. Quotidian time presents itself as a natural fact counterpoising to the extraordinary. However, quotidian practices open moments or gaps to be occupied by the imaginary plane of the extraordinary practices, moments that Echeverria calls “rupture times” and will work in a rhythmical and cyclical movement acting upon the quotidianity in order to de-re-substantialize the identity of a particular culture or social life (Echeverria, La Modernindad 188,189).
By being an artistic expression placed in imaginary dimension, music is one of those “rupture times.” For Echeverria, similar to Bataille, Bergson, and Deleuze, art practice is one among feast and play that provide a cyclical experience able to rupture the spatiotemporal dimension to modify temporality (Echeverria, La Modernindad 189; O‟Sullivan 48). It closes and reestablishes the sense of the world while it destroys and reconstructs the “naturality” of human by bringing the experience of the imaginary into the plain of the routine (189). Through materials of expression and techniques, the artist would transduce her/his imaginary experience to offer the community the possibility to aestheticized their singular lives. This is to say, they recompose PONCE 46 their quotidian life around the moment of interference of the extraordinary time in the routine time (Echeverria, “El Juego, La Fiesta y El Arte” 426).
If we come back to my introductory description of Sanación, there is a ritualistic sensation within the aesthetic experience that doubly alters the routine‟s temporality. The use of Nature voices has a sacred connotation as I have argued before. For example, chagchas and other percussion instruments connected to Amerindian and Afro festivities are found next to Vasija de Barro‟s resonances that address directly an indigenous ritual. This combination of different times‟ movements renders a ritualism rhythm drawing me to its temporal journey, as a moment of rupture in my everydayness.
Performing a close-linear listening of the piece‟s rhythm elucidates how the ritual time resonates in the piece. There are five main sections of linear and cyclical movements in the totality of one rhythm. The first one will be the piece‟s introduction (00:00 00:30), whose digitalized sound will establish the pieces‟ linear rhythm: cadential and smooth (⁴/₄ 텟 텠 텭 텡 텟 턽), echoing a danzante rhythm, although this time it keeps the tempo for profane listeners to dance their own modern ritual and not the sacred-religious festivities. A cyclical movement between the guitar and the percussion follows in the next 01:30 minutes (00:30 02:00), in which the melodic patter will repeat over and over adhering new sounds in every cycle until reaching a transitional passage that holds the sensation in pause (02:00 02:16). Its digital sounds transport me to a virtual space, in which I am received by a rhythmic lower frequency contrapunted by Nature‟s sounds (02:16 03:14). Once again, it is the force of the percussion through tambourine that intensifies the pace in a horizontal, strong, and straightforward movement, while the low digital sound repeats its melody and the previous leitmotifs start echoing cyclically, expanded by the carrying of past sounds. Two linearities and circularities move together until their climax (03:15). As an effect, I felt driven by the music without any separation between the movements of my body and the beats, experiencing music in its dance form while my cultural memory is triggered: my past, present, and body are projected into those temporal sounds. Its affects affect upon my body producing a symbiosis between me and the music. As type of ritualistic trance experience, in which the object‟s objectivity, in this case music, and the subject‟s subjectivity reach the imaginary dimension confounding their boundaries (Echeverria, “El Juego, La Fiesta y El Arte” 425). Gradually, the movement‟s curvature starts to align itself with the same flux of the PONCE 47 introduction. Now the time is linear again, as if the music prepares you for the reproduction of your daily life activities. Gently, the linearity ends with the initial rhythm and melody, reminding the listener of its departure point, and me of my culture albeit transformed (03:54 04:16).
For Lefebvre and Rancière, linearity represents the temporality of reproduction: the repetition of our daily activities marked by work and institutions. Institutions that for a decolonial perspective materialize the Modernity project and are the operational tools of power, to guaranty the durability of Eurocentric-capitalist modernity reaffirming a teleological time (Rancière 15–17; Lefevbre 2004). While the cyclical would be more associated to cosmos-nature and communal temporalities, day-nigh, seasons, and so on are repetitive time, yet do not occur under the logic of the instrumental reason. Lastly, the ritual for Lefebvre has its own particular movement and time: a combination of both in a double relation with rhythm (Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyda Life 30).
Sanación‟s rhythmical assemblage arranges the coexistence of the two rhythmical movements opening up a rupture in temporal experience consonantly with the ritual‟s time. The linearity of the routine time is taken into the music as a point of departure; establishing a quaternary time (4/4) is its general tempo. Like the refrain‟s anchor it is transformed and overlapped by the extraordinary circular movement that includes a combination proper to the ritual time. Therein, the linearity differs from Lefebvre‟s linear time, since many of them resemble nature‟s voices, given the sensation of the listener is not of a repetitive sound due to nature‟s infinitive sonic archive and the fact that a new sound is added each time. However, nature and its unnamable sounds are part of our routine, of the daily sounds that we encounter in our daily life practices. In this sense, linearity is also a routine time. In fact there are some fragments where the digital sounds resemble the modern and technological character of our urban spaces, yet the nature of the sound keeps reminding us of the geography in which they are located. Meanwhile, the cyclical movements performed by traditional instruments in combination with the melody‟s traditional echo have a non-instrumental logic. The cycle comes from the humans and not from nature, which for my body is associated with indigenous and Afro festivities as a part of my habitus, provoking a bodily reaction.
According to my cultural memory, dance becomes the habitual gesture in response to the ritualistic rhythm created by Sanación. These „kinecepts‟ – habitual bodily practices – that are PONCE 48 performed unconsciously as gestures of the body to which they belong (Turestsky 145); for my decolonial reading they respond to my form of listening by being the body as the listening organ. The bodily reactions are indeed unconscious. Its meaning can be perceived as the enactment of the habitus and its modus operandi (Bourdieu 69). According to Bourdieu, habitus is: “a subjective but non-individual system of internalized structures, common schemes of perception, connections and actions”(60) that make possible the production of thought, perception, and actions inherited by the particular historical and social conditions of its production, in which those conditions will be also their limits (55-57). In this regard, the habitus is both the product and the enactment of history that produces individual and collective practices in concordance with the schemes engendered to maintain the same structure (57).
The body: its schemes of actions em-body the habitus and thus the incorporation of history behind it (69). For Bourdieu the body develops muscular patters, behaviors, and movements that simultaneously makes it and mirrors the logic of the schemes produced by the habitus. The body, since its birth, automatizes itself through a mechanical process of learning that assimilates its surrounding. This is precisely what makes the habitus imperceptible and obscure from our consciousness (69). Its continued repetitions along history (subjects‟ past) internalizes the habitus as a second nature, forgetting it is history-embodiment.
In this case, my awareness of the disposition of the movements as the ritual´s rhythm effect and consciousness impulse of the composers to bring the feast and rite to the music – as stated in the first chapter –, discloses a fissure in the modus operandi of the musical habitus. This awareness is produced by the displacement of the space where the ritual rhythm is performed, leading us to question why the rite and feast are dissonant elements for music that makes me notice the practice of habitual listening. What do I refer to by a spatial dislocation? Why are the rite and feats repetitive elements in Yangana and Prender el Alma, and what are their political and subjective implications?
ii. Resounding the historical fracture: a dichotomic ear
I introduced previously how the territory‟s aural frame responds to two forms of audible techniques: the lettered elite and the peoples historically considered "non-literate” (Ochoa PONCE 49
Gautier, Aurality 4; Holguín and Shifres 46). These two forms of listening-sounding could be understood as two different audible habiti that have worked as lasting transportable disposition systems integrating the past and present experiences into its matrix of perception (Bourdieu 54). To this extent, it is necessary to trace back briefly into the historico-material construction of habitus‟ rhythm to understand how the inclusion or exclusion of the rite and feats shed light to a division between writing/orality as two diverse epistemologies. To one extent, this crystalizes the colonial construction of this division in order to legitimize Western literacy culture and its mode of production, transmission and storing of knowledge as the valid and universal one. To the other, it reflects how there is another understanding of sound operating beyond Western cosmology (Mignolo 1995).
The audible fame of the mestizo has two incisive moments in its formation that created and institutionalized the two forms of listening. In the early stage of colonization, the delegitimization of local music was related to Christianity. For the Catholic Church, indigenous and black music were considered “barbaric” because it led people to participate in collective immoral acts, reinforcing their “barbaric” condition. Within this period, the Jesuit chronicles show how rhythm was the central element to describe Indigenous and Afro music either as the source of producing the “barbaric gathering” or as an element of admiration38. Music inferiority receded in its social function, rather than the music per se because it was directly related to the myths, feats, daily life practices as forms of transmitting, connecting, and experiencing the local culture and cosmology (Hernández Salgar 248). Music as the weaver space between the time of routine and the extraordinary, the sacred and the mundane takes place in festivities and daily practices, which were condemned despite having what we could describe as a similar structural function within Catholic religion. The evangelization process colonized the content of music, in addition to disciplined music‟s spatial articulation and performance to Catholic religious practices, notwithstanding the sacrality of the music not being removed.
Despite the valorization of music being based on religious aspects, it reinforced the notion of race in terms of culture: “being <
38For a detailed work of the archival in Nueva Granada see Hernández, Oscar. “Colonialidad y Poscolonialidad Musical en Colombia.” Latin American Music Review, vol. 28, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2007, pp.247-270 https://doi.org/10.1353/lat.2007.0030. Access 2 June 2017. PONCE 50 certificates of nobility, modes of behavior (...) and forms of producing and transmitting knowledge” (Hernández Salgar 249). In this regard, music reinforced the „Other‟ discourse within the logic of human/non-humans coined by Silvia Wynter. As she sustains, non-existence or non-human is produced under the form of insuperable inferiority legitimized under two discourses: Christianity and Rationality (Wynter 2003).
The introduction of rational and aesthetic discourse into music during the late XVIII-XIX century exacerbated music‟s division adding a new element that established an episteme of sound ingrained until now as the aural reference. By XVIII century the consolidation of the notation system introduced by the Jesuits was part of trope and linguistic discourse to contribute to the establishment of literacy as the superior model of culture, but also as the only way to inscribe, produce, and transmit knowledge39 (Mignolo, Darker Side of Renaissance: 44–46; Holguín and Shifres 44,45; Castro-Gomez 26–28). Approaching music in terms of scores implied the creation of a meta-language to mediate the access and understanding of it in a logo form that engrained an evolutionary approach of music (Holguín and Shifres 44). This positivist view of music as a science promulgated music in terms of conceptualization defined by qualities such as pitch, timbre, tempo and so on, based on tonal harmony as its structure. Categories considered – until now- as universal futures that reflected the development of music from rhythmic to tonal harmony (Hernández Salgar 253). We could say that in the same manner Europe established writing as alphabetic and is indistinguishable from the book; the music alphabet was the rules of tonal harmony and the scores were the books to be stored and learn: “the body of knowledge” (Mignolo, Darker Side of Renaissance 77,79).
In addition to the positivist approach that circulated in music, the notion of music in relation to the aesthetic discourse influenced the delegitimization of local music (Mignolo and Gomez 2012; Santamaría 2007). The Hegelian idealism and Kantian universalism of beauty was put into motion into art discourse. Despite many musicologists having stated the variety of approaches regarding music in terms of aesthetic and the possibilities to some approaches to question the idea of universality (Karnes 3–16 2008; Titus, “The Advance of Musical Scholarship” 157–74),
39 According to Marx Weber, the rationalized forms of culture were considered “the most elevated since they allow men to reflect upon himself and recognize his own spiritual vocation. Human groups that have not been able to accede to the reflexivity of high culture remain rooted in "youth," and find themselves in need of the "illumination" radiating from lettered people” (ctq. in Castro-Gomez 25). PONCE 51 in Latina America the mainstream aesthetic music discourse reinforced the notion of universality and the location of Europe and its music as the ideal to be followed (Estévez 2008, 2015; Hernández Salgar 2007; Holguín and Shifres 2015; Santamaría 2007; Castro-Gomez 29). Consequently, the zero point in music was founded; academic music within the aesthetic form ingrained the locus of enunciation of Western European Culture that presents itself as universal endorsed by science and philosophy, of a subject placed out of time and space. As Christopher Small argues, modern philosophy and art have prevailed music‟s understanding as a thing whose inner and meaning is “truly” achieved through the study of its scores, relegating it to a secondary plain the role of listening and performance (4).
In this regard local music was delegitimized in its sonic features due to its “simplicity”, “primitivism”, and “ugly” sounds, leading to implement disciplinary practices to literate or study the “true art”(Godoy 170). Music Conservatories, such as French model of schools were the institutions in charge of setting the distinction between art and handicraft practices, besides teaching and determining what knowledge is and what it is not (Santamaría 199). They entrenched the division between orality and writing as two distinct and oppositional forms to construct, carry, and store knowledge in relation to music, in which the latter appeared to be the evolution of the first one (Mignolo, Darker Side of Renaissance 213). In the case of Ecuador, this institution was founded in the late XIX century under the Civilization Cultural Project with the aim of defeating „barbarism‟ (popular expressions) to achieve an European culture40 (Godoy 170). With all these changes, music was placed into a secular discourse, from which its ritualism and festive dimensions were completely dismembered from the sonic experience under the discourse of art, expanding the gap between it and “popular” or tradition forms. By the end of XIX century, a solid hierarchical dichotomy between the‟ high‟ art of the conqueror, representing the symbolical capital of the “white man” morally correct and academic; and the popular art from the conquered: local, “barbaric”, and “simple” condemned to orality and inferiority, and with it, to a particular form to constructing knowledge was formed (Quijano 2007; Holguín and Shifres 40).
40For the president Garcia Moreno, Ecuador should have followed the French culture as its paradigm. The local elites were in charged to „civilize‟ the „illiterate,‟ who listen to music that were considered noisy, loudly, and bad taste (Godoy 159). For the elites, the authentic music was the European academic music that only could be taught in Conservatories, explaining the prohibition of performing Ecuadorian popular in the Conservatory during the XIX century (Godoy 170). PONCE 52
On the other hand, black and indigenous communities continued producing their own music inscribed in myth, rituality, and festivity despite systemic violence and domination (Mullo 18). Although coloniality repressed and destroy local cultures, indigenous and afro communities found modes of resistance to preserve their cultures recoded with some western codes, mainly by the Catholic discourse. In the previous section, I referenced the syncretism between Amerindian Cosmology and Catholicism to explain how nature and other elements as the market hold an ambivalent meaning in their representation. This to say, they represent more than a thing: there is a factual connection to the “real”, but there is another meaning or an exceeding representation that resides in the symbolical rather than the signal (Gruzinski 14; Poole 2–4), which is registered on another plane accessible by and through the body. For instance, the Arrullos are Afro version of the Villancicos – Spanish-Catholic songs sung during nativity. For the afro communities these songs hide rituals to put into motion their cosmology: they are songs for the living and dead, divine and human, where the opposition between the spiritual against the carnal is revealed, as well as the ardency of the devil figure as a transgressor of the quotidian. Hereof, music and singing are the only elements capable of restoring the balance (Mullo 192).
For the „non-literate,‟ music was and still is a gathering space of this ambivalent and resistance site, but also a way of transmitting their cultural memory and producing knowledge of the world framed under the ritual and feast. Generally, rituals are repetitive social practices that bring to the surface the deepest values of a group. Through them, communities order, recreate, reproduce, restore, and renovate their symbolical practices and social relations in a recognized and determined time and space and usually accompanied by the feast or are feats (León Cobo 25; Guerrero Arias 14,20; Geertz 2010). According to the ethnomusicologist Juan Mullo: “their sonorous world: the catarchical chants, the black Arrullos, the sacred chant or Anent Shuar, the Andean Yaravies, etc. are symbolic expressions in action, it is a form to come back and be closer to nature” (own translation 18). Indigenous, afro, and lately popular mestizo music have festival and ritual cycle as the core of the music. Despite the calendar mainly responding to Christian festivities and festive cycles, they are synchronized with their own cosmology. Music‟s chants and dances have a diverse social function according to time and spaces, always related to religious and agrarian time (Mullo 17; Godoy 19,33). For the “traditional” and “popular” music, the rhythm of their music will continue being the space where people gather and their framework of the world is set in motion. PONCE 53
Under this historical contextualization, the Ecuadorian audible frame was constructed under a refracted rhythm marked by colonial relations of power. Equally to rhythm-time, the demarcation between “academic” vs. “popular” or “traditional” carried a distribution of people and filiations associated with sonic features of each sphere. This can explain why Ecuadorian music language has been characterized by a division of the sonic that has produced internal borders in its territory. In this regard, the mestizos‟ aural frame has been mark by a binary logic „I‟ versus the „Other‟, where the „I‟ is located in the literate sphere, while the „Other‟ in the “non- literary”. However, this division encloses structures of domination which is part of the mestizo‟s inner self, given that he is both. As a result, the music produced by them has been characterized by racial, social, and political connotations, in which “whiteness” has been a characteristic of the genres produced by them, such as type of pasillos or pasacalles (Mullo 17,18; Wong 2).
In a Bourdieusean sense, these genres as one of music‟s materiality or the lack of popular-traditional music in the academic music‟s repertoire are part of the habitus and an example of that which has disciplined people‟s ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. They are an internalized form of domination that reproduces a hierarchical social order at the racial, social, and economic level: an ethno-cultural/social system of classification conducted by Ecuadorian cultural institutions as well as their own subjects, in which indigenous, blacks, and popular mestizos have being constructed as the „Other‟41 (Silva 24–27; Wong 74; Roitman and Oviedo 2016).
For Carlos de la Torres, there are victims of themselves: mestizos, indigenous, and blacks who produce and reproduce “racial rituals” within culture, perpetuating spaces of ethnic domination to differentiate between „whites‟ and the mentioned „Others‟ and reaffirming their loyalty to occident (ctq. in Silva 29). As an outcome, the music has produced a “negative ethnic identity” in the mestizo subjectivity: a rejection and/or low esteem for their culture caused by a rupture in their inner self; in the public sphere they follow the dominant culture whitening their identity, while in the quotidian or private sphere they experience their cultural values as tradition (Wong 75,76; Espinosa 2005)
41Until today, for the upper-middle-class the notion of Ecuadorian national music excludes genres associated with indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian population since their music is inferred with bad taste, vulgarity, and simplicity, illustrating how the habitus enacts the past (Wong 3; Godoy). PONCE 54
Ann Stoler‟s notion of internal frontier as an ambiguous and contradictory concept that inflects good will at the same time as it produces violence and exclusion provides some theoretical framework to understand how music as refracted rhythm goes beyond a conceptual understating to mobilize a power discourse within the tangible and the intangible (Stoler, “KeyNoteˮ). Like an internal frontier, music‟s rhythm has touched the material world by its capability to set up an internal spatial distribution placing and displacing bodies, fostering a possible “us” and “them” that will make some citizens more „familiar‟ while others more akin to „strangers‟. It also affects the intangible space of sensory regime, creating particular sentiments and sensibilities imprinted in the subjects. It operates internally to distribute individually and collectively certain demarcations, while maintaining a unifying contour, producing division and distinction within the same territory (Stoler, “KeyNoteˮ).
The problem here, pushing Stoler‟s concept is that the fracture relies on the public sphere and in the subject‟s subjectivity. The affective sediments created by music categorization have contributed to the production of self-narration upon a hierarchical difference, in which the refracted rhythm will be present in the music and the mestizos‟ inner self. In an interview about this Yangana Mancero comments: “I arrive into a point that I did not know where my place on music was” (Editorial, “Yangana un andino cosmopolitaˮ). The disconnection between the music he heard at home, at the streets, the music of the local culture was completely separated from his musical formation and his practice as academic musician, leading towards an inner crisis and to and internal seek for its “musical origins” (Editorial, “Yangana un andino cosmopolitaˮ). Therefore, there is a colonization of living experience that is reflected in the music language commonly used by the mestizos, what Maldonado Torres refers to coloniality of being (242). Music as acoustic language is also the place where knowledge is inscribed, as my argument on Ochoa‟s aurality and Feld‟s acoustemology has claimed; if language is something that humans beings are, then coloniality of power and of knowledge thus infers the coloniality of being (424). However, what happens if the language is modified and the music‟s territory presents two sound epistemes operating in the language, as the previous section presented? If the configuration of spatiotemporal changes, can also its subjects? PONCE 55
iii. Fracturing the habitus: restoring new times. From the ritual and festive time to the aesthetization of life
Under this contextual frame, the implementation of the feast and rite as a constituent of this new sonic language not only unsettles the listening habitus, but implies a reconfiguration of language, reflecting a new acoustic practice that emerges from another temporality. In Yangana and Prender el Alma, the rhythm is not fractured; on the contrary, it allows for the coexistence of multiple times operating simultaneously in a unity without hierarchies among them. In the following section, I will argue how rhythm‟s structure and its way of functioning in combination with the baroque temporality makes possible the transformation of the internal frontier into an ambivalent site, an intermediate space, as Homi Bhabha suggests, that provides the ground to elaborate strategies of subjectivity, individual or communal, in which new signs of identity could emerge (Bhabha 1994).
By reactivating these elements banned from the academic music, the new musical language produces a disruption in the categorization of music and its spatial distribution. A decolonization of the art form, where the boundaries between academic or western music and indigenous, afro or popular music confound, clashing with the habitus of the two audible techniques. There is a decolonial de-territorialization of both spheres (academic-traditional), which provides more materials of expression to enhance its potential, to subsequently opens its borders to allow a re-territorialization process creating more connections and alliances beyond its territory. In the case of Prender el Alma, there is an amerindianization of the western feast and a westernization of traditional rite. The ritualistic setting prompted by the use of instruments, nature sounds, the circular and linear rhythmic movements, the cultural references, and so on, creates a different atmosphere: more spiritual, sacred, connected to nature within the electronic sounds and beats that gather everything seemingly dissimilar in unity. The „tradition‟ invades a technological, modern, global, and manly for our country‟s „white milieu‟ to recode and transform, making possible new affordances. Simultaneously, the rite is displaced from its religious sacrality to secular discourse. Rite‟s collective operation and function disappears for the majority of listeners, and the music pieces are taken into a separated sphere for the listener‟s enjoyment, in addition to its insertion into the cultural industry, playing tightrope to be drained by the commodity. The rite during the listening, it is not only an exclusive practice of Afro or PONCE 56 indigenous communities within a religious or agrarian setting, but it is brought to our inner self to reconfigure our time‟s audible practice.
Similarly, in Yangana there is an aesthetization of the quotidian life and a festivization of the art (music). All of its pieces are Ecuador‟s places, aspects, elements or activities. His impressionist and expressionist character share the places‟ landscapes and experiences through sonic expressions that compose „living soundscapes,‟ argued in the first chapter. Using Echeverria‟s words, it provides an aesthetic experience of the places and activities people encounter in their daily life frame by a festive sensation and quality. All the places, elements or traditions are invaded by traditional rhythms converting them into a double expression artifact, in which the festive component gathers the emotions of the collective. The festival sound turns the piece into a collective work through which societies weave community. It reminds mestizo listeners of their locality through their own affects (León Cobo 9; Guerrero Arias 13,16; Pujol Cruells 36). Consequently, in both pieces of music the new language shows how the artists are located as an instrument of the festive and the festive as an artistic material (Echeverria, La Modernindad 220), producing a re-signification of the artwork that cannot be enclosed only inside a Western understanding nor in Amerindian though. There is a dialogue among them; this is to say, an ecology of knowledges that comes along with a radical compresence, meaning when the practices and the agents of “practices and agents on both side of the abyssal line are contemporaneity granted” (De Sousa Santos, “Ecologies of Knowledge” 191), reflecting the contemporaries of multiple temporality. In this case, shedding light on another temporality operating in the music.
Echeverria and De Sousa Santos propose understanding the Baroque as part of one of the ethos produced by the development of Western Capitalist Modernity (Echeverria, La Modernindad 90; De Sousa Santos, Conocer Desde El Sur 178). For the authors, the particular social-historical conditions will determine how each geographical region deals with the unbearable contradictions of the capitalist form of reproduction (Echeverria, La Modernindad 15; De Sousa Santos, Conocer Desde El Sur 178). This would correspond to the material plane of Modernity‟s temporality that I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, which in the case of Latin America, was determined by a historical project characterized by the discontinuity of American life with respect to European life and pre-Hispanic life due to the Conquer and the colonization (Echeverria, La Modernindad 81,82). For Echeverria, there is an impossibility to PONCE 57 recreate a European life by the criollos due to the presence and resistance of local cultures. Neither can we reproduce an Amerindian life as the reconstruction of the pre-Hispanic life due to the colonial massacres and the colonization of their culture. This civilizatory survival crisis led the diverse mestizos to construct something different than they would have expected: a Europe that never existed before them, a different Europe: a 'Latin-American' one constructed by the European codes with the ruins of the pre-Hispanic, plus the African codes brought by the enslaved, which for Echeverria is the fabulation of a non-existent Europe, a baroque project in motion (82).
Echeverria argues there is an intention for the baroque to represent the world, yet in the action of it, the signification of the representation radicalizes and liberates from the canonical paradigm, positioning itself as the simulacrum of it42 (La Modernindad 212,213). This implies that Yangana and Prender el Alma operates in a different ethos where the temporality represented in the music‟s rhythm already echoes a notion of Deleuze‟s fabulation characterized by the activation of “the „powers of the false‟ to falsify orthodox truths in the process of generating emergent truths, and in doing so, to summon forth a „people to come” (Bogue 81). Notwithstanding, the “truth” in which the mestizo‟s subjectivity emerged and entailed colonial power relations as the pillar of its narration, previously exposed, asserting Deleuze‟s argument of the unknowing future in this process (Bogue 82).
However, the aesthetization of daily life practices carried out by the music that locates the feast and the rite as their central elements would not only be an effect of the baroque ethos‟ obsession for placing the enjoyment of beauty as a condition for everyday experience (Echeverria, La Modernindad 186), but also of two different epistemes of sounds acting simultaneously. Both musical languages set up a decolonial musical practice, in which although their becoming depart from the art-aesthetic domain, they are not restricted to this terrain, spreading themselves into other life‟ spheres as an operation tool to think and rethink the memory, the culture, and our collective subjectivity.
42 For Echeverria, the baroque ethos and subjectivity are not committed to the modern civilizational project of productivity: The baroque does not sacrifices to the use‟s value, but it is not revealed against the valorization of value, it takes value in an absurd and paradoxical way: it escapes to live another world within this world, investing its productive energy in the construction of it by locating the feast, art, and play as its principal axes (39). PONCE 58
The following close listenings will crystalize how the combination of the baroque ethos with its rhythm‟s structure/functioning providing the ground for a new fabulation of time, in which the music works as a form of knowing-in-action (Feld, “Acoustemology” 13). Through sounds, the music transmits local knowledge and culture and with the sound provided, the place base-listener, in this case me, could reconstruct memories and a cultural past, some of which banned from the official history. Henceforth, a form of knowing that can be framed under the concept of epistemología del sentir situado (epistemology of the situated senses) coined by decolonial scholar Iván Periánez as a set of “situated knowledge which is result of vernacular learning, interpersonal relationships and collective social reproduction” (30).
Based on Baroque‟s pictorial art, Martin Jay proposes a baroque scope regime operating in Modernity‟s time: a “vision sought to represent the unrepresentable and, necessarily failing, produced the melancholy as characteristic of the Baroque sensibility” (17). Opacity, indecipherability, theatricality, dramaticality, affective, carnivals, and fragmentary are some of the characterizations of this art regime (Jay 17,18; Echeverria, La Modernindad 207–221), in which music and its particular features: polyphony, ornament, and basso continuo will be offered for a Deleuzean reading of the uniqueness of this art regime as an operative function to a trait (The Fold 3), in this case to a mode being in and inhabiting Modernity from Latin America that shed light on the necessity of an alter modernity ( Echeverria, La Modernindad 14,15).
Baroque music is marked by contradictions and ambivalent intentions: a continual play between the religious and rationality, sacred and profane, subject and world (Beltrando 294,295), and in this case, Western and Amerindian culture that materializes under its musical forms, creating its own aesthetic. It represents and differentiates the folds of its ornaments into two ways: the corrugations of the matter and the fold‟s soul to reflect its multiplicity that can be folded in many ways (Deleuze, The Fold 3,4); as Deleuze argues referring to Boulez, it is “the polyphony of polyphonies” (The Fold 83). It is a new kind of story, as my close reading will note, where the “description replaces the object, the concept becomes narrative, and the subject becomes the point of view or the subject of expression” (The Fold 127).
In Both Mancero and Cruz many of the barroque‟s characteristics are present. Driven by their „Place‟, their music represents their routine time reconfigured by the extraordinary time of art and of the feats and rite. By bringing new elements from Ecuador‟s geography under two PONCE 59 audible techniques, there is an assemblages of rhythms that will bring a proliferation of symbols, objects, and sounds whose effects do not necessarily remain linked or fixed to a particular code or referent (significance), like baroque‟s open code: self- focused, multiple, and manipulated by emotions (Jay 17,18; Deleuze, The Fold 34). As I already exposed in the first chapter, there are many ambiguities and contradictions sounded by the music where the artificial is located as natural, the sacred as human or natural, the nature as culture and vice versa. Likewise in baroque art, the music language has ambivalence as its core, disintegrating any monolithic constructions to let their fragments be used and decoded in new relations (De Sousa Santos, Conocer Desde El Sur 181; Echeverria, La Modernindad 215). In turn, the music blurs the inside and the outside of the object. Therein, the subject/object diffuses, given that as the object becomes objectile the subject becomes „superject‟ (Deleuze, The Fold 20). This is to say, the subject only exists in the music and the music only in the performance, in the case of the musicians, and in the narration for me as its listener. Henceforth, the point of view of variation will be the condition of a baroque art, not its consequence (Deleuze, The Fold 20).
Prender el Alma‟s combination of sonic and visual rhythms creates a story-rhythmical time where the music becomes a composition of the senses: audible and sight come together to navigate into the sounding cartography of the composer and his place. The music materialized in images (sound-images) follow music‟s rhythm43. The music video departs from nature, from which the camera will move forward and the music‟s electronic bass line will be the repetitive melody to mark the pace of the path, equally to the baroques‟ basso continue that allows other sounds and visual voices to create their own melodies without harnessing each other (Deleuze, The Fold 81). Comparable to passages of a travel diary, the narrator takes us to the music‟s territory with its own temporality, where fragmentary moments, places, practices, and people‟s routines assemble in the electronic melody and the multiple percussion patters: the multiplicity of agrarian lives coexisting within the city; the Catholic with the Apus and the Pachamama, all in the same image confounding their cultural boundaries. Under the linear and rhythmic rhythm of music, the subjective travels horizontally, vertically and circularly. Both sound and image are moving commensurably, in a resignulaization process whose becoming is determined by the
43 I take the idea of Deleuze‟s sound image,but inverted: it is not the sound that becomes image, rather the images that function within the rhythm structure of time. They imaged the sound although they have their own plot (Time Image 278). PONCE 60 before and after. The sounded journey is the montage of the multiplicity of the fragmented images and sounds exposed in close ups that center the sensation in the present, where the time of the living presented is the one proposed by the music‟s rhythm.
This temporality movement characteristic of rhythm allows mestizos to access the past from a phenomenological encounter, in which a reconstruction/recreation through memory is possible. The following close reading of fig.11 exposes how the memory within the new acoustic practice provides the material for new connections at the symbolical and effective level that work also at the visual level, in consonance with baroque‟s aim of staging the emotions, affects, contradictions, and ambiguities of the world, rather than representing its pure materiality (Echeverria, La Modernindad 213).
Fig. 11: Archeological figure. Prender el Alma. Screenshots, YouTube, Web. 5 May 2018
A pre-Columbian archeological figure is the central element of both images, reminding us about our pre-Hispanic past. The silence of my knowledge about Jama Coaque‟s culture and the indigenous history resonates louder than the digital music, whose marked rhythm of 4/4 pushes me to gallop through its sound-images. The archeological figure brings the past into the present. In the left footage, the past is simultaneously with and is the present. The figure shares the same territory with the juice maker, a sonic territory that is simultaneously the zone of alliance between them and the product of that past, as the man is. Paradoxically, the figure‟s type of representation loses its anchor in its past as a resemblance of an indigenous coastal culture, to find its meaning in its relation with the present: the modernized traditional sounds and the juice maker, whose afro descendant phenotype does not match the Jama Coaque‟s stereotype. Here, PONCE 61 the figure passes to represent a traditional past which is actively lived and performed by the people through their daily life practices: artisan and pre-industrial that resemble an agrarian life that amalgamate with modern aspects, synchronizing with the music‟s rhythm whose technological sounds remind us of the territory‟s multitemporal rhythms. On the contrary, in the right footage, visually, the figure is separated by a glass, equally to the silent collection of Ecuador‟s National Museum. The gap between the past and present has the sonic territory‟s nature as the only communal ground. Nature appears visually and sonically as the fog in between the modern electronic sound and the traditional sounds, as the inaudibly sediment that keeps them close. The image‟s few seconds exposure confronts me with a reminder its history; however, the meager knowledge about them in the official history would produce what Olivia Bloechl calls a deconstructive approach to history and memory by the subjects: “...discourses and performances that seem to lack any memory of colonial violence often bear traces of such a witness, which is not available for translation as historical fact or interpretation, but whose silence itself opens these discourses and performances to deconstruction” (10).
The encounter with the colonial silence leads me to find its significance in between my personal and collective experiences, generating Turino‟s indexical understanding (8), which in this case echoes Homi Bhabha‟s notion of subaltern memory (qtd. in Bloechl 6). For Bhabha, subaltern signification emerges in the gap between what is narrated by the nation‟s narration - whose plot without place and time is to deny its ethno-cultural-social system of classification- and the person‟s own experiences. In this fissure, the narration does not anchor anymore in the past nor is generic. It is brought into the subject‟s „now‟, opening itself for new significations by the subject who confronts the contradictions and the missing parts (202,203). For Bhabha, subaltern signification “indicates cultural memory that is barred from being plausible knowledge, but that also ensures the impossibility of secure memory by virtue of its exclusion” (qtd. in Bloechl 6) by not being part of the official narration and having a form that cannot be inserted as history material. In this regard, music‟s reconstruction of the past produces partially to what Dipesh Chakrabarty, denominates “subaltern past,” a place inaccessible by the dominant history: “subaltern pasts represent moments or points at which the archive that the historian mines develops a degree of intractability with respect to the aims of professional history" (qtd. in Bloechl 11). Subaltern pasts resist historization by finding no academic practices to reproduce and transmit their past, such as “forms of memory that act as limits beyond which historical PONCE 62 knowledge cannot lay claim to authority, to being "good history" (qtd. in Bloechl 11). This juxtaposition of times and subjects dim their division, as the baroque‟s sfumato that blurs the contours of the past, future, and present bringing a temporality of irruption that activates the surprise and desire as the two mobilizing elements, resulting in the exposure of the ambivalence between real and fiction (De Sousa Santos 182,183; Echeverria, La Modernindad 195).
The reconstruction of the past through memory fostered by the rhythm implies the primacy of the body as a center of perception. Turetsky affirms within rhythm‟s structure: “the past is the medium in which memory focuses on a particular former present. The past is never itself presented, but rather is a condition of representation giving it an extra dimension in which reflection may occur” (147). This phenomenological understanding of the rhythm, where the body experiences the pulses and the memory of them, as a part of its habitus, it is also present in my listening of Neblina de Guápulo, which also reflects a set of connections that transgress representation in its conventional form to re-think it under a different paradigm without dismissing it.
The rhythm of Neblina de Guápulo is an albazo, an albazo that is and is not. If we listen to the piano‟s introduction, sonorously it does not resemble it, yet the piano already presents F major as the tonality of the upcoming albazo‟s pentahonic melody and plays slowly within a 6/8 time (albazo‟s rhythm). During section A the albazo unfolds vividly (00:20 01:29), dance is the first automatic reaction of the body followed by an association of indigenous and rural festivities. There is no one particular festivity that these rhythms call or trigger; rather it is the feast sensation in general. This habitual reaction matches the conceptual definition of the albazo as a lively and festive rhythm of the highlands that announces buoyantly the early morning during festivities (Mullo 64). This is to say, the audible technique of the “popular” is in motion, holding tradition, thus a past connotation. However, the albazo is not presented in its “purest traditional form”, the introduction of contemporary cords by the piano accompaniment and the contrabass within rhythm open a new temporality: the „literary” form of listening is operating through its European-North American sonic features that within our music‟s imaginary holds a modern, urban, and universal implication (Estévez, EsTuDiOs SoNoRoS 28–31). These two temporalities and forms of listening will coexist through the pandiatonism (01:00 1:29). Metaphorically, music‟s properties doubly (rhythmical and harmonically) consent many tonalities-tempos functioning at the same time: polyphony of voices and temporalities. From 01:33 until the 04:09 PONCE 63 the albazo‟s rhythm is audible gone; in fact the tempo stops being ternary to change its compass to an malleable quaternary time, in which each instrument develop their own voices and we are immerse into a dialogue of heterogeneous voices that bring together conflictive and non- conflictive. From moments we can hear how some resonances of other voices (between de piano and the contrabass) are taken as material of expression of each voice with fragments of cellular rhythms from the past time; a Deleuzoguattarian‟s resingularization would be the process of composing in this improvisation section. From minute 03:16 to 04:09 the Chaos seems to reach the space, where the expression gradually increases and in each instrument is playing louder, as if there were screaming and struggling to be heard. The rhythm of the percussion keeps them together, without making them lose their individuality. Suddenly (04:09), the albazo is back, all of them are playing it synchronized in the 6/8 rhythm‟s festive time, as if the catharsis of the feast have left them the same, but changed and restored.
Likewise, the baroque art, the porously and mineable body of albazo‟s rhythm brings the ambivalence of the two forms of listening together, subverting the contradiction into a space here the ambivalence is turn into an operational mode (Deleuze 1993; Echeverria 1998). At the same time that my body is experiencing the feast and indirectly the reproduction of my local values (music in its social function), a Western understanding of music is operating by the categorization of the music through musical structures and the feast experience in a music genre: albazo. Consequently, a practical and conceptual knowledge is put in motion through the act of listening.
In this regard, sounds and rhythms activate local sonorous memory of the living experiences (Periáñez 40) that strengthen the symbolical relations of the feast and the rite and its importance to transmit local culture and make audible the symbolical way of thinking of indigenous and Afro communities, for which the affective and creational dimension is the form to apprehend and conceptualize the world and operate within (Borja 12,14). Remember the feast implies remembering and learning the way we live and understand our local place and the ecological relations this entails, addressed in the previous section. In this case to learn conceptually through the assemblages of rhythms the notion of the spatiotemporal dimension for Amerindian communities, in which the experience of time resembles a similar movement of the one proposed by rhythm: before-after-now, adding and up-here down in a livable cyclical movement (Borja 10).) According to them, the present is the ending point of the time dimension, PONCE 64 in which the past goes to the future and then comes to the present, movement that synchronizes with rhythm‟s living present. The knowledge produced by rhythm is about time and temporality, thereby a form of inhabiting space and the disposition and relation between it, people, and time.
Music is a form of thinking through and from sounds that places the body as both the point of locution and memory. Bourdieu‟s notion of habitus helps to explain how the body is created in a network of social relations and socials-historic conditions at the same time as it enacts them. According to Bourdieu, what is learned from the body is different from the knowledge one has, since the knowledge of the body is something that one is (73). Idea that converges with a decolonial conception of the body introduced in the previous chapter. Similar to Adriana Maya‟s corp-orality, Diana Tylor sustains performance – within decolonial context – embodies practices of knowing and transmitting knowledge, in which the body is the producer of cultural memory at the same time that carries it. Locating the body as transmission device and a producer of culture and knowledge of the world: “The body functions as the site of convergence binding the individual with the collective, the private with the social, and the diachronic and the synchronic, memory with knowledge […] embodies the locus and means of communication” (89). The locus of enunciation implies carrying a historicity where a form of thinking is inscribed; paraphrasing Walter Mignolo, speaking already contributes to maintaining or changing a value of system (Darker Side of Renaissance 5). What is important here and where the political aspect of music recedes is not much about talking of the hybrid space, but about analyzing from where and how this space thinks, talks, and remembers.
This primacy of a place-body in the music would make some of its layers or effects only accessible by bodies that share the same aural frame. For some bodies the sounds will provide knowledge about the world and a means of creating it; meanwhile for others it would be music to enjoy within the larger universal musical language. In this sense, Cruz and Mancero‟s music could be equalized newly to Deleuzian minor art that is found in a vernacular body language; locally and territorially its mode contraposes politically to a larger and hegemonic language (Western understanding of music) (O‟Sullivan 71). Equality to minor, the music locates part of its layers out of the hegemonic narrative. Both composers de-territorialize the dominant language by transforming and creating a new narrative that assembles the two forms changing the sonic features and the composition process. For instance, Mancero‟s scores don‟t fit any preexisting forms, although they oscillate between classic and jazz musical notation, there are parts that are PONCE 65 not written down, which could be seen as an improvisation section and others that have to be transmitted aurally: “knowing and learning how to play traditional rhythms is not through scores neither book, they must be sensed and experienced to be understood […] listening to them and experience what they communicate…one has breathe it the music since kid”44. Also, in Cruz there is a different DJ composition, since he works collectively with other musicians and records layer by layer every melody and rhythm with acoustic instruments with the aim of creating a structure of a song with “humanity behind” despite the electronic medium.
This artistic and artisan form of thinking to encounter aspects of our lives that go beyond the enjoyment of art is similar to Amerindian and Afro‟s episteme of sound. It gives back to music its location as a practice that involves thinking about our reality and the forms of being and relate with our surroundings. If knowledge is understood as “a construction as the interaction though socially organized practices of human actors, materials, instruments ways of doing things, and skills, in order to create something that did not exist before” (De Sousa Santos, 194). Music is a for form of knowledge that at the sonic level provides the space for an ecology of knowledge through its multiple temporalities to create something new: a new “true false”, a new fictitious-reality that opens again the baroque‟s possibility to reimagine our lives without the canonical aspects of representation, but this time trying to overcome colonial relations or at least exposing them.
Conclusion
Music‟s rhythm has shown throughout this chapter a different configuration of time. Contrary to Rancière‟s Western time as “a form of division between two forms of life: the form of life of those who have time and the form of life of those who has not have not”(Modern Times 61) that has causal rationality as the linkage form of temporality, the aesthethization of daily life practices carried out by the music ruptures the quotidian and a renders a new fabulation. In music, the fragmented experiences of times of the different places-voices of Ecuador come together in a collective becoming. Temporality that resembles the one proposed by rhythm‟s structure, where the present prevails and each rhythm. It is an own universe that synthetizes the assemblages of material and non-material gatherings, in which its temporal frame is expanded by the coexistence of polyphonic temporalities
44 Mancero, Daniel. Personal Interview. 8 Dec. 2016. PONCE 66
As we have seen along the chapter, rhythm by the virtue of its structure, allows music to create an intermediate space where two forms of audible techniques that have behind diverse forms of knowledge‟s and epistemes come together. By using different art and music techniques, such as the juxtaposition of sound and images, a bricolage of symbolical elements montage, a pandiatonism structure, but mainly the conventions of multiple rhythms, there is neither center nor original in music. The plasticity of rhythm allows ambivalence to exist and provide new symbolic elements for the listener to reconfigure under a non-hierarchical relation among elements, habitus, and people that make plausible another form of understanding the music and its temporality.
As the close listening/readings reflect, representation does not entirely disappear. There is a conscious intention to introduce and to recuperate elements, practices, and musical functions of particular communities: Western, Afro, Indigenous and popular mestizos. However, operates under a different paradigm that emerged from its Latin America Baroque ethos that already problematizes the conception of truth, origin, and hierarchies in it. Due to its affective and assemblage operation, the music aligns with Deleuzean art‟s machine operation, in which art works through a variety of signifying but also asignifiying registers (O‟Sullivan 4). It makes it possible to think beyond representation or a representation where the mind is not necessarily the origin of the thought, but the sensing body, a form of thinking, producing, and storing knowledge, in which the sound is the affective alphabet that already operates in Amerindian and afro communities.
PONCE 67
Final Coda: Political assemblages
Through Yangana and Prender el Alma‟s sounds, I have walked through the sonorous cartography of the mestizo audible experience, whose festival and rituals rhythms, sounding nature, and foggy and living landscapes have disclosed along the two sections a polyphonic assemblage that lays out their place as their beating hearth from which the new musical practice departs. “The first concrete rule of assemblages is to discover the territoriality” (Deleuze et al. 8). It is from there that the musical assemblage will be formed and operate. Dragging codes from their local milieu, the music slides into a territory to recreate multiple gatherings in an ecological movement, reinforcing the placeness of its locution.
Along the thesis, I have argued how within the music the three ecologies intertwine in a continual process of re-singularization, in which both space and time are formed under a relational configuration. This is the procedure that Guattari calls heterogenesis, from which modes of subjectification emerge. For Guattari subjectivities are produced under a variety of practices, it is not something given nor fixed:
The subject is not a straightforward matter; it is not sufficient to think in order to be, as Descartes declares, since all sorts of other ways of existing have already established themselves outside consciousness, while any mode of thought that desperately tries to gain a hold on itself merely turns round and round like a mad spinning top, without ever attaching itself to the real Territories of existence[…]Rather than speak of the 'subject', we should perhaps speak of components of subjectification, each working more or less on its own (34,35).
Music, for Deleuzoguattarian, by being a modality of the refrain, produces affective responses that has the potential to rupture habits and form new ones to construct a new type of subjectivity within the refrains territory, in this case a new mestizo subjectivity in which music is a mode of subjectification, as my analysis hopefully exposed (O‟Sullivan 93). PONCE 68
This art‟s capacity to work upon the subjective realm and create new contra-hegemonic ones45, in the case of our object goes beyond art‟s political dimension to challenge capitalism and forms of power to a medium of crystalizing and accessing another form of understanding the world from a relational ontology. Analyzing the music assemblagely in conjunction with acoustemology from a decolonial lens, allowed me to show how music sheds lights onto another form of creating knowledge in practice trough and with sounds. By illustrating how Amerindian cosmologies are a part of its core, I sustained there is double political dimension operating in the mestizo music: the rupture of musical hegemonic discourse and the public sonorization of some aspects from the denominated “Other” occluded or marginalized in the plane of the “real”, which for us, mestizos, it is part of our inner selves. Therefore, there is a decolonial movement at the level of power and knowledge in this music. As I have reflected along the thesis, music is a different form of constructing knowledge that works from the aesthetics and exceeds it to act upon the social functions of others such as the transmission of symbolical elements, constructing and reaffirming a type of culture and with it an identity.
In the two chapters , I introduced the idea of Deleuzoguattarian minor art operating in the music due to three main characteristics: its capability to de-territorialize the “major music language”, its political connotation, and its collective dimension that work as an operational tool to think a new spatiotemporal configuration along with a collective subjectivity (O‟Sullivan 67– 69). However, the later one, contrary to Deleuze‟s claim would have a degree of representation by showing some similitudes with the place from which the music arises. Therefore, the mestizo music is indeed a minor music.
The de-territorialization of the major language responds to the breakdown of the institution of Ecuadorian music as two separated acoustic practices: the literate and the „non- literate‟. As my close readings reflected, those performative practices have carved both the way of listening and a particular distribution of people and space. Sounds and rhythms have functioned ambiguously: as containers of identity percolated by colonial relations of power that confined particular bodies to places (Bull and Back 14), and, at the same time, as a form of claiming, reconstructing, and transmitting local cultures, such as the case of Afro- and Amerindian communities from their particular territory (Mullo 2009; Godoy 2005; Estévez
45 This idea is also present in many other scholars: Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Mignolo, and Rolando Vázquez. PONCE 69
2008). The musicking of Yangana and Prender el Alma has made audible music‟s paradoxical function: as a form of exercising colonial power: disciplining and reshaping colonial bodies, and, as a means of resisting it.
By applying an assemblage reading in both sections, I was able to portray how the music brings both acoustic practices together under a re-singularization process, in which the one form is transformed by the other and vice versa. This unexpected articulation of the two forms of listening located the body as the center of the experience, an element that let me be exposed to – and in my case discover – a fissure in my listening habitus that glimpses at its construction and the fictional-colonial character of many of the associations created by it. In particular this regards indigenous and Afro music, whose aesthetic expressions have been underestimated by the Western rational ear. The moral and pejorative associations not only have marginalized the music from the public sphere, but also have disarticulated and dismembered music‟s central position of constructing and transmitting their cosmologies in the mestizo imaginary. It is through this crack that the geopolitical location of understating music unveils, using Mignolo‟s words, to turn this music expression into a decolonial art and a new practice of producing and transmitting local knowledge (Mignolo 2010; De Sousa Santos 2011).
Although the ecological connections display within the baroque temporal-space of music fashions‟ ambiguous and even contradictory connections, the representational character still present in music and plays an important role. In this sense, I diverge from a Deleuzoguattarian rejection of representation within the artwork. Many of the relations that for them occur exclusively if we overcome representational thinking; in the case of the mestizo music they respond to existing social interactions of Ecuador‟s geographical place, such as the contradictory meaning of the market or Nature. Subsequently, music‟s representational character shows another paradigm operating within representation that not necessity entails power relations, hierarchy, origin, and so on. In fact, in this case, it involves resistance and other forms of being that echoes Guattari‟s eco-political articulation (Guattari 2000). Simon O‟Sullivan argues we are representational creatures: “representation is not only an academical matter, but the way we think PONCE 70 our relation to ourselves and the world” (6). Despite representation having predominantly functioned under this features, there are alter paradigms around it functioning in parallel46.
Having a parallel reading of acoustemology and Deleuzoguattarian assemblages, I claim music is a creative form of thinking in the act (Massumi and Manning 2); thinking through and with sounds by the practice and method of listening (Kapchan, “The Splash or Icarus” 2,3) Music is form of knowing in action that locates the body as the collector and producer of the meaning. It is the main techniques to create and conduct affect, to produce and affect knowledge that, as I exposed, it is a form to create knowledge of the world (Kapchan, “Body” 41). As I have argued along the thesis, the body is central for music given that form of listening is conditioned by it, whose spatiotemporal location will reshape our ear and what and how we listen to it. Aligning my argument with Bourdieu and Viveiros de Castro on how the habitus of our body will be constructed under and ecological relations, in which the historical material conditions cannot be detached, and asserting Feld‟s thesis on acoustemology in which:
“Sound both emanates from and penetrates bodies, this reciprocity of reflection and absorption is a creative means of orientation--one that tunes bodies to places and times through their sounding potential. Hearing and producing sounds are thus embodies competencies that situate actors and their agency in particular historical worlds. These competencies contribute to their distinct and share ways of being human: they contribute to possibilities for and realization of authority, understanding, reflexivity, compassion and identity” (“A Rainforest Acoustemology” 226).
The act of listening is itself a political and decolonial practice; “listening to listening (is) sensing sense: making sense of what we hear. Listening to how we hear, and perhaps most importantly, realizing how unique an experience of listening can be in relation to who we are and where we are at the moment of listening” (Wateman 118,119). Both sections have shown how listening is a form of thinking and being through the medium of sound: music is not mere
46 For a deeper discussion of vision and representation in Latin America see the work: Poole, Debora. Visión , Raza y Modernidad. Una introducción al mundo andino de las imágenes. Lima, Casa de Estudios de Socialismo, 2000; and Gruzinski, Serge. La guerra de las imágenes: De Cristóbal Colón a "Blade Runner" (1492-2010). México D.F, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994.
PONCE 71 materiality; it is also a space of multiple configurations where subject and music construct themselves upon each other.
Through my place-based listening in combination with an assemblage, I developed how the music disclosed and recreated a particular spatio-temporal configuration through sounds. They are means from which it is perceived, transduced, and reflected. In relation to space, there is an intimate connection between place and subjects. Escobar‟s notion of „place,‟ in combination to Soja‟s „geography‟ and Borja‟s „living landscapes‟ provide me the conceptual frame to create a dialogue to analyze the complexities of the place‟s socio-cultural relations, in which the affective dimension is the key to living an sense of the territory integrally. Music‟s placeness reflects the importance of the territory, which comprehends the human and other-than-humans– that is apprehended synesthetically and expressed sonically by the place-based body. The „living soundscapes‟ rendered by the sounds conducted me to argue how there is a relational ontology operating in the territory between the people, their daily social interaction, and the environment. This leads me to propose the subject is its territory and the territory is the subject, including the non-human aspects of it.
Within the assemblage there is movement between the semiotics of its content and the affect of the expression from which new configurations unfold (Deleuze et al. 14,15). This in-between space among the place‟s enunciation and expressive practices was heard in the entanglements between rural and urban, and Culture and Nature that sonic sensations prompted. Although I explain how Ecuador‟s context might explain how these divisions mingle, I have shown through parts „A‟ and „B‟ how this fogginess represents a political act by the ruralization of the city suggested by the music, and in the latter one, a different relationally of two ontologies operating simultaneously that are indeed place-base local forms of resistance.
By positioning the rite and feast there is an emphasis in the communal ties that are stronger in the rural areas, offsetting cities‟ individualization and returning to a local form to produce community. Moreover, this promotes living in the space affectively and symbolically, which responds to an amerindianization and afronization of understanding and relating with space. The agrarian life shown in Prender el Alma and Yangana highlights an alter economical system of production based on reciprocity relations between humans and environment. The music opposes PONCE 72 to the instrumentalized reason and revalorizes Ecuador‟s local knowledges and practices (De Sousa Santos, Conocer Desde El Sur 196).
Through my listening of the sounds, rhythm, and metaphors I argued how Nature is a constituted being of the composers and their territory. Taken Morton‟s concept of ecological form in dialogue with Watsuji‟s thesis of the environment as a condition of the bodies, I was able to explain the ecological construction between subject, environment, and territory. I reflected on how this ecosophy in the case of the mestizo reflects a different relation and understanding of Nature from a decolonial perspective (de la Cadena 2014; Ochoa Gautier, Aurality 2014; Viveiros de Castro 1998). I argued and illustrated how the relation with it oscillates between the sacred, human, and object. Equally to Neblina de Guápulo‟s fogginess, what constitutes or come from Nature or human within Cruz‟ album is hazy and will depend of the ear from which is heard (Ochoa Gautier, “Accoustic Multinaturalismˮ 138).
For Ochoa, music features such as the categorization of melody, pitch, rhythm, and voice are transversed by a zoopolitics obsessed with separating humans and non-humans. Likewise language, music “has been a fundamental “anthropotechology” used in projects that seek to “direct the human animal in its becoming man” and there are central to the establish human as a separated political community” (“Accoustic Multinaturalism” 113). Subsequently, these sonic entanglements prompted by the music don‟t dissolve the human into the natural. Rather, paraphrasing Ochoa, they explore different ontologies operating within music that do not take nature and culture for granted (141).
This aligning with Feld‟s acoustemology and the aim of “sounds‟ capacity to foster a relational type knowing that explores different forms of relations between environmental ambiences and human-animal sound” (qtd. in Ochoa Gautier, “Accoustic Multinaturalismˮ 138). From my lecture, this in-between zone shed lights to a co presence of two ontologies: a multicultural and multinatural (Viveiros de Castro 1998) cohabiting in the same territory and providing a mixture episteme to understand Nature. Antagonism and contradiction, by virtue of music‟s rhythm and its operation within the baroque temporality, can and do exist in the mestizo betweeness space.
Within this territory music reflected and recreated a particular temporality operating within. By performing and assembling analyses of rhythm, I draw an analogy between music‟s rhythm PONCE 73 structure and time to argue how music‟s ontology entails a political potential that allows us to think differently. In this case, it is to overcome power and understand a alter forms of thinking and inhabiting the spatiotemporal: a diachronic temporality operating under the baroque ethos characterized by the irruption of the temporal order and the established canoness (De Sousa Santos, Conocer Desde El Sur 179; Echeverria 1998). Mancero‟s aesthetization of the quotidian life and festivization of the art, and Cruz‟ amerindianization of the western feast and a westernization of traditional rite show both type of transgressions, transforming Western Modernity‟s temporal disposition to locate the present as the center of temporality. Rhythm‟s new plot of time sounded an assemblage of a common time, where the heterogeneous and contradictory rhythms of the colonial past and present, and of the alter cosmologies gathered in the montage of music‟s rhythm: rite, nature, city, feats, humans all together resounding, coexisting, sharing the volume and re-singularizing each other in a new becoming. Music reaffirms the possibility of a new plot of time with new significations as an alternative to a teleological, Capital-ethno-centric Modernity exercised internally by the dominant institutions and the majority of population, and externally by Globalization. And with it, the possibility for colonial subjects to re-create and re-transform to avoid being caught in the loop of our colonial body and history, or at least bring the conflict to the surface is manifest.
The conception of time and the plot of knowledge are directly linked. The understanding of time depends of what is possible or not that operates under a particular form of thinking (Rancière, Modern Times 13). As I exposed, Western Modernity‟s time placed one type of rationality that has causal-linkage and the principle of logic/science as the vehicle to construct the narrative of time and thus knowledge, foreclosing other temporalities and forms of thinking (Rancière, Modern Times 13; De Sousa Santos, “Ecologies of Knowledge” 189). However, as mentioned previously and reflected along the sections, music‟s –affective-corporeal form of thinking implies also a sensing understanding of the spatiotemporal that exceeds this type of thought and is place-based founded.
Sounds and rhythms are a material of expression that comes from the experience that resonates Alzadúa‟s situated, sensing, and living thinking (2007). The lack of separation between art and life prompted by music depicts how the mestizo music is intertwined with the forms of being and sensing of a particular group that transmit and self-define through this musical artistic PONCE 74 practice. Consequently, music and subject construct themselves upon each other in an intra- active process, as the sections addressed.
As a practice, the knowledge produced by music was an active and ongoing process: a form of knowing-in-action that as the sections illustrate happen through sounding and listening as its acts: for both the composers and me as its listener (Feld, “Acoustemology” 13). A form of self-knowledge (De Sousa Santos, “Ecologies of Knowledge” 199,200) that makes audible the relation of a particular group with its spacio-temporality and fosters audibly the transmission of a particular symbolical order from the “epistemology of situated sense” epistemología del sentir situado through the acoustics, in which the multiple episteme that inhabit Ecuador encounter in an ecology of knowledge. As my thesis has exposed, a dialogue between North and South and a process of translation is possible through music, where the sound of one does not exist with the ear of the other and vice versa, as this conceptualization also reflects.
The music gave me as mestiza the possibilities to learn, think, and construct my collective subjectivity not from the coloniality of power. It made audible the mestizo internal voices bringing them to the surface to encounter themselves in a political topography, where they do not nullify each other nor the conflict –constitutive of the political and even more of the colonial subjects (Mouffe 2013; Maldonado-Torres 2007). Music by its own ontology makes possible a heterogenesis process that echoes a Butlearean political space. The music‟s sonorous bricks have created a mestizo musical space that sheds lights of a political topography with different relations between human and non –human, time and space, in which the subject‟s subjectivity is not unified, breaking the ambivalent position of identity construction and including Nature as part of itself.
In 2012 Yangana‟s encounter act upon and within my body, its sound lingered in my fibers resonating silently during years until my ear came across with Prender el Alma, whose sounds reverberate their vibrations and I was caught again in a second musical encounter. However, that time the music was and it was not an object of encounter. The collective enunciation of its rhythms, the resounding Nature, their rural and urban sounds in proliferation with other mestizos‟ sounds resonating in Ecuador‟s sonorous space were talking to me, to us of our sonic place. After my ongoing listening with the music and my processes of knowing-in- action through the affective, corporeal, and conceptual sounds, the music -Yangana and Prender PONCE 75 el Alma- was turned into both: an object of recognition, representing audibly the sounding cartography of my place, with its ambiguities, contradictions, and multiple relations; and an object of encounter, leading me to confront my own coloniality: my refracted ear and colonial aphasia (Stoler, Duress 128) in the use of music categorizations that seems disassociated with colonial past and my incapability to implement other concepts to refer to music without using a colonial grammar, but also to exposing me to new emotions, affections, associations, movement, and conceptualization as it is this analysis: to think through and with their sounds, to inscribe one type of mestizo audible experience as an effort to reflect from a decolonial phenomenology of the senses.
PONCE 76
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