Mestizo Music: a Political Topography of Diachronic Times

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.

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